Essay by Eric Worrall
Al Jazeera promoting climate change explanations instead of exposing political incompetence or worse.
Cholera: An overlooked outcome of climate change
Global warming is exacerbating the spread of a disease that should have been consigned to the dust bin of history a long time ago. We need to take action now.
Robert Kampala Regional Director, WaterAid Southern Africa
Published On 23 Feb 202423 Feb 2024…
Climate change-related extreme weather and the destruction it causes are making headlines on a regular basis across the world. Yet the profound health implications of the climate emergency are often left untold.
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Zambia, for example, is currently experiencing its worst cholera outbreak to date with more than 18,000 confirmed infections. The disease has already killed more than 600 people, a third of them children, and led to aid agencies warning of an “uncontrollable health crisis” in the country.
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Countries in Europe and North America – once crippled by this disease – have long eliminated the threat of cholera through the provision of safe water and sanitation services for their entire populations. These successes should be replicated in countries fighting cholera today. The catastrophic, preventable cholera outbreaks in Southern Africa must be a wake-up call for all governments and development partners to increase funding for water, hygiene and sanitation, especially at this time of crisis when climate change is fuelling a surge in waterborne diseases.
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Read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/2/23/cholera-an-overlooked-outcome-of-climate-change
Climate change is not causing cholera outbreaks, political incompetence is causing cholera outbreaks. Singapore, perched almost right on the equator, has no problem keeping their water safe to drink.
It is a particular disgrace that Zambia is suffering water treatment issues, that foreign donors and charities like World Vision appear to be doing the heavy lifting, instead of the Zambian Government.
Sea salt and electricity is all that is needed to make water safe to drink.
Zambia has plenty of hydroelectricity and lots of mining revenue. Zambia is landlocked, but Zambia has good access to salt from domestic salt mines and an established import market.
If you run an electric current through ordinary salt water, the salt is converted into Sodium Hypochlorite, a widely used water treatment chemical. Anyone who owns or has visited a salt water swimming pool has seen this process in action.
Given how easy water purification is, perhaps the current President of Zambia Hakainde Hichilema can explain why more mining revenues aren’t being spent on making Zambian water completely safe, and providing adequate medical help for the 18,000 victims of the Zambian Cholera outbreak.
Zambian President Hichilema appears to have experience in the mining business. According to The Panama Papers, a massive leak of confidential banking documents from Panama, President Hichilema was a director of the Africa focussed Bermudan mining company AfNat Resources Ltd between March and August in 2006. Hichilema apparently resigned this directorship just before he was elected as President of the Zambian United Party for National Development in September 2006.
No doubt President Hichilema will leverage his insider knowledge of the African mining industry to ensure Zambian water treatment operators and doctors receive the funding they need, to treat the sick and to eliminate future Cholera outbreaks.
This isn’t the first time Al Jazeera has leapt on climate change as an explanation for a major disaster, when other, potentially more plausible explanations are available. Back in 2015, Al Jazeera published an article blaming climate change for the flooding of the River Nile, and severe flooding in the city of Alexandria, though on that occasion Al Jazeera mentioned some locals blamed the flooding of Alexandria on incompetent drain maintenance rather than climate change.
To be polite, I think the government has other priorities than public health.
My dogs are smart enough to NOT poop in their water bowl.
Is Mr. Hichilema smarter than my dogs?
Do you think Hichilema actually uses the same water supply as the public?
The Plan: Blame other people and ask for their money.
Throw in the phrase “climate change” and triple the money
requested, ’cause the leaders want new limousines.
One aspect of the explosion of Mt Tambora in 1815 may have been a the first cholera pandemic. It started in India, in 1817,
From https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/history-of-cholera :
Hey, is there a character limit now? See my first comment!
My Swedish genes like cold weather! This suggests that Tambora is off the hook. (And the Year Without a Summer was likely most impactful near the northern jet stream, e.g. New England, not so much to southern latitudes.)
The theory that severe cold killed the cholera bacteria seems a bit sketchy. It goes dormant in the cold, but in 1832 it killed 2200 people in Quebec.
https://web.stanford.edu/~moore/Cholera.html
More likely people realised the problem was tainted water and shellfish, and made more effort to avoid known sources and cook their food.
I am going to reject that one out of hand. There has only been one new disease in Holocene, SARS-COV-2 which was created by the Wuhan Virology Institute in 2019 using American money funneled to it by Saint Anthony Fauci. The rest of them have been traveling around with humans and their co-living animals for thousands of years.
So much easier to shift all responsibility to someone or something else.
Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema . . . hey, I think I just got an unsolicited email from that guy, something about splitting money held in an unclaimed bank account if I would just send him $15,000 for lawyer fees to break the money lose.
He’s my new best friend!
Climate change is causing Scholara outbreaks
Oh My God, Not Again.
You don’t even need chemicals. The Romans didn’t have problems with cholera. They got their water from springs and clear streams in the hills.They piped the water through aqueducts down into the city. they built sanitary sewers under the streets and buildings for excrement which dumped out downstream.
It doesn’t take high tech. It takes efficient and competent government.
And it has nothing to do with the climate.
Don’t shit in the water you drink from.
Did they consider the people downstream and what they thought about their polluted river?
The Mediterranean, pretty much. It was big enough.
@Beb_Vorlich: They understood that river water is dirty, which is why they supplied their drinking water from the hills. Modern systems can treat dirty water to make it potable using chemicals. The Romans didn’t have the chemicals so they made the effort to source clean water.
Climate Change the get out of jail free card ( literally) for all corrupt or/and incompetent politicians.
How did anyone contract Cholera from rice?
Don’t you have to cook the stuff and the boily water would kill the pathogen?
Exactly how ‘ale’ became so popular in the UK – basically = boiled water flavoured with some barley-malt and hops.
With less alcohol in it than many supposed ‘Alcohol free’ beers you can buy now and of course, where the Joule (unit of Energy) came from
Joule himself being the son of a brewer who wanted to save his dad a few pennies in his beer making process.
Keep it under your hat but, shovelling Electricity into the ocean may be a remedy for the wildly imagined Ocean Acidation
(Would anyone put it past the lunatics now running this asylum)
Normally, you wouldn’t catch cholera from rice but if you leave leftover rice out it will pick up local bacteria which will get transmitted when eaten if the rice is subsequently only heated up or eaten cold. If you don’t have access to plentiful energy 24/7 then I can see a situation where families might batch cook enough rice to see them through a day or so without energy.
I suspect strict handwashing and modern food handling is a hangover of efforts to fight the cholera epidemic, without stringent food handling precautions anyone infected could easily pass it on via anything they touch.
Leaving cooked rice out unrefrigerated is dangerous, cholera aside.
How many times do we have to teach people the exact same things? People in African countries have been taught how to have safe drinking water repeatedly. If they are really so stupid they still don’t get it, it is THEIR fault, not the climate.
Zambia has some pretty extreme pockets of poverty, I suspect many of the sick people can’t afford soap, and don’t have a lot of choices over what they drink.
Why are they in poverty? It ain’t their location. Again, how many times do people have to be taught things? 100 years plus of missionary work alone has taught the people of Africa the simple basics, add in 65-75 years of foreign government assistance/education programs and there is absolutely no legitimate reason for these disease outbreaks to be happening. Either it is being done to these people intentionally by some other group or they really are just, that, stupid. There is no 3rd option.
The article reminded me of this Dilbert cartoon:
LOL 🙂
Since climate change is responsible for almost everything that ails us, why not include cholera as part of the mix. I’m expecting alcoholism to make it next.
Singapore got a mention, so: In the 1960’s a traveler in the tropics carried a passport and a health booklet showing current vaccinations. A co-worker flying from Djakarta to Singapore happened to be about a week overdue for a cholera shot. He couldn’t board a plane till he got that shot. It was administered right at the airport and he was on his way.