The first six pandemics
Cholera became a disease of global importance in 1817. In that year a particularly lethal outbreak occurred in Jessore, India, midway between Calcutta (Kolkata) and Dhaka (now in Bangladesh), and then spread throughout most of India, Burma (Myanmar), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). By 1820 epidemics had been reported in Siam (Thailand), in Indonesia (where more than 100,000 people succumbed on the island of Java alone), and as far away as the Philippines. At Basra, Iraq, as many as 18,000 people died during a three-week period in 1821. The pandemic spread through Turkey and reached the threshold of Europe. The disease also spread along trade routes from Arabia to the eastern African and Mediterranean coasts. Over the next few years, cholera disappeared from most of the world except for its “home base” around the Bay of Bengal.
The second cholera pandemic, which was the first to reach into Europe and the Americas, began in 1829. The disease arrived in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1830, continuing into Finland and Poland. Carried by tradesmen along shipping routes, it rapidly spread to the port of Hamburg in northern Germany and made its first appearance in England, in Sunderland, in 1831. In 1832 it arrived in the Western Hemisphere; in June more than 1,000 deaths were documented in Quebec. From Canada the disease moved quickly to the United States, disrupting life in most of the large cities along the eastern seaboard and striking hardest in New Orleans, Louisiana, where 5,000 residents died. In 1833 the pandemic reached Mexico and Cuba.
The third pandemic is generally considered to have been the most deadly. It is thought to have erupted in 1852 in India; from there it spread rapidly through Persia (Iran) to Europe, the United States, and then the rest of the world. Africa was severely affected, with the disease spreading from its eastern coast into Ethiopia and Uganda. Perhaps the worst single year of cholera was 1854; 23,000 died in Great Britain alone.
The fourth and fifth cholera pandemics (beginning in 1863 and 1881, respectively) are generally considered to have been less severe than the previous ones. However, in some areas extraordinarily lethal outbreaks were documented: more than 5,000 inhabitants of Naples died in 1884, 60,000 in the provinces of Valencia and Murcia in Spain in 1885, and perhaps as many as 200,000 in Russia in 1893–94. In Hamburg, repeatedly one of the cities in Europe most severely affected by cholera, almost 1.5 percent of the population perished during the cholera outbreak of 1892. The last quarter of the 19th century saw widespread infection in China and particularly in Japan, where more than 150,000 cases and 90,000 deaths were recorded between 1877 and 1879. The disease spread throughout South America in the early 1890s.
The sixth pandemic lasted from 1899 to 1923 and was especially lethal in India, in Arabia, and along the North African coast. More than 34,000 people perished in Egypt in a three-month period, and some 4,000 Muslim pilgrims were estimated to have died in Mecca in 1902. (Mecca has been called a “relay station” for cholera in its progress from East to West; 27 epidemics were recorded during pilgrimages from the 19th century to 1930, and more than 20,000 pilgrims died of cholera during the 1907–08 hajj.) Russia was also struck severely by the sixth pandemic, with more than 500,000 people dying of cholera during the first quarter of the 20th century. The pandemic failed to reach the Americas and caused only small outbreaks in some ports of western Europe. Even so, extensive areas of Italy, Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans were severely affected. After 1923 cholera receded from most of the world, though endemic cases continued in the Indian subcontinent.