Cholera

Natives of the northern mountains of India believe that cholera is a six-handed demon with no feet. Therefore it cannot leave its habitat in India's lowlands until some traveling hillsman comes along, upon whom it can lay its many clutches. Actually the cause of cholera is a microbe shaped like a comma, which enters the body only through the mouth, infests the digestive tract, irritates the bowels to such extent that they extract and eject quarts of fluid from the body. A victim of cholera may die--shriveled and cold from dehydration, uremia and toxemia--within four or five days of exposure to infection.

Primitive and scientific explanations aside, by last week 16,500 inhabitants of the northwestern mountains of India had died in a cholera epidemic. Frantic sanitarians had vaccinated 600,000 persons, doused thousands of wells with germicidal potassium permanganate to halt an epidemic which began the end of April. Nonetheless, the epidemic has spread northwesterly into Afghanistan.

This worries the sanitarians of the Western World. For from Northwestern India by way of Afghanistan spread the first epidemic of Asiatic cholera which Europe knew. It began in 1826, reached Russia in 1830, England in 1831. Another wave spread to Mecca, Egypt, England and, in 1832, to the U. S. Last of successive pandemics touched the U. S. as late as 1911, and the disease has been kept out of the country since only by close medical inspection of every sailor and traveler who enters a U. S. port.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.