Thanks to ASTMH for tweeting the link to this January 13 editorial in NEJM: The Cure for Cholera — Improving Access to Safe Water and Sanitation. It's a long item, and here is the conclusion:
Nothing said here has not been said before, often at greater length and depth. But the message bears repeating, frequently and insistently. Cholera, rightly feared for both the terrifying loss of life it can cause and for the panic it incites in affected populations, is as much a symptom as a disease.
It is a symptom of insufficient investment by the global development community in assuring access to safe water and improved sanitation — of providing only a Band-Aid solution to a difficult problem.
Because fecal–oral transmission is the predominant means by which people contract cholera, the frequency of cholera cases in the 21st century reflects the indisputable fact that the current state of development leaves more than a billion of the poorest and most marginalized people at risk of ingesting feces with their food and water.
As long as that is the case, it is difficult to be satisfied — notwithstanding the real successes that have been achieved — with the state of public health in developing countries.
