Introduction
Cholera is a bacterial infection that is transmitted in water or food contaminated with a carrier’s excreta. It enters the body through the mouth and the digestive system. The worst affected people will lose a quarter of the body’s fluid through violent diarrhea and vomiting. This results in severe dehydration, often turning the skin bluish-grey. Without treatment, cholera can kill in a matter of hours.
There are references to what is thought to be cholera in Sanskrit texts dating back to the fifth century BCE (Harris et al. 2012). However, cholera first spread from its endemic haunts in the Ganges Delta when the East India Company army invaded the Maratha Empire in 1817. From there, cholera travelled via trade routes to the rest of the world. Over the past two centuries, there have been seven pandemics that have resulted in tens of millions of deaths (Lee and Dodgson 2000). The first pandemic (1817–1823) reached China, Japan, Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Near...
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Kennedy, J. (2019). Cholera. In: Romaniuk, S., Thapa, M., Marton, P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_524-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_524-1
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