Via Environmental News Service: Pioneer in Fight Against Cholera Wins Stockholm Water Prize. Excerpt:
Dr. Rita Colwell, an American expert on the prevention of waterborne infectious diseases, has been awarded the 2010 Stockholm Water Prize, widely recognized as the world's premier award for water related research or policy work.
The prize, which includes a $150,000 award and a crystal sculpture, honors individuals, institutions or organizations whose work contributes to the conservation and protection of water resources and to improved health of the planet's inhabitants and ecosystems.
The year 2010 marks the 20th anniversary of the Stockholm Water Prize and the World Water Week in Stockholm where it will be presented to Dr. Colwell.
Dr. Colwell heads the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics. She is also an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, chairman of Canon US Life Sciences, Inc. and a former director of the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Colwell has made exceptional contributions to control the spread of cholera, a waterborne pathogen that infects up to five million people and leads to an estimated 120,000 deaths each year.
Her work has established the basis for environmental and infectious disease risk assessment used around the world, and she was first to link the incidence of cholera to climate change.
In the 1960s, Colwell observed that the causative agent for cholera, the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, could survive by attaching to plankton. This led to her discovery that certain bacteria, including Vibrio species, can become dormant in rivers, lakes and oceans under conditions adverse for growth, to revert to an actively growing state when conditions are again favorable.
The finding that the environment serves as reservoir of infection contradicted the then conventional wisdom that cholera was only spread by person to person contact, food or drinking water and that its presence in the environment could only be due to the release of sewage.
As a result of her discovery, scientists are now able to link changes in the natural environment to the spread of disease using the most modern technologies.
