Africa in the Time of Cholera

by Echenberg, Myron

• ISBN13: 9781107001497
• ISBN10: 1107001498
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-28
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

This book combines evidence from natural and social sciences to examine the impact on Africa of seven cholera pandemics since 1817, particularly the current impact of cholera on such major countries as Senegal, Angola, Mozambique, Congo, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Myron Echenberg highlights the irony that this once-terrible scourge, having receded from most of the globe, now kills thousands of Africans annually Africa now accounts for more than 90 percent of the world's cases and deaths and leaves many more with severe developmental impairment. Responsibility for the suffering caused is shared by Western lending and health institutions and by often venal and incompetent African leadership. If the threat of this old scourge is addressed with more urgency, great progress in the public health of Africans can be achieved.

Author Biography

Myron Echenberg is former Chair of the History Department at McGill University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He is a former editor of the Canadian Journal of African Studies and previously served as President of the Canadian Association of African Studies. Professor Echenberg is the author of Plague Ports. The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894-1901; Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914-1945; and Colonial Conscripts: The Tiralleurs Sngalais in French West Africa, 1857-1960, which won the Herskovits-Award of the African Studies Association for the outstanding original scholarly work published during 1991.

Table of Contents

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
List of Abbreviations	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
The First Six Pandemics, 1817-1947	p. 13
Cholera Circles the Globe	p. 15
Medical Responses	p. 29
Cholera Ravages Sub-Saharan Africa: Senegambia, Ethiopia, and Zanzibar, 1821-1894	p. 45
Cholera in North Africa and the Nile Valley: Tunisia, 1835-1868, and Egypt, 1823-1947	p. 65
The Seventh Pandemic	p. 87
Introduction: Cholera Changes Its Face	p. 87
Medical Changes	p. 91
The Seventh Cholera Pandemic in Africa	p. 109
Risk Factors: Environment and Geography, Armed Conflicts, and the Dispersal of Refugees	p. 125
Risk Factors: Public Health Policy Choices among Stable and Weak States	p. 140
Zimbabwe, Portrait of Cholera in a Failed State	p. 163
Cholera Today	p. 174
Bibliography	p. 185
Index	p. 199
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