By the 1930s, cholera had been reduced to an anomaly in the world’s industrialized cities. The great killer of the nineteenth-century metropolis had been tamed by a combination of science, medicine, and engineering. In the developing world, however, the disease continues to be a serious threat. A strain of V. cholerae known as “El Tor” killed thousands in India and Bangladesh in the 1960s and 1970s. An outbreak in South America in the early 1990s infected more than a million people, killing at least ten thousand. In the summer of 2003, damage to the water-supply system from the Iraq War
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