On Valentine’s Day in 1992, . Several people on the flight showed signs of food poisoning. Local and state health departments investigated the outbreak and found the causative agent to be .
Of the 75 or so people tested, all but two sat in the economy class of the plane. The economy class had eaten food loaded onto the plane while on a layover in Lima, Peru. The food was shrimp, fresh shrimp from right there in Peru.
At the time, that would soon after the whole continent had been cholera-free for decades. It is believed that the cholera bacteria was in the sewage that drained into the ocean, and the shrimp were being contaminated that way. .
One passenger, a man in his 70s, .
One of the things that prevented the epidemic from spreading further from the passengers is the availability of clean water and sanitation in their final destination countries (USA, Japan, Canada). Had that not been the case, this flight could have seeded cholera and made many more people sick.
For example, in 2010, that left the small nation on the western side of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean without potable water for many of its citizens. In response, the United Nations sent in a group of peacekeepers from Nepal to aid in the recovery. . The waste from the peacekeeper camp was dumped into a nearby waterway that was being used by citizens downstream for drinking water. This epidemic cost over 8,500 lives, with almost 700,000 sick in a nation of 11 million. That’s almost one tenth of the country sick with cholera, and a 1.2% case fatality rate. Furthermore, there was no immunity to cholera in Haiti from disease nor vaccination at the time of the earthquake. It had been over a century since the disease was last detected in Haiti.
How did they know that a peacekeeper carried the bacteria into Haiti? Disease investigators from the World Health Organization and other health agencies that responded to the epidemic , the bacteria that causes cholera, to the circulating strain in Nepal’s outbreak. Nepal, however, had not just suffered a devastating earthquake and was not as dense in population as Haiti, which kept the outbreak under control in Nepal.
So why is it important to know this? It is important to know, because a devastating earthquake just took place in and Syria. Response is pouring into the area from all over the world, and it is up to the responding agencies to ensure they don’t make things worse by bringing infectious diseases with them. Furthermore, there already is a cholera epidemic in Syria, . Most cases are concentrated along Syria’s border with Türkiye, precisely where the earthquake happened.
Finally, to make things worse, . Because the cholera vaccine has not been prioritized for production, only a few laboratories produce it, and some of those laboratories are planning on stopping production entirely.
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