cholera pandemic, 1846-1860
Years: 1846 - 1860
The third cholera pandemic (1846–60) is the third major outbreak of cholera originating in India in the nineteenth century that reaches far beyond its borders, which researchers at UCLA believe may have started as early as 1837 and lasted until 1863
In Russia, more than one million people die of cholera.
In 1853–54, the epidemic in London claims over ten thousand lives, and there are twenty-three thousand deaths for all of Great Britain.
This pandemic is considered to have the highest fatalities of the nineteenth-century epidemics.
Like the earlier pandemics, cholera spreads from the Ganges delta of India.
It has high fatalities among populations in Asia, Europe, Africa and North America.
In 1854, which os considered the worst year, twenty-three thousand people die in Great Britain.]
This year, the British physician John Snow, who is working in a poor area of London, identifies contaminated water as the means of transmission of the disease.
After the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak he had mapped the cases of cholera in the Soho area in London, and noted a cluster of cases near a water pump in one neighborhood.
To test his theory, he persuades officials to remove the pump handle, and the number of cholera cases in the area immediately declines.
His breakthrough helps eventually bring the epidemic under control.
Heis a founding member of the Epidemiological Society of London, formed in response to a cholera outbreak in 1849, and he is considered one of the fathers of epidemiology.
