Scientists pinpoint river flow associated with cholera outbreaks, not just factors related to global warming

American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene: An examination of the world’s largest river basins found nutrient-rich and powerful river discharges led to spikes in the blooms of plankton associated with cholera outbreaks. These increased discharges often occur at times of increased temperature in coastal water, suggesting that predicting global warming's potential temperature effect on cholera will be more complicated than first thought, according to a new study published today in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

The findings by the authors will help give public health authorities another critical clue toward predicting future outbreaks of cholera based on climatic and environmental models in the hopes of preventing the spread of the deadly and highly infectious disease that currently plagues Haiti and several other countries.

The study began in the Bay of Bengal where researchers aimed to solve a mystery: When sea temperatures rise, phytoplankton—microscopic plants that live in the ocean and provide a food source for zooplankton, with which cholera bacteria are associated—decrease. So why had past studies found sea temperatures rising and numbers of phytoplankton also increasing? The authors analyzed twelve years of data, including images from NASA satellites, and pinpointed the large flows from the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers, carrying nutrients from soil, as the cause of a bloom of phytoplankton. This is followed by zooplankton blooms and thus contributes to outbreaks of cholera.

“We weren’t satisfied with just this result, so we then went to test this finding in other places—the Orinoco (in South America), the Congo, and the Amazon river basins, and we found the same thing: The positive relationship between phytoplankton blooms and ocean temperature is related to large river discharges,” said Shafiqul Islam, PhD, the lead investigator of the study and a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. “The main significance is that finding an association between sea surface temperatures and cholera outbreaks should not lead us to conclude that with global warming, cholera will definitely go up.”

But Islam said that global warming may play a role in other ways in outbreaks of cholera, including contributing to droughts and high salinity intrusion in the dry season and floods in the wet season. Both of those conditions have been found also to contribute to cholera epidemics, as published recently in the journal Water Resources Research. “If river flows are more turbulent, if droughts are more severe, if flood is more severe, cholera is more severe,” he said. “But cholera may not have direct linkage with rising sea surface temperatures.”...

Scanning electron microscope image of Vibrio cholerae bacteria, which infect the digestive system. Shot with a Zeiss DSM 962 SEM (for you gearheads out there), from T.J. Kirn, M.J. Lafferty, C.M.P Sandoe and R.K. Taylor, 2000, "Delineation of pilin domains required for bacterial association into microcolonies and intestinal colonization", Molecular Microbiology, Vol. 35(4):896-910. The Source: http://remf.dartmouth.edu/images/bacteriaSEM/source/1.html. To renew your faith in humanity, the license information at http://remf.dartmouth.edu/imagesindex.html strikes the following Whitmanesque pose: "These images are in the public domain. Do with them what you will."