Abstract
The best intervention for long-term cholera control is the development and maintenance of water and sewage treatment systems. But many people in low-income countries still lack access to safe water supplies and even modestly improved sanitation facilities.
Whenever epidemics of cholera occur, the global public health community is energized. Experts meet, guidelines for control are reviewed and reissued, and new and modified interventions are proposed and promoted. In the past two decades, these things happened after cholera appeared in Latin America in 1991, in the wake of the Rwandan genocide and the ensuing refugee crisis in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1994, in Zimbabwe in 2008, and in October 2010, at the onset of the ongoing epidemic in Haiti (see article by Barzilay et al.). But even when it is not covered in the news . . .