Skip to content

The Causes of Cholera

2017-08-22 · explainer · John · 3:58 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Global development (also: Health) · mode: News analysis · tags: timely hook, heavy topic

John explains that cholera, once a pandemic killer, was beaten mainly by sewers and clean water, describes the worst cholera outbreak in decades in war-torn Yemen, and argues that fewer people would die if the world paid attention: donating helps, and attention itself shrinks the empathy gap between rich and poor worlds.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Medical advances beyond medicines; cholera, the 19th-century pandemic and James K. Polk

  • ★ John says that when he thinks of advances in medicine he thinks of medicines and medical devices, but he should be thinking of something else too. — 00:00:00 · vaccine
  • ★★ John says Vibrio cholerae causes cholera, a diarrheal disease that usually lasts only a few days but can kill very quickly via dehydration. — 00:00:17
  • ★★ John says a cholera pandemic about 160 years ago killed tens of millions of people, including over 150,000 Americans, among them the 11th US president, James K. Polk. — 00:00:29 · United States
  • ★ John says fear of cholera was such that Polk was first buried in a public cemetery, as infectious disease regulations dictated, not with a presidential ceremony. — 00:00:38
  • ★★ John says cholera could take 20 pounds of body weight via diarrhea in under a day and, depending on the strain, killed up to half of those infected. — 00:00:48

00:00:58 — Clean water ended cholera; Yemen's war, sewer failure and the cholera outbreak, its treatment and aid

  • ★★★ John says cholera is gone for most of the world not because of antibiotics or vaccines (a vaccine gives up to six months of protection) but because of sewers and water purification. — 00:00:58 · vaccine
  • ★★★ John says cholera is also caused by lack of access to clean water, so it is a social and political problem as well as a health one, as Yemen now shows. — 00:01:08
  • ★★ John says that while access to clean water grows worldwide every year, Yemen was, even before its civil war began in 2015, one of the few countries where access to safe drinking water had declined since 1990. — 00:01:20
  • ★★★ John says the war has displaced millions and killed more than 10,000, and thousands more have died in the worst cholera outbreak since at least 1949, when good records began. — 00:01:35
  • ★★ John says the outbreak began after the bombing of Sana'a caused the city's sewer system to fail, and cholera has spread through most of Yemen. — 00:01:49
  • ★★★ John cites the World Health Organization's estimate that over 500,000 people in Yemen have been infected, about half of them children. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ John says cholera is treatable with oral rehydration solution, which is super cheap and can be made at home, but it requires clean water, scarce in parts of Yemen. — 00:02:02
  • ★★ John says most health workers in the hardest-hit regions have not been paid in over a year. — 00:02:13
  • ★★ John says malnutrition is now common among Yemeni children, lowering their resistance to infection. — 00:02:18
  • ★★ John says the Yemen outbreak has so far been less deadly than many previous outbreaks, partly because of the strains of cholera involved. — 00:02:23
  • ★★ John credits NGOs like Save the Children, working in extremely difficult conditions to provide oral rehydration solution, and unpaid Yemeni health workers who keep providing care. — 00:02:31 · Save the Children

00:02:42 — Why the world ignores Yemen, why donating and paying attention matter, and the empathy gap

  • ★★★ John says a hard truth of this epidemic is that fewer people would be dying if the world were paying more attention. — 00:02:42
  • ★★ John thinks there are many reasons we find this story hard to attend to, starting with Yemen's complex civil war with no clear or simple path to peace. (hedged) — 00:02:48
  • ★★ John says the political drama in the United States feels so astonishing and unprecedented that it is hard to look at anything else. — 00:02:55 · United States
  • ★★★ John says most of us feel we can't do anything about cholera in Yemen, but that is not true: donating to organizations working there pays for health workers and life-saving hydration solution. — 00:03:01
  • ★★★ John argues that paying attention itself makes a difference: it encourages more news coverage and helps shrink the huge empathy gap between the rich and poor worlds. — 00:03:14 · empathy
  • ★★★ John admits he pays more attention to crises in distant Europe or Australia than elsewhere because people there feel close to him: he watches them on YouTube and reads their Reddit posts. — 00:03:24 · Europe, Australia, YouTube, Reddit
  • ★★★ John says he really believes all human lives are equally valuable, but he can't live that belief if he can't empathize with people living in poverty or in fear of cholera. — 00:03:38 · empathy, extreme poverty
  • ★★★ John says he is trying to pay attention because the Yemen cholera outbreak is a health problem, a political problem and an empathy problem. — 00:03:48 · empathy

In the description and comments

  • ★ The description points viewers to the WHO's overview of the crisis in Yemen and Save the Children's coverage of the crisis and its interventions to learn more. — video description · Save the Children
  • ★★ The description cites a UNICEF statement that nearly two million children in Yemen are acutely malnourished, which puts them at higher risk of cholera and other life-threatening illnesses. — video description
  • ★ The description points to New York Times coverage of the outbreak and the unpaid health workers, background on the Yemeni civil war from The Atlantic and Al Jazeera, and says the video's graphs come from Our World in Data, whose Burden of Disease section shows long-term trends in health and disease. — video description · The New York Times
  • ★ The description thanks Rosianna Halse Rojas for help gathering research and Emma Luthi Price for suggesting the video. — video description · Rosianna Halse Rojas

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: cholera · empathy · Yemen · Yemen cholera outbreak

Also: People: James K. Polk

Organizations: Reddit · Save the Children · World Health Organization · YouTube

Concepts: Antibiotic · extreme poverty · infectious disease · malnutrition · oral rehydration therapy · sanitation · vaccine · Vibrio cholerae · water scarcity

Places: Australia · Europe · Sanaa · United States

Events: Yemeni civil war

Only in the description or credits: Al Jazeera · Emma Luthi Price · Our World in Data · Rosianna Halse Rojas · The Atlantic · The New York Times · UNICEF

Also centred on cholera: Thoughts from The Well

← Previous: What I've Been Thinking About · Next → Trust and Fire - Thoughts from the Smoke