Cholera, pandemics and the Winnebago County Health Department
Add comment June 4th, 2008
When I was a young girl, bananas were considered a deadly food.
It made sense in that time and place. We were living in Japan, it was the early 1960s, and a new cholera epidemic had just started in Indonesia and spread to Taiwan. The nation of Taiwan was the source from which Japan imported most of its bananas.
People in that part of the world were terrified of cholera. It could be a death sentence. The bactera that caused the disease came from the feces of infected people, and spread through contaminated water and (to a lesser extent) food — hence the fear of bananas from Taiwan. We knew that cholera, which causes severe diarrhea and vomiting, could send a healthy person into shock and death from dehydration in just a day or two. (These days the World Health Organization has a rehydration solution which is used to very effectively to treat cholera victims during outbreaks that still occur in third-world countries.)
I’d always thought of cholera as a third-world disease. But recently I learned that in the 1800’s, before people knew about bacterial infections and how they spread, several cholera pandemics made their way to the United States.
In fact, the first Board of Health in Rockford was created in 1854 because of a cholera pandemic that reached this city. Victims of the disease were quarantined in a house outside the city limits. Because the situation was considered a health emergency, the city passed an ordinance providing for nuisance abatement and preservation of health in June of that year, forming the new Board of Healtlh.
That Board of Health was a predecessor to today’s Winnebago County Health Department. The Board’s creation is the beginning spot in a historic timeline displayed on a wall at the WCHD building. According to its records, the Winnebago County Health Department opened in 1962 and merged with the city’s health department in 1970.
These days, cholera is not a threat in our part of the world. But the Winnebago County Health Department still is concerned and preparing for the possiblity of other potential pandemics, said Emergency Response Coordinator Dan Reilly.
In fact it has created an Emergency Operations Plan to provide coordinated responses of county government and community in case of a health emergency such as a pandemic or bioterrorism attack, Reilly said.
Under the plan, the Winnebago County Health Department holds exercises to train and test local agencies and health professionals on responses to specific health emergency scenarios, he said. One of those exercises is coming up on June 13.
Stay tuned to this blog for more details.
