question: how does cholera spread after a flood?
Obviously there is sewage mixed in with the flood waters. but do you have to drink the water to be infected? What about wading through the water, while have some scratches on your skin, or a cut on one of your fingers?
Mainly infected water.
Yes, sanitation is important but for cholera, mainly it’s important so you don’t contaminate your food and water indirectly. Direct infection from another person is not common at all.
That said, untreated water can harbor other nasty bugs that can/will infect cuts or wounds. It’s not just cholera you have to worry about with tainted water. Here in the Houston region, there are regular warnings after major rains or floods not to let kids play in floodwater. There’s all sorts of nasty things they can pick up in it.
if you need drinking water, the only available sources have been contaminated by the flooding, and you have no means to purify the water either chemically or by boiling, then you drink and die of cholera or don’t drink and die of thirst.
Cholera is an extreme-poverty disease and a sign of just how abysmal Russian logistics is. If they can’t provide their troops clean water to drink then it’s almost certain they’re not getting good food, weapons, supplies, and everything else needed to keep an army going and fighting.
No kidding. If they can’t boil, even a little bleach (8 drops per gallon) will go a long way.
A very large shipment of Lifestraws would help Ukraine. The Red Cross distributed them to Kenya, Haiti, Ecuador and other countries after floods and earthquakes.
Vibrio Cholerae is almost exclusively oral-fecal transmission, so you have to take the bacteria orally in contaminated food or water (unless you make a habit of licking contaminated surfaces for your own kinky reasons) and transmitted by shitting the pathogen into other substances likely to be taken in orally layer.
A soldier should be well protected by eating only uncontaminated food and drinking pure water (both provided by the army’s supply lines) and some basic sanitation, like sanitizing your hands before handling your own provisions if you may have contaminated the surface of your skin.
If you have to scrounge, your risks increase but there are valid methods to decontaminate your pickings, like thoroughly cooking food or chemically decontaminating water.
If you have to scrounge and your quartermaster corps is so ineffective they can’t provide any way to decontaminate your scroungings, you are well and truly fucked.
It would be from drinking contaminated water. Which would in turn be necessitated if troops had no access to uncontaminated water so they got desperate and drank whatever was available.Cholera can be a huge issue in areas of few water sources because infected patients start shedding massive amounts of bacteria in their feces. But maintain proper hygiene and don’t let it into water sources and you’re fine as a population.
A few things to keep in mind here:
1.) A Ukrainian environmental agency has reported detecting cholera and E. coli in the floodwater.
2.) However so far this report of sick troops is sketchily sourced. It’s from a non-governmental group claiming they have this info based on “informers” in Russian military hospitals.
3.) It’s not normally hard to treat cholera. At least in the first world. These days it’s very much a disease of impoverished, undeveloped areas.
So this is not likely to become a massive issue and may in fact just be propaganda.
Treatment is hydration support to prevent the catastrophic diarrhea from dehydrating the victim to literal death. Very often, IV hydration.
If the Russian military can’t provide clean drinking water, how likely is it they have field hospitals provisioned with ample supplies of Ringer’s or D5W IVs to save cholera sufferers?
It’s literally orders of magnitude easier to prevent cholera than treat it. I’m going to go out on a limb and say the Russian occupation forces are doing the only thing easier: absolutely nothing, and fuck the conscripts and convicts in the trenches.
Huh, I did some looking into it, and it looks like an alcohol concentration of somewhere between 6.25% and 15% (depending on the drink) is enough to kill cholera, but that the disease nonetheless has a higher incidence among heavy drinkers, because heavy drinking reduced stomach acidity.
In any event, I can imagine a breakdown of military logistics sufficient that the troops can’t get bottled water, but that they can’t even get the means to purify water? That’s a whole other level of incompetence.
Or, if you can’t get fancy, simply salt and sugar dissolved in water – clean water.
They’re fucked.
And there’s another factor - how many of these troops just didn’t know the connection between drinking water and cholera? I mean, we have people here who are asking questions about exactly what is needed to be infected, so it’s legitimate to ask, how successful was the Russian educational system in teaching the same things?
In a modern nation, probably it’s not common knowledge how to make water safe but I would expect people know not to trust random water.
But these are nominally trained soldiers who should have been given a minimum of survival training, including making water safe. At the very basic level, it’s not terribly complicated stuff - you’ll get some of it in scout training as boys around here, much less for members of a professional military.
I think that’s the flaw
Here’s another story saying Russia is hurrying to vaccinate their soldiers due to the alleged cholera outbreak, though the source may be the same as the other article.
No regular news source has mentioned it yet that I’ve seen.
Ukraine has attacked a bridge leading to Crimea. According to Russia, "it was likely British Storm Shadow missiles were used in an attack “ordered by London”. And Ukrainian canals are drying up due to the dam being breached.
That particular bridge makes sense. When I saw the headline I thought of the Kerch bridge, which wouldn’t make as much sense. The idea being that Ukraine wants (so claim the armchair generals) the Kerch bridge to remain functional so that the Russians in Crimea have a means to escape when the time comes.
And if they aren’t able to escape, they’ll fight to the death rather than surrender? I doubt it. Not today’s Russian army.
If the Russians can flee, at least it saves Ukrainians ammo not having to clear Russian lines.
Even if they’re not fighting back with much vigor, ypu can’t leave a living enemy behind you unless you capture, disarm, and restrain them, and frankly it’s quicker to just shoot them.