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insidiouslybleak t1_j67covn wrote

Reply to comment by CrieDeCoeur in TIL cholera was reintroduced to Haiti after a century by UN peacekeepers responding to the 2010 earthquake. The resulting outbreak was the worst on record, killing 10,000 and infecting 820,000. by theworkinglad

I really did NOT need to know that, but now I do. Thank you. My future self playing jeopardy will be grateful for this awful info.

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Mick_86 t1_j67obah wrote

I recommend reading The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. It's the story of the 1854 London Cholera epidemic. This was back when scientists laughed at the idea that germs caused disease.

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throwawayforj0b t1_j68nqp9 wrote

Is that the one where they realized it was coming from a single well?

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series_hybrid t1_j68qvw1 wrote

There had been a home with a septic pit in the basement. When the road was widened by the government, that house was demoed like many others.

Then, someone decided to install a public water well in a certain intersection, near the old cesspit.

There was a water table that was refreshed by rain up in the hills. edit: a water table is a layer of sand with a layer of clay under it. Rain percolates down through the soil and hits the clay, then spreads out sideways to make a flat "table" of water. Digging a well is best done near a river, but not too close.

The sun caused tides once a day on the Thames River, and once a month when the moon was on the same side of the Earth as the sun, the double tide makes the Thames water level higher.

Under the right conditions, the water table flows back towards the land, instead of flowing from the land to the river. It flowed from the abandoned cesspit towards the well.

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throwawayforj0b t1_j68r6en wrote

I wasn't aware of the hydrological reasons for it, very interesting!

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series_hybrid t1_j68znlo wrote

It's been a while, I may have gotten some of the details wrong.

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Jaggedmallard26 t1_j68u031 wrote

I quite like the style of this comment, just various events that come together at the end.

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series_hybrid t1_j6d03hn wrote

Thanks. I try to present interesting stories in the most compelling way possible.

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foxorhedgehog t1_j69l2bc wrote

There is a replica of that pump at the original location. My friend, who is an epidemiologist, sent me a picture of it recently.

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throwawayforj0b t1_j69pael wrote

It's one of the earliest stories of epidemiology. My favorite tidbit is that there was one cluster in a rich area of town away from the well that they couldn't explain at first (and made it harder to track down the source). They found out there was a rich woman who had a servant retrieving water from the bad well 'because it tastes sweeter'.

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insidiouslybleak t1_j67px15 wrote

And here we are again - full circle. Back to accepting truly appalling levels of mortality as the normal price of doing business. I’m not ‘pragmatic’ or mercenary enough to just accept that.

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V6Ga t1_j67f555 wrote

The number one cause of death in the world is diarrhea.

EDIT: further research on this has led me to believe that I read a stat on the number one cause of death for children. Also, as a happy fact, access to safe drinking water has made some astonishing gains in the last 30 years.

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mike117 t1_j687ebo wrote

Got a source for that? Not that I don’t believe you I’m just surprised it’s above stuff like heart attacks or war.

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V6Ga t1_j68asrk wrote

I think if you search around you will find you are correct! Random results of chasing after the answer showed me some stuff!

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-causes-of-death

Clearly the work done in getting safe water has been way more effective than I was paying attention to. My statement was correct at one point, IIRC. It stuck with me, and you asking made me check! I may have read a statistic on causes of death of children. Either way, I am glad you asked!

War has always been pretty ineffective at killing people, though the people it kills are the engines that drove countries, historically: young males. And the concomitant civil unrest causes serious excess deaths. The Iraq war "only" killed 4500 US troops, and 15,000 Iraqi forces, but total excess deaths number as high as 1 million.

WWI had total military deaths at 10 million, but the resultant spread of Spanish flu caused at least 50 million deaths, and maybe as much as 100 million, in a world population of 1.5 billion.

Epidemics were the only truly effective killers, outside of China, which has had some insanely deadly civil wars, but the big one, The Taiping Rebellion, killed most people from the resultant famine from loss of central government control over irrigation and flood control. (30 million deaths out of a population of 450 million.)

Justinian's Plague,

>The Justinian plague in the sixth century and is estimated to have killed between 30 and 50 million people—about half the world's population at that time—as it spread across Asia, North Africa, Arabia, and Europe.

Black Death >The Black Death was the second great natural disaster to strike Europe during the Late Middle Ages (the first one being the Great Famine of 1315–1317) and is estimated to have killed 30 percent to 60 percent of the European population, as well as about one-third of the population of the Middle East.[14][15][16] The plague might have reduced the world population from c. 475 million to 350–375 million in the 14th century

and Spanish Flu all killed a significant percentage of the world's population.

Of course the 20th century managed to make men capable to serious mechanized death. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all killed a serious percentage of their own countries populations.

TL;DR Justinian's Plague killed half the world's population!

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Kuris t1_j6fuegt wrote

Germs are no joke! As a grown ass man, a scrape on my elbow has put me in the hospital for 5 days now.

Without access to modern medicine (and antibiotics in particular) this shit would've killed me!

That is scary, scary stuff.

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arkstfan t1_j6a4vm9 wrote

Arkansas Bioscience Institute a partnership of the University of Arkansas, Arkansas State University, UA Medical Sciences and Arkansas Children’s Hospital have been working on a vaccine for some common causes of diarrhea. Their work has been promising enough to get some international funding.

Didn’t realize how big a deal it was until reading about it.

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cubixjuice t1_j67d1o2 wrote

It's an interesting disease imo. Terrifying, yes, but still interesting. Makes diarrhea that looks like lentil soup 😋

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insidiouslybleak t1_j67fit8 wrote

I wish that I lived in the kind of 21st century where I didn’t need to know anything at all about any of these diseases. I’m old, I’m vaccinated, I’m old enough to remember when these were historical problems that plagued humanity that had been solved. But here we are - polio in NY, measles in Ohio, that kid who died the most gruesome death imaginable from tetanus a few years ago in Oregon, pertussis in Alberta, drug resistant everything - I want my futuristic advanced civilization back. We as a species fuck up everything so badly and I hate it.

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Yurekuu t1_j67nmyg wrote

Well, I got curious about the tetanus case so I just wanted to let you know the boy didn't die. He recovered completely, though he suffered for two months, and his parents still refused to vaccinate him after.

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insidiouslybleak t1_j67pgla wrote

Oh, that poor kid. I can’t imagine the pain. Please tell me his parents have lost custody.

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NessyComeHome t1_j680kmh wrote

Cholera was never a historical problem. It was never close to being eradicated. You're having nostalgia for a past that never existed.

https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2022-DON426

Even the cholera vaccine used in the US isn't on par with what we, or maybe I should say I, think about when we think about vaccines. 85% protection for first 6 months, drops to 62% to 50% protection between 6 months and two years. After 2 years it drops below 50%.

While we humans have eradicated smallpox, we arn't anywhere close to doing that for any other disease.. which sucks, because even with 50% protection after two years, that's a lot of lives saved.

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rsh056 t1_j68w5lq wrote

I believe we're pretty close to eradicating guinea worm. And I think we're not that far off on polio either?

Regardless, even with thorough vaccination, it's tough to eliminate most diseases. All the more important to keep your up to date, since they'll still be out there!

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TitaniumDreads t1_j67wedl wrote

i like how we spent centuries at the mercy of measles and once we defeated it a handful of ding dongs took the side of measles

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