Cholera pandemics are fueled by globe-trotting bacterial strains
Insight into how the bug spreads could help stop it
By
Aimee Cunningham
7:00am, November 13, 2017
Cholera strains behind worldwide outbreaks of the deadly disease over the last five decades are jet-setters rather than homebodies.
It had been proposed that these cholera epidemics were homegrown, driven by local strains of Vibrio cholerae living in aquatic ecosystems. But DNA fingerprints of the V. cholerae strains behind recent large outbreaks in Africa and Latin America were more closely related to South Asian strains than local ones, according to two papers published in the Nov. 10 Science.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cholera-pandemics-are-fueled-globe-trotting-bacterial-strains
