Second cholera pandemic

Hand bill from the New York City Board of Health, 1832. The outdated public health advice demonstrates the lack of understanding of the disease and its actual causative factors.

The second cholera pandemic also known as the Asiatic Cholera Pandemic was a Cholera pandemic from 1829-1849.^[1]

History

This pandemic began, like the first, with outbreaks along the Ganges River delta. From there the disease spread along trade routes to cover most of India. By 1828 the disease had traveled to China and was at the southern tips of the Ural Mountains in 1829. In London, the disease claimed 6,536 victims; in Paris, 20,000 succumbed (out of a population of 650,000) with about 100,000 deaths in all of France.^[2] The epidemic reached Russia (see Cholera Riots), Quebec, Ontario and New York in the same year and the Pacific coast of North America between 1832 and 1834.^[1]

Legacy

Norwegian Poet Henrik Wergeland wrote a stage-play inspired by the pandemic, as it reached as far as Norway. The Indian Cholera, as he called it, criticized British colonialism for spreading the pandemic.

See also

• Cholera outbreaks and pandemics

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Cholera's seven pandemics". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. December 2, 2008. http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/05/09/f-cholera-outbreaks.html. Retrieved 2008-12-11. "The second pandemic started in India and reached Russia by 1830 before continuing into Finland and Poland. A two-year outbreak began in England in October 1831 and claimed 22,000 lives. Irish immigrants, fleeing poverty and the potato famine, carried the disease from Europe to North America. On their arrival in the summer of 1832, 1,220 died in Montreal and another thousand across Quebec. The disease then entered the U.S. through Detroit and New York, and reached Latin America by 1833. Another outbreak across England and Wales began in 1848, killing 52,000 over two years." 
2. ^ Charles E. Rosenberg (1987). The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866. University of Chicago Press.