Introduction

Summary

This book has two purposes. It offers an overview of Africa's historical encounters with the seven cholera pandemics from 1817 to the present. Second, it explores the epidemiology of the contemporary African experience during the seventh cholera pandemic, for which evidence is more robust and for which the analysis has immediate policy relevance.

Scientific interest in cholera continues to be significant. Not only did the disease help launch the new field of epidemiology in the late nineteenth century, it also represents a fascinating and complex challenge in the newest research specialties of disease ecology, membrane biology, and trans-membrane signaling. In public health circles, cholera raises questions for global health workers concerned with new and reemerging infectious diseases.

Part One describes the first six cholera pandemics through to 1947, emphasizing how the disease affected Africans. Of course, Africa's experience with cholera cannot be isolated from that of other parts of the globe, especially the Middle East and the Indian Ocean region, long active as favorite routes for cholera's diffusion into the African continent. Nor can the experience of Europe and the Americas be overlooked, especially efforts in the industrializing countries to diagnose and treat this dreaded disease. Chapters 1 and 2 explore cholera's global trajectory and the medical responses the disease provoked. Much of the record of Africa's early experience with cholera has not survived, which may explain why this is the first attempt to produce a study of cholera in Africa.