Cholera

This story is part of CBC Health's Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.The impacts of climate change hit Canada hard in recent years, from the deadly heat dome of 2021 to the country's worst-ever wildfire season last summer. And those devastating environmental disasters provoked a lot of anxiety among pregnant individuals."Pregnancy, even without heat and smoke, is a time when…

MIT researchers have identified components of mucus that can block cholera infections by interfering with the genes that cause the microbe to switch into a harmful state.Utilizing these protective molecules could potentially provide a new approach to managing the illness, which is transmitted through contaminated water.Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered molecules present in mucus that have the ability to impede cholera infection by disrupting the genes responsible for the…

Less than a year after the Haitian government declared that cholera had been eliminated in the country, the disease is infecting thousands of people again.According to a World Health Organization report from December 13, the country has reported 13,672 cases and 283 deaths since early October.Haiti's last cholera outbreak started in 2010. Now, in a correspondence from the New England Journal of Medicine, experts are saying that the strain of cholera currently causing another outbreak in Haiti is related to the 2010…

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The global stockpile of cholera vaccines the World Health Organization helps manage is "currently empty or extremely…

On 2 October, Haiti announced that cholera had returned to the country. Memories from the previous epidemic, which killed close to 10,000 Haitians between 2010 and 2019, are still raw; now, with violent gangs fighting for control over the country and the health system in disarray, things could again get very bad. A few days later, Lebanon reported its first cholera cases since 1993, in a Syrian refugee and a health care worker in the north of the country. More…

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Cholera is a severe diarrheal illness caused by a Vibrio cholerae bacterial infection of the intestine.A new study reveals why a particularly infectious strain of cholera declined.A recent study explains why a highly contagious cholera bug variant that caused significant disease outbreaks in the early 1990s did not, according to expectations, create the eighth cholera pandemic. Instead, it mysteriously vanished.The research examined samples of the cholera-causing bacterium O139 Vibrio cholerae and found that throughout…