LABORATORY ACTIVITY # 1

PUBLIC HEALTH THEN VS NOW

Laboratory Activity
Choose a public health issue / disease outbreak in the past. Explain how it
affected the public and how health practitioners addressed the issue (identify the agent,
control the spread, find the cure).
- The public health issue / disease in the past that I choose is the cholera. Cholera
is a serious disease; it causes severe watery diarrhea which can lead to
dehydration and even death if untreated. Cholera is caused by eating or drinking
food or water that contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. An estimated
1.3 to 4 million people around the world get cholera each year and 21,000 to
143,000 people external icon die from it. Cholera is an acute, diarrheal illness
caused by infection of the intestine with the toxigenic bacterium Vibrio cholerae
serogroup O1 or O139. People who get cholera often have mild symptoms or no
symptoms, but cholera can be severe. Approximately 1 in 10 people who get sick
with cholera will develop severe symptoms such as watery diarrhea, vomiting,
and leg cramps. In these people, rapid loss of body fluids leads to dehydration
and shock. Without treatment, death can occur within hours. Oral or intravenous
hydration is the primary treatment for cholera. In conjunction with hydration,
treatment with antibiotics is recommended for severely ill patients. It is also
recommended for patients who have severe or some dehydration and continue to
pass a large volume of stool during rehydration treatment. Prevention of cholera
is dependent on access to safe water, adequate sanitation, and basic hygiene
needs.
Explain how current health practitioners, with advances in public health and
medicine, might deal with the same issue if it happens in the present. Site your sources
accordingly.

I think the health practitioners of today could handle it even better. It is normally
dehydration that leads to death from cholera, so the most important treatment is to
give oral hydration solution (ORS), also known as oral rehydration therapy (ORT).
The treatment consists of large volumes of water mixed with a blend of sugar and
salts. Prepackaged mixtures are commercially available, but widespread
distribution in developing countries is limited by cost, so homemade ORS recipes
are often used, with common household ingredients. Severe cases of cholera
require intravenous fluid replacement. An adult weighing 70 kilograms will need at
least 7 liters of intravenous fluids. Antibiotics can shorten the duration of the
illness, but the WHO does not recommend the mass use of antibiotics for cholera,
because of the growing risk of bacterial resistance. Anti-diarrheal medicines are
not used because they prevent the bacteria from being flushed out of the body.
With proper care and treatment, the fatality rate should be around 1 percent