Cholera Spreading through Iraq - Food Shipments Halted

OP:
Thanks for posting this. Chlorination is bad stuff, but in this instance, the alternative is horrible. The question now will be...Will Gates get the chlorination systems to the people in time?

Hi Red. Who guards the Jordan-Iraq border?







"..WHO's Iraq representative says that as of last week 100,000 tons of chlorine were being held up at Iraq's Jordanian border because of fears the chemical could be used in explosives.."

This will depopulate the 'displacemet' camps.

Miserable and messy - but effective, I guess.

I knew a British woman who lived at an orphanage during WW2, and she said they were dosed daily with chlorinated water to prevent cholera. She had a real aversion to the smell as an adult, but it probably saved her life.

Withholding the chlorine for a contaminated water supply is murder.

Precisely! You've hit the head on the nail of the bush plan of turning iraq into one big coffin.

Is 3rd CAV still on guard?

God almighty, will it never end!! the damage we have done to that country.

If they hanged those Neo-cons thugs in the White house 3 times each it would not be even close to the horrors we have done.

Praise him who gives peace in all things :: Poop in the water ! Germ warfare!"A total of 2,082 people are infected with cholera in Iraq according to the last statistical figures recorded on September 23," [link to afp.google.com]

Maybe the problem at the Iraq-Jordan border isn't all about the chlorine.



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The Associated Press September 19, 2007, 3:40PM ET text size: TT
Iraq starts exporting oil to Jordan

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BAGHDAD

Iraq on Wednesday resumed oil exports to Jordan, after a four-year halt following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said.

Al-Dabbagh told The Associated Press that Iraq plans to export 10,000 barrels a day by land at a price of $4 dollars cheaper per barrel than market price. Al-Dabbagh refused to say where the oil will be handed over to the Jordanians, citing security reasons.

Al-Dabbagh also said the reason the oil is given cheaper than the market price was that Jordan would be in charge of securing tanker trucks transporting the oil.

Jordan's Energy Minister Khaled al-Shraydeh said last month that the supply would eventually cover the kingdom's daily needs of 100,000 barrels and would be trucked across Jordan's desert border from the northern oil fields of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, accompanied by Iraqi security guards. At the time, he said Iraq would start the exports with 10,000 barrels a day and would later increase to 100,000 barrels a day.

Before the war started in 2003, Iraq covered all of Jordan's oil needs, delivering a portion for free and the rest at about one-third the world market price because of their close ties and Iraq's history of providing its neighbor with inexpensive oil.

When the supply was halted at the outset of the war, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates stepped in for a year to provide the cash-strapped kingdom with oil at prices believed to have been below market levels. Saudi Arabia now provides Jordan with funding to help the country pay for its oil needs.

I'm using a new computer and touchpad keyboard and I now have the dexterity of a palsied baboon in mittens.
Please forgive my twitches.



Maybe the problem at the Iraq-Jordan border isn't all about the chlorine.


Iraq starts exporting oil to Jordan

Iraq on Wednesday resumed oil exports to Jordan, after a four-year halt following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said.

Al-Dabbagh told The Associated Press that Iraq plans to export 10,000 barrels a day by land at a price of $4 dollars cheaper per barrel than market price. Al-Dabbagh refused to say where the oil will be handed over to the Jordanians, citing security reasons.

Al-Dabbagh also said the reason the oil is given cheaper than the market price was that Jordan would be in charge of securing tanker trucks transporting the oil.

Jordan's Energy Minister Khaled al-Shraydeh said last month that the supply would eventually cover the kingdom's daily needs of 100,000 barrels and would be trucked across Jordan's desert border from the northern oil fields of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, accompanied by Iraqi security guards. At the time, he said Iraq would start the exports with 10,000 barrels a day and would later increase to 100,000 barrels a day.

Before the war started in 2003, Iraq covered all of Jordan's oil needs, delivering a portion for free and the rest at about one-third the world market price because of their close ties and Iraq's history of providing its neighbor with inexpensive oil.

When the supply was halted at the outset of the war, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates stepped in for a year to provide the cash-strapped kingdom with oil at prices believed to have been below market levels. Saudi Arabia now provides Jordan with funding to help the country pay for its oil needs.

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Quotes: US ARAB Enter Symbol: NewsLetter: Search News: advanced







So is the oil being blocked because of the cholera or is the chlorine being blocked because of the oil, or what?





Security conditions still blocking oil shipment from Iraq to Jordan

24/09/2007

(MENAFN - Jordan Times) AMMAN - The first shipment of Iraqi oil was still facing "tremendous security challenges" Sunday, rendering it impossible to predict when it will arrive in Jordan, a source at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources said.

Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit said Thursday that the oil shipment from Iraq was expected to arrive "in a few hours".

It was due to be delivered at the Jordan-Iraq border, which means "special security measures are being implemented inside Iraq to guarantee a safe passage of the shipments", a well informed source told The Jordan Times.

Earlier Thursday, Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Khalid Shraideh noted "the security conditions were likely the major obstacles facing the oil shipments from Iraq. This is what the Iraqis have been telling us."

Stopping short of revealing the expected arrival time of the 25 trucks carrying the first shipment, the source said the Iraqi government's commitment to providing Jordan with oil is unquestionable.

Under the 2006 agreement between the two governments, signed during Bakhit's visit to Baghdad, Iraq agreed to supply Jordan with 10-30 per cent of its daily needs of around 100,000 barrels at a discounted rate of $18 below international market price.

Such a discount is expected to soften the impact of the hike in the international oil prices on the state budget.

The government said last month it will not raise the prices of fuel derivatives this year, a decision that has widened the budget deficit, once estimated at JD385 million, by an additional hundreds of millions.

[link to www.menafn.com]




I see..

the oil is going to Iraq to Jordan, the chlorine is coming from Jordan to Iraq.

Maybe they're trying to avoid a meeting of the two.

Delete me, someone just fucking delete me please.



Son ofa BITCH I'm tossing this bastard out the window.


AAAAggggh!



Microsoft and Vista

The Great Stink of 2007.....

OOOH what better way for Bush et.al. to murder the Iraqi people. Yeah they are holding up the chlorine..... which is causing the deaths... and yes this is MURDER..... Hang the bastards in the WH.

They dont want them to have chlorine because the insurgents will make bombs with it.

There's historical precedent, of course, but it usually turns out badly.



World War II in the Pacific
Unit 731

Japanese troops dropped cholera and typhoid cultures in wells and ponds, but the results were often counterproductive. In 1942, germ warfare specialists distributed dysentery, cholera and typhoid in Zhejiang Province in China. but Japanese soldiers themselves became ill and 1,700 died of the disease.

While the Japanese army retreated from China as the war was ending, plague-infected animals were released and caused outbreaks of the plague that killed at least 30,000 people in the Harbin area from 1946 through 1948.

"Germ warfare specialists, Iishi and his colleagues received immunity from prosecution and ... in exchange they provided a great deal of information to U.S. authorities."

In particular, they provided the results of "field tests" in which hundreds of thousands of civilians in China and eastern Russia were exposed to and died from deadly germs such as anthrax and plague.

Biological Warfare.
On at least five occasions during the first two years the Japanese armed forces tried to employ bacteriological warfare in China. They have tried to produce epidemics of plague in Free China by scattering plague-infected materials with airplanes.

When too many Japanese soldiers also died, the attacks were suspended.



[link to www.ww2pacific.com]

Only Trouble is Iraqi's dont drink.



THE BAD NEWS: Recently discovered in a number of carefully controlled trials, scientists have demonstrated that if we drink 1 liter of water each day, at the end of the year we would have absorbed more than 1 kilo of Escherichia coli, (E. coli) bacteria found in feces. In other words, we are consuming 1 kilo of poop each year.

THE GOOD NEWS: We do NOT have to run that risk when drinking Wine, Vodka, Scotch or other liquor because alcohol has to go through a purification process of boiling, filtering and/or fermenting which kills all E.coli.We do NOT have to run that risk when drinking Wine, Vodka, Scotch or other liquor because alcohol has to go through a purification process of boiling, filtering and/or fermenting which kills all E.coli.

THE REMINDER:

Water = 1 kilo Poop, (1 kilo = 2.2 pounds)
Wine = health, fun and sex

Even with this scientific evidence some skeptics say, “I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t like the way it tastes”… hmmm wine vs. poop in a taste test? Go figure. Others say “I don’t drink alcohol because it makes me talk stupid”…I can only weigh in and offer my years of enlightend experience in this matter. Without a doubt, it’s better to drink ALCOHOL and talk stupid than to drink WATER and be full of poop.

“It only takes one drink to get me drunk; the trouble is I can’t ever remember which one it was.” — WC Fields

Mass culling anyone??

Chlorine isn't a necessity for water puriication. Water can be made safe by means other than chlorine.

Boiling or treating the water IODINE will also work.

I just opened a bottle of Gerolsteiner mineral water, probaby crawling with achbugs.

why did iraq have to wait 30 days before really responding - sounds like nola after katrina...

Accident?? This is the fourth to come with it, mexico, and three countries now.

[link to en.wikipedia.org]
Drawing: Death Bringing Cholera, 1912


Cholera (or Asiatic cholera or epidemic cholera) is a severe diarrheal disease caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Transmission to humans is by ingesting contaminated water or food. The major reservoir for cholera was long assumed to be humans, but some evidence suggests that it is the aquatic environment.

V. cholerae is a Gram-negative bacteria which produces cholera toxin, an enterotoxin, whose action on the mucosal epithelium lining of the small intestine is responsible for the characteristic massive diarrhea of the disease.

In its most severe forms, cholera is one of the most rapidly fatal illnesses known: A healthy person may become hypotensive within an hour of the onset of symptoms and may die within 2-3 hours if no treatment is provided. More commonly, the disease progresses from the first liquid stool to shock in 4-12 hours, with death following in 18 hours to several days without rehydration treatment

Symptoms
Symptoms include those of general GA tract (stomach) upset and massive watery diarrhea. Symptoms may also include terrible muscle and stomach cramps, vomiting and fever in early stages. In a later stage the diarrhea becomes "rice water stool" (almost clear with flecks of white). Symptoms are caused by massive body fluid loss induced by the enterotoxins that V. cholerae produces. The main enterotoxin, known as cholera toxin, interacts with G proteins and cyclic AMP in the intestinal lining to open ion channels. As ions flow into the intestinal lumen (lining), body fluids (mostly water) flow out of the body due to osmosis leading to massive diarrhea as the fluid is expelled from the body. The body is "tricked" into releasing massive amounts of fluid into the small intestine which shows up in up to 36 liters of liquid diarrhea in a six day period in adults with accompanying massive dehydration. Radical dehydration can bring death within a day through collapse of the circulatory system.


whoa.

Treatment
In general, patients must receive as much fluid as they lose, which can be up to 36 liters, due to diarrhea.

Treatment typically consists of aggressive rehydration (restoring the lost body fluids) and replacement of electrolytes with commercial or hand-mixed sugar-salt solutions (1 tsp salt + 8 tsp sugar in 1 litre of clean/boiled water) or massive injections of liquid given intravenously via an IV in advanced cases. Without treatment the death rate is as high as 50%; with treatment the death rate can be well below 1%.

Tetracycline antibiotics may have a role in reducing the duration and severity of cholera, although drug-resistance is occurring. Oral tetracycline was recommended for reducing the period of vibrio excretion and need for parenteral fluid. Initially cholera vibrios were universally susceptible to all antibiotics active against gram negative bacilli, but since 1979 multiple drug resistant strain have become increasingly common and their effects on overall mortality are questioned. Other antibiotics that have been used include ciprofloxacin and azithromycin, although again, drug-resistance has now been described.

Epidemiology
Prevention
Although cholera can be life-threatening, it is nearly always easily prevented, in principle, if proper sanitation practices are followed. In the United States and Western Europe, because of advanced water treatment and sanitation systems, cholera is no longer a major threat. The last major outbreak of cholera in the United States was in 1911. However, everyone, especially travelers, should be aware of how the disease is transmitted and what can be done to prevent it. Good sanitation practices, if instituted in time, is usually sufficient to stop an epidemic.

There are several points along the transmission path at which the spread may be halted:

Sickbed: Proper disposal and treatment of the germ infected fecal waste (and all clothing and bedding that come in contact with it) produced by cholera victims is of primary importance.

Sewage: Treatment of general sewage before it enters the waterways or underground water supplies prevent possible undetected patients from spreading the disease.

Sources: Warnings about cholera contamination posted around contaminated water sources with directions on how to decontaminate the water.

Sterilization: Boiling, filtering, and chlorination of water kill the bacteria produced by cholera patients and prevent infections, when they do occur, from spreading. All materials (clothing, bedding, etc.) that come in contact with cholera patients should be sterilized in hot water using (if possible) chlorine bleach. Hands, etc. that touch cholera patients or their clothing etc. should be thoroughly cleaned and sterilized. All water used for drinking, washing or cooking should be sterilized by boiling or chlorination in any area where cholera may be present.

Water filtration, chlorination and boiling are by far the most effective means of halting transmission. Cloth filters, though very basic, have greatly reduced the occurrence of cholera when used in poor villages in Bangladesh that rely on untreated surface water. In general, public health education and good sanitation practices are the limiting factors in preventing transmission.

*Hard to do if you have no water*


Susceptibility
Recent epidemiologic research suggests that an individual's susceptibility to cholera (and other diarrheal infections) is affected by their blood type: Those with type O blood are the most susceptible, while those with type AB are the most resistant. Between these two extremes are the A and B blood types, with type A being more resistant than type B.

About one million V. cholerae bacteria must typically be ingested to cause cholera in normally healthy adults, although increased susceptibility may be observed in those with a weakened immune system, individuals with decreased gastric acidity (as from the use of antacids), or those who are malnourished.

It has also been hypothesized that the cystic fibrosis genetic mutation has been maintained in humans due to a selective advantage: heterozygous carriers of the mutation (who are thus not affected by cystic fibrosis) are more resistant to V. cholerae infections. In this model, the genetic deficiency in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator channel proteins interferes with bacteria binding to the gastrointestinal epithelium, thus reducing the effects of an infection.

Transmission
Persons infected with cholera have massive diarrhea. This highly liquid diarrhea, which is often compared to "rice water," is loaded with bacteria that can spread under unsanitary conditions to infect water used by other people. Cholera is transmitted from person to person through ingestion of feces contaminated water loaded with the cholera bacterium. The source of the contamination is typically other cholera patients when their untreated diarrhea discharge is allowed to get into waterways or into groundwater or drinking water supply. Any infected water and any foods washed in the water, and shellfish living in the affected waterway can cause an infection. Cholera is rarely spread directly from person to person.

V. cholerae occurs naturally in the plankton of fresh, brackish, and salt water, attached primarily to copepods in the zooplankton. Both toxic and non-toxic strains exist. Non-toxic strains can acquire toxicity through a lysogenic bacteriophage. Coastal cholera outbreaks typically follow zooplankton blooms. This makes cholera a zoonosis.

Laboratory diagnosis
Stool and Swab collected in the acute stage of the disease are useful specimens for laboratory diagnosis. A number of special media have been employed for the cultivation for cholera vibrios.

They are classified as follows:

Holding or transport media
1.Venkataraman-ramakrishnan (VR) medium
2.Cary-Blair medium: This the most popularly carrying media. This is a buffered solution of sodium chloride, sodium thioglycollate, disodium phosphate and calcium chloride at pH 8.4.

Enrichment media
1.Alkaline peptone water
2.Monsur's taurocholate tellurite peptone water

Plating media
1.Alkaline bile salt agar: The colonies are very similar to those on Nutrient Agar.
2.Monsur's gelatin Tauro cholate trypticase tellurite agar (GTTA) medium: Cholera vibrios produce small translucent colonies with a greyish black centre.
3.TCBS medium: This the mostly widely used medium. This medium contains thiosulphate, citrate, bile salts and sucrose. Cholera vibrios produce flat 2-3 mm in diameter, yellow nucleated colonies.


Biochemistry of the V. cholerae bacterium
Most of the V. cholerae bacteria in the contaminated water that a potential host drinks do not survive the very acidic conditions of the human stomach. But the few bacteria that manage to survive the stomach's acidity conserve their energy and stored nutrients during the perilous passage through the stomach by shutting down much protein production. When the surviving bacteria manage to exit the stomach and reach the favorable conditions of the small intestine, they need to propel themselves through the thick mucus that lines the small intestine to get to the intestinal wall where they can thrive. So they start up production of the hollow cylindrical protein flagellin to make flagella, the curly whip-like tails that they rotate to propel themselves through the pasty mucus that lines the small intestine.

Once the cholera bacteria reach the intestinal wall, they do not need the flagella propellers to move themselves any more, so they stop producing the protein flagellin, thus again conserving energy and nutrients by changing the mix of proteins that they manufacture, responding to the changed chemical surroundings. And on reaching the intestinal wall, they start producing the toxic proteins that give the infected person a watery diarrhea which carries the multiplying and thriving new generations of V. cholerae bacteria out into the drinking water of the next host— if proper sanitation measures are not in place.

Microbiologists have studied the genetic mechanisms by which the V. cholerae bacteria turn off the production of some proteins and turn on the production of other proteins as they respond to the series of chemical environments they encounter, passing through the stomach, through the mucous layer of the small intestine, and on to the intestinal wall. Of particular interest have been the genetic mechanisms by which cholera bacteria turn on the protein production of the toxins that ineract with host cell mechanisms to pump chloride ions into the small intestine, creating an ionic pressure which prevents sodium ions from entering the cell. The choride and sodium ions create a salt water environment in the small intestines which through osmosis can pull up to six liters of water per day through the intestinal cells creating the massive amounts of diarrhea. The host can become rapidly dehydrated if an appropriate mixture of dilute salt water and sugar is not taken to replace the blood's water and salts lost in the diarrhea.

By inserting separately, successive sections of V. cholerae DNA into the DNA of other bacteria such as E. coli that would not naturally produce the protein toxins, researchers have investigated the mechanisms by which V. cholerae responds to the changing chemical environments of the stomach, mucous layers, and intestinal wall. Researchers have discovered that there is a complex cascade of regulatory proteins that control expression of V. cholerae virulence determinants. In responding to the chemical environment at the intestinal wall, the V. cholerae bacteria produce the TcpP/TcpH proteins which, together with the ToxR/ToxS proteins, activate the expression of the ToxT regulatory protein. ToxT then directly activates expression of virulence genes that produce the toxins that cause diarrhea in the infected person and that permit the bacteria to colonize the intestine. Current research aims at discovering "the signal that makes the cholera bacteria stop swimming and start to colonize (that is, adhere to the cells of) the small intestine."


History
Origin and spread
Cholera was originally endemic to the Indian subcontinent, with the Ganges River likely serving as a contamination reservoir. It spread by trade routes (land and sea) to Russia, then to Western Europe, and from Europe to North America. It is now no longer considered an issue in Europe and North America, due to filtering and chlorination of the water supply.

1816-1826 - First Cholera pandemic: Previously restricted, the pandemic began in Bengal, then spread across India by 1820. It extended as far as China and the Caspian Sea before receding.

1829-1851 - Second Cholera pandemic reached Europe, London and Paris in 1832. In London, it claimed 6,536 victims.
[link to www.mernick.co.uk]

In Paris, 20,000 succumbed (out of a population of 650,000) with about 100,000 deaths in all of France. It reached Russia (Cholera Riots), Quebec, Ontario and New York in the same year and the Pacific coast of North America by 1834.

1849 - Second major outbreak in Paris. In London, it was the worst outbreak in the city's history, claiming 14,137 lives, ten times as many as the 1832 outbreak. In 1849 cholera claimed 5,308 lives in the port city of Liverpool, England, and 1,834 in Hull, England.

An outbreak in North America took the life of former U.S. President James K. Polk. Cholera spread throughout the Mississippi river system killing over 4,500 in St. Louis and over 3,000 in New Orleans as well as thousands in New York. In 1849 cholera was spread along the California and Oregon trail as hundreds died on their way to the California Gold Rush, Utah and Oregon.

1852-1860 - Third Cholera pandemic mainly affected Russia, with over a million deaths. In 1853-4, London's epidemic claimed 10,738 lives.

1854 - Outbreak of cholera in Chicago took the lives of 5.5 per cent of the population (about 3,500 people). Soho outbreak in London stopped by removing the handle of the Broad Street pump by a committee instigated to action by John Snow.

1863-1875 - Fourth Cholera pandemic spread mostly in Europe and Africa.

1866 - Outbreak in North America. In London, a localized epidemic in the East End claimed 5,596 lives just as London was completing its major sewage and water treatment systems--the East End was not quite complete. William Farr, using the work of John Snow et al. as to contaminated drinking water being the likely source of the disease, was able to relatively quickly identify the East London Water Company as the source of the contaminated water. Quick action prevented further deaths.

1881-1896 - Fifth Cholera pandemic ; The 1892 outbreak in Hamburg, Germany was the only major European outbreak; about 8,600 people died in Hamburg, causing a major political upheaval in Germany, as control over the City was removed from a City Council which had not updated Hamburg's water supplies. This was the last serious European cholera outbreak.

1899-1923 - Sixth Cholera pandemic had little effect in Europe because of advances in public health, but Russia was badly affected again.

1961-1970s - Seventh Cholera pandemic began in Indonesia, called El Tor after the strain, and reached Bangladesh in 1963, India in 1964, and the USSR in 1966. From North Africa it spread into Italy by 1973. In the late 1970s there were small outbreaks in Japan and in the South Pacific. There were also many reports of a cholera outbreak near Baku in 1972, but information about it was suppressed in the USSR.

January 1991 to September 1994 - Outbreak in South America, apparently initiated when a ship discharged ballast water. Beginning in Peru there were 1.04 million identified cases and almost 10,000 deaths. The causative agent was an O1, El Tor strain, with small differences from the seventh pandemic strain.

In 1992 a new strain appeared in Asia, a non-O1, nonagglutinable vibrio (NAG) named O139 Bengal. It was first identified in Tamil Nadu, India and for a while displaced El Tor in southern Asia before decreasing in prevalence from 1995 to around 10% of all cases. It is considered to be an intermediate between El Tor and the classic strain and occurs in a new serogroup. There is evidence of the emergence of wide-spectrum resistance to drugs such as trimethoprim, sulfamethoxazole and streptomycin.

2007 - The U.N. reported recently of a Cholera outbreak in Iraq.


Famous cholera victims
The crying and pathos in the last movement of Tchaikovsky's (c. 1840-1893) last symphony made people think that Tchaikovsky had a premonition of death. "A week after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, Tchaikovsky was dead--6 November 1893. The cause of this indisposition and stomach ache was suspected to be his intentionally infecting himself with cholera by drinking contaminated water. The day before, while having lunch with Modest (his brother and biographer), he is said to have poured faucet water from a pitcher into his glass and drunk a few swallows. Since the water was not boiled and cholera was once again rampaging St. Petersburg, such a connection was quite plausible ...."

Other famous people who succumbed to the disease include:

James K. Polk ex-President of the United States
Mary Abigail Fillmore, daughter of U.S. president Millard Fillmore
Elliott Frost, son of American poet Robert Frost
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Samuel Charles Stowe, son of Harriet Beecher Stowe
Carl von Clausewitz
George Bradshaw
Adam Mickiewicz
August von Gneisenau
William Jenkins Worth
John Blake Dillon
Daniel Morgan Boone, founder of Kansas City, Missouri, son of Daniel Boone
James Clarence Mangan
Mohammad Ali Mirza Dowlatshahi of Persia
Ando Hiroshige, Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print artist.
Juan de Veramendi, Mexican Governor of Texas, father-in-law of Jim Bowie
Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich of Russia
William Shelley, son of Mary Shelley
William Godwin, father of Mary Shelley
Judge Daniel Stanton Bacon, father-in-law of George Armstrong Custer
Inessa Armand, mistress of Lenin and the mother of Andre, his son.
Honinbo Shusaku, famous go player.
Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Eurasian Portuguese Poet and Teacher. Resided in India.
Alexandre Dumas, père, French author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, also contracted cholera in the 1832 Paris epidemic and almost died, before he wrote these two novels.

Research
The major contributions to fighting cholera were made by physician and self-trained scientist John Snow (1813-1858), who found the link between cholera and contaminated drinking water in 1854 and Henry Whitehead, an Anglican minister, who helped John Snow track down and verify the source of the disease, an infected well in London. Their conclusions and writings were widely distributed and firmly established for the first time a definite link between germs and disease. Clean water and good sewage treatment, despite their major engineering and financial cost, slowly became a priority throughout the major developed cities in the world from this time onward. Robert Koch, 30 years later, identified V. cholerae with a microscope as the bacillus causing the disease in 1885. The bacterium had been originally isolated thirty years earlier (1855) by Italian anatomist Filippo Pacini, but its exact nature and his results were not widely known around the world.

Cholera has been a laboratory for the study of evolution of virulence. The province of Bengal in British India was partitioned into West Bengal (a state in India) and East Pakistan in 1947. Prior to partition, both regions had cholera pathogens with similar characteristics. After 1947, India made more progress on public health than East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). As a consequence, the strains of the pathogen which succeeded in India had a greater incentive in the longevity of the host and are less virulent than the strains prevailing in Bangladesh, which uninhibitedly draw upon the resources of the host population, thus rapidly killing many in it.

Other historical information
In the past, people travelling in ships would hang a yellow flag if one or more of the crew members suffered from cholera. Boats with a yellow flag hung would not be allowed to disembark at any harbor for an extended period of time, typically 30 to 40 days.


[link to en.wikipedia.org]

The Cholera Story
The bad news is that a waterborne disease, cholera, has proven one of history's most virulent killers. The good news is that it was through cholera epidemics that epidemiologists finally discovered the link between sanitation and public health, which provided the impetus for modem water and sewage systems.

With 20th - century smugness, we know cholera is caused by ingesting water, food or any other material contaminated by the feces of a cholera victim. Casual contact with a contaminated chamberpot, soiled clothing or bedding, etc., might be all that's required.

The disease is stunning in its rapidity. The onset of extreme diarrhea, sharp muscular cramps, vomiting and fever, and then death - all can transpire within 12-48 hours.

In the 19th century cholera became the world's first truly global disease in a series of epidemics that proved to be a watershed for the history of plumbing. Festering along the Ganges River in India for centuries, the disease broke out in Calcutta in 1817 with grand - scale results.

India's traditional, great Kumbh festival at Hardwar in the Upper Ganges triggered the outbreak. The festival lasts three months, drawing pilgrims from all over the country. Those from the Lower Bengal brought the disease with them as they shared the polluted water of the Ganges and the open, crowded camps on its banks.

When the festival was over, they carried cholera back to their homes in other parts of India. There is no reliable evidence of how many Indians perished during that epidemic, but the British army counted 10,000 fatalities among its imperial troops. Based on those numbers, it's almost certain that at least hundreds of thousands of natives must have fallen victim across that vast land.

When the festival ended, cholera raged along the trade routes to Iran, Baku and Astrakhan and up the Volga into Russia, where merchants gathered for the great autumn fair in Nijni-Novgorod. When the merchants went back to their homes in inner Russia and Europe, the disease went along with them.

Cholera sailed from port to port, the germ making headway in contaminated kegs of water or in the excrement of infected victims, and transmitted by travelers. The world was getting smaller thanks to steam-powered trains and ships, but living conditions were slow to improve. By 1827 cholera had become the most feared disease of the century.


The Laughter Died: It struck so suddenly a man could be in good health at daybreak and he buried at nightfall. A New Yorker in 1832 described himself pitching forward in the street "as if knocked down with an ax. I had no premonition at all."

The ailment seemed capable of penetrating any quarantine of harbor or city. It chose its victims erratically, with terrifying suddenness, and with gross and grotesque results.

Acute dehydration turns victims into wizened caricatures their former selves. The skin becomes black and blue, the hands and feet drawn and puckered. The German poet Heinrich Heine described an outbreak in Paris in a letter to a friend:
"A masked ball in progress ... suddenly the gayest of the harlequins collapsed, cold in the limbs, and underneath his mask, violet blue in the face. Laughter died out, dancing ceased and in a short while carriage-loads of people hurried from the Hotel Dieu to die, and to prevent a panic among the patients were thrust into rude graves in their dominoes [long, hooded capes worn with a half-mask). Soon the public halls were filled with dead bodies, sewed in sacks for want of coffins ... long lines of hearses stood in queue..."

The worldwide cholera epidemic was aided by the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying growth of urban tenements and slums. There was little or no provision at all for cesspools or fresh water supplies. Tenements rose several stories high, but cesspools were only on the ground floor with no clear access to sewers or indoor running water. It didn't make much difference, because until the 1840s a sewer was simply an elongated cesspool with an overflow at one end. "Night men" had to climb into the morass and shovel the filth and mire out by hand. In most cases, barrels filled with excrement were discharged outside, or contents of chamber pots flung from open windows - if there were any - to the streets below.

Water hydrants or street pumps provided the only source of water, but they opened infrequently and not always as scheduled. They ran only a few minutes a day in some of the poor districts. A near riot ensued in Westminster one Sunday when a water pipe that supplied 16 packed houses was turned on for only five minutes that week.

Cholera first hit England through the town of Sunderland, on October 26, 1831. One William Sproat died that day from the disease, though nobody wanted to admit it. Merchants and officials found plenty of reasons to rationalize away a prospective 40 day maritime quarantine of the ports.

England was reaping the profits of the Industrial Revolution. and a quarantine of ships would be catastrophic for the textile industry. At any rate, the medical profession held that cholera wasn't contagious. Public health administration was in its infancy, and so disorganized that the leading doctor didn't know there were two infected houses only a short distance away from each other. He learned of the "coincidence" three months later.

The American Experience: American hygiene and sanitation were not much better. (cholera spread through immigrants from the infected countries, Ireland in particular, whose masses were fleeing the poverty and despair of the potato famine. Those who could scrape together three pounds for passage left for North America.

Life aboard an immigrant ship was appalling as ship owners crowded 500 passengers in space intended for 150. Infected passengers shared slop buckets and rancid water.

The contagion spread as soon as the immigrants landed. In one month 1,220 new arrivals were dead in Montreal. Another 2,200 died in Quebec over the summer of 1832.

Detroit became another focal point of cholera. Instead of drawing fresh water from the Detroit River, people used well water. The land was low and it was much more convenient. But outhouses placed at odd locations soon contaminated those wells, and cholera spread quickly.

Cholera entered New York through infected ships. City people started clogging the roads in an exit to the countryside. On June 29, 1832, the governor ordered a day of fasting and prayers - the traditional response by government to treating the disease. After July 4, there was a daily cholera report.

Quarantine regulations which sought to contain towns and cities in upper New York, Vermont and along the Erie Canal met with little success. Immigrants leaped from halted canal boats and passed through locks on foot, despite the efforts by contingents of armed militia to stop them.

Some doctors flatly declared that cholera was indeed epidemic in New York, but more people sided with banker John Pintard that this "officious report” was an "impertinent interference" with the Board of Health. The banker incredulously asked if the physicians had any idea what such an announcement would do to the city's business.

Visitors were struck by the silence of New York's streets, with their unaccustomed cleanliness and strewn with chloride of lime (the usual remedy for foul-smelling garbage). Even on Broadway, passersby were so few that a man on horseback was a curiosity. One young woman recalled seeing tufts of grass growing in the little-used thoroughfares.

Big news was unfolding in England then, but no one realized the significance.

Steadfast Ignorance: The eminent Dr. John Snow demonstrated how cases of cholera that broke out in a district of central London could all be traced to a single source of contaminated drinking water. Sixteen years later Snow would win a 30,000 franc prize by the Institute of France for his theory that cholera was waterborne and taken into the system by mouth.

But Snow's original work received little attention from the medical profession. He was attacked at the weakest point - that he could not identify the nature of the "poison" in the water.

By the end of the first cholera epidemic, the relationship between disease and dirty, ill - drained parts of town was rather well established. This should have spurred sanitary reform. But little action followed.

An out-of-sight, out-of-mind syndrome developed when the first epidemic ended. The learned Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal at one point declared they would review no more books on the subject “because of the multitude of books which have recently issued from the press on the subject of cholera, and our determination to no longer try the patience of our readers."

When the second cholera epidemic hit England in 1854, Snow described it as "the most terrible outbreak of cholera which ever occurred in this kingdom." At least it provided him with an opportunity to test his theory.

By charting the incidence of the disease, he showed that over 500 cases occurred within 10 days over a radius of some 250 yards centered on London's Broad Street. He looked for some poison which he believed came from the excreta of cholera patients and swallowed by the new victims. A common factor was their use of water that had been polluted with sewage. Snow had traced the pipelines of various water companies and showed that one was infected by cholera.

By the methodical process of elimination, he proved his point: A workhouse in that area had its own private well, and there were only 5 deaths among its 535 inmates. A brewery on Broad Street likewise never used the water from the Broad Street pump, and it had no cases among its 70 workers.

The actual discovery of the comma-shaped bacillus of cholera was made by the German Dr. Robert Koch in 1876. Through microscopic examination, he ascertained that excrement may contain cholera bacteria a good while after the actual attack of the disease."

Final Obstacles: Cholera was always the worst where poor drainage and human contact came together. This of course was apt to be in crowded slums.

So at first, those on top of the social heap could reassure themselves that pestilence attacked only the filthy, the hungry and the ignorant. When the cholera epidemic first hit Paris, there were so few deaths outside of the lower classes, that the poor regarded the cholera epidemic as a poison plot hatched by the aristocracy and executed by the doctors. In Milwaukee, efforts to apply basic health measures were thwarted by rag-pickers and "swill children" who saw the removal of offal and garbage from the streets as a threat to their livelihood. As one newspaper editorialized, "It is a great pity if our stomachs must suffer to save the noses of the rich."

The immunity enjoyed by the wealthy was short-lived, however. The open sewers of the poor sections eventually leached into the ground and seeped into wells, or ran along channels into the rivers that supplied drinking water for whole towns and cities. Once the rich and the movers and shakers of society began to get sick, government reform began.

Thus it happened that most municipal water mains and sewer systems got built in the late 19th century in America. Public health agencies got formed and funded. Building codes and ordinances got passed and enforced.

The superstitions of the ages had finally run their course. Mankind began to understand that the evil spirits causing its woes were microscopic creatures that could be defeated by plumbers and sanitary engineers.


[link to www.theplumber.com]

We infect the place with contagious diseases and then say 'bring the troops home.'

Back to the Dark Ages, folks..

IRAQ: Polluted Shat al-Arab threatens life, could spread diseases

25 September 2007 (IRIN) - High rates of contamination in Iraq's Shat al-Arab river, formed by the confluence of the Euphrates and the Tigris in the southern province of Basra, threaten life and could spread disease, a specialist told IRIN on 24 September.

"The Shat al-Arab is facing a very dangerous state of contamination, with sewage being discharged directly into the Euphrates and Tigris, and industrial waste, oil products and the remnants of munitions from the 1980s Iran-Iraq war [having been dumped in the river]," said Malik Hassan, director of the Seas Sciences Centre affiliated to the University of Basra.

The absence of dredging operations, Hassan said, had allowed these materials to become poisonous: "The corrosion of munitions and the interaction of industrial and microbial pollution from hospital waste, are producing poisons which can be active for decades and get into peoples’ bodies."

"All this could increase cancer among the people who live nearby and who depend on the river for their sustenance. It could also lead to an increase in waterborne diseases such as cholera," Hassan said.

The southern stretch of the river - some 200km in length - constitutes the border between Iraq and Iran down to the mouth of the river as it discharges into the Gulf.

"Now only 20 percent of the palm and other trees remain as most have been damaged by these waste materials. We have also seen a 90 percent reduction in the number of `Subor’, a famed fish, and a 70 percent decrease in the number of `Buni’ [barbel] fish," he said.

"It is a tragic situation and needs a huge effort to contain. The government and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) should start immediate and urgent measures to combat this situation… it will do more harm than wars," Hassan said.

Some of the pollution is directly attributable to political violence.


Oil slick threatens water supplies

On 18 September unidentified gunmen planted a bomb under an oil pipeline near the northern city of Beiji, causing a fire and huge quantities of crude oil to spill into the River Tigris.

An Iraqi police official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, said the bomb went off before dawn, making it difficult for firefighters to extinguish the blaze.

Beiji is about 250km north of Baghdad and home to Iraq's largest oil refinery.

Later in the day, the spill reached the central city of Tikrit, over 100km to the south, the official said. The oil spill led to the closing of water treatment stations in both Tikrit and Beiji.

In Baghdad, a municipal official on 20 September urged residents to conserve water and fill up their tanks in case water treatment stations had to be shut down because of the spill.

"We call upon people to store and be economical in their use of drinking water in anticipation of the worst, which is the arrival of the oil at water treatment stations in Baghdad," said Naim al-Qaabi, deputy head of the Baghdad municipal administration.

Al-Qaabi said rubber barriers had been placed around water purification plants in and around the capital. He said, however, that the barriers may not be sufficient and that the plants might have to be shut down.

In the meantime, he said, water towers around the city were being filled to capacity to store as much water as possible before the slick reaches the capital.


[link to uruknet.info]









They are screwed.


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