I woke up today in an ultra shitty mood.
So what better day for a TL;DR version of the human history of shitting ourselves to death?
Today’s Moment of Science…. the seven cholera pandemics.
Diarrhea has been a fairly common cause of death for most of human history. Of course the causes of diarrhea are many and varied, but none so severe as this one: cholera. It can take your life due to dehydration in a matter of hours. Stool from a cholera patient is described as grey, fluid, and mucusy. It’s highly unusual shit.
There were six cholera pandemics in the last 200 years. I say “were” because the seventh pandemic? Technically- and I triple checked this- continues today. It’s not really affecting those of us who take for granted things like a stable food chain, modern sanitation, and a clean water supply. So, out of sight and all that.
Though the incidence of cholera first appears in literature in the 1600s, the first cholera pandemic, largely noted as ‘Asiatic Cholera,’ spread from Calcutta through the Ganges river starting in 1817. Over the next six years, it spread through China, Southeast Asia, parts of the Middle East, up to southern Russia and reached Japan’s shores.
It barely left one land mass in six years. Compare that to the pace of our modern world; covid hit six continents within a season and all seven in a smidge over a year.
The combination of widespread belief in miasma theory coupled with the disease’s early association with its origins in Asia contributed to racist stereotypes of ‘dirty’ Hindus spreading disease on pilgrimages. As several cholera outbreaks started in India, the unearned stigma from cholera didn’t shake easily. Future pandemics likewise spread through pilgrimages, but in large part spread through war and trade.
Blink and you’ll miss the moment between pandemics. Dates vary by source, but Britannica sticks a pin at 1829 for cholera’s second go at us. Working its way from southern Russia up through Europe, it made its first appearance in the Americas by 1832. The total death toll is unknown, but hundreds of thousands perished around the world.
At this point, everybody had a theory what caused cholera, and they all sucked. Miasma. Dirty immigrants. Something something the poors. So of course, the next pandemic was gonna suck too.
When the third cholera pandemic hit London in 1854, luckily the physician John Snow knew something.
(I hear you booing).
After the earliest known example of rigorous contact tracing, he figured out that everyone who’d fallen ill got their water from the same well. The well’s water pump handle was removed, and the epidemic sputtered to a stop. A nearby cesspit leaking into the well was to blame, and wouldn’t you know it, water contaminated with fecal matter is a tad unhealthy.
But figuring out “maybe don’t drink shitty water” was not much comfort in the fourth or fifth pandemics, because modern systems of sanitation wouldn’t become standard issue for several more decades.
So of course, we’ve gotta talk about the cholera riots.
As early as the second pandemic in Russia, people rioted against anti-pandemic lockdown orders. In England at the same time, they rioted against the government for their gross mishandling of the disease. Shit got downright conspiratorial. A disease couldn’t simply be this terrible and kill people this quickly, nuh-uh. This was the work of body snatchers who were using patients to conduct dissections. Some real cabal shit. To be fair, there was like one guy who was found guilty of grave robbing but the rest? Fucking loads of cholera.
In the 1890s during the fifth pandemic, riots broke out in Germany and Russia to counterprotest the anti-cholera measures the government had in place. And because of something about history and repeating itself, Russians had one more go of ‘plz can haz the shitz’ fights with their government in the sixth pandemic 1909.
Maskholes today look oddly like nineteenth century peasants fighting for the right to shit themselves to death.
The last great pandemic, the seventh pandemic, started in 1961 and never ended. It mainly lasted through the early 1970s. Instead of going away though, it was wiped out from some areas and became endemic to others. Right now the cholera pandemic is raging in Yemen. The country of 29 million has had about 1.4 million infections since 2016.
Cholera is a disease that virtually disappears with the trappings we consider normal in the developed world. If clean water is available, the population is virtually guaranteed safety from the disease. It’s caused by the spread of the bacteria Vibrio cholerae mainly via contaminated water sources. Though it’s not entirely pleasant to catch today, you have a good shot at survival with antibiotics and IV fluids.
We have a fairly effective vaccine for cholera now. But even with the pernicious nature of the disease, due to limited financial resources, areas with endemic cholera are likely to get a clean water supply before they get vaccinated.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, pleading with you not to look away from the shittier parts of our history.
FWIW, In the late 1980s, I lived for a few months in a small inland Mexican town, during a cholera ‘outbreak’. No running water, but meticulous hygiene. On the other hand, Haiti 2010 was a cholera catastrophe waiting to happen. (A UN ‘Peacekeeper’ from Nepal seems to have been the source.)