ENDEMIC CHOLERA IN RURAL BANGLADESH, 1966–1980

Since 1963, the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), formerly the Cholera Research Laboratory, has maintained a field station in Matlab to treat patients from a surveillance population of 240,000 who have cholera and other diarrheal diseases. Since 1966, the authors have analyzed hospital records of 7141 surveillance-area patients culture-positive for v. cholerae 01 to relate the seasonality, age and sex distribution, and geographic trends with hypotheses concerning transmission, immunity, and risk groups. From this review, they have found that: 1) children 2-9 years old and adult women are most commonly hospitalized for cholera; 2) V. cholerae 01 emerges simultaneously throughout the area of surveillance, with the early cases being of different phage types; 3) three patients were…