by Sonia Shah
23. Koeppel, Water for Gotham, 16, 52, 117.
24. Interview with Robert D. Mutch, Nov. 27, 2012; Duffy, A History of Public Health, 211; Nelson Manfred Blake, Water for the Cities: A History of the Urban Water Supply Problem in the United States (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1956), 124; “Old Water Tank Building Gives Way to Trade,” The New York Times, July 12, 1914.
25. Blake, Water for the Cities, 126.
26. Koeppel, Water for Gotham, 64.
27. The data collected was in grains per gallon: 1 grain = 64.8 mg; 1 gallon = 3780 g. Koeppel, Water for Gotham, 121, 141.
28. J. S. Guthrie et al., “Alcohol and Its Influence on the Survival of Vibrio cholerae,” British Journal of Biomedical Science 64, no. 2 (2007): 91–92.
29. Peter C. Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Geismar, “Where Is Night Soil?”; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 112.
30. Documents of the Board of Aldermen of the City of New-York, vol. 9, document 18.
31. Sanderson, Manahatta, 10, 64, 153; Duffy, A History of Public Health, 25, 91, 379, 407; Feachem, Sanitation and Disease; Anbinder, Five Points, 87.
32. Duffy, A History of Public Health, 197.
33. Sanderson, Manahatta, 81.
34. Dudley Atkins, ed., Reports of Hospital Physicians and Other Documents in Relation to the Epidemic Cholera of 1832 (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1832); James R. Manley, “Letters addressed to the Board of Health, and to Richard Riker, recorder of the city of New-York: on the subject of his agency in constituting a special medical council,” Board of Health publication (New York: Peter van Pelt, 1832).
35. Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), 37.
36. Greene, A Glance at New York.
37. A drink consisting of water with just 15 percent gin would have to sit for twenty-six hours before cholera vibrio in it would perish. J. S. Guthrie et al., “Alcohol and Its Influence on the Survival of Vibrio cholerae,” British Journal of Biomedical Science 64, no. 2 (2007): 91–92.
38. Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell (New York: Random House, 2007); Duffy, A History of Public Health, 226.
39. Blake, Water for the Cities, 60.
40. “Extract of a letter from New-York, dated July 19, 1832,” The Liberator, July 28, 1832; Atkins, Reports of Hospital Physicians.
41. Atkins, Reports of Hospital Physicians.
42. The Cholera Bulletin, Conducted by an Association of Physicians, vol. 1, nos. 1–24, 1832 (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 6.
43. Philip Hone, The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1910); John N. Ingham, Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing, 1983); Atkins, Reports of Hospital Physicians.
44. Atkins, Reports of Hospital Physicians.
45. Letter from Cornelia Laura Adams Tomlinson to Maria Annis Dayton and Cornelia Laura Tomlinson Weed, June 22, 1832, in “Genealogical Story (Dayton and Tomlinson),” told by Laura Dayton Fessenden (Cooperstown, NY: Crist, Scott & Parshall, 1902).
46. Autobiography of N. T. Hubbard: With Personal Reminiscences of New York City from 1798 to 1875 (New York: J. F. Trow & Son, 1875).
47. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 32.
48. Hone, The Diary of Philip Hone.
49. Chris Swann, A Survey of Residential Nutrient Behaviors in the Chesapeake Bay (Ellicott City, MD: Chesapeake Research Consortium, Center for Watershed Protection, 1999).
50. Traci Watson, “Dog Waste Poses Threat to Water,” USA Today, June 6, 2002.
51. Robert M. Bowers et al., “Sources of Bacteria in Outdoor Air Across Cities in the Midwestern United States,” Applied and Environmental Microbiology 77, no. 18 (2011): 6350–56.
52. Dana M. Woodhall, Mark L. Eberhard, and Monica E. Parise, “Neglected Parasitic Infections in the United States: Toxocariasis,” The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 90, no. 5 (2014): 810–13.
53. P. S. Craig et al., “An Epidemiological and Ecological Study of Human Alveolar Echinococcosis Transmission in South Gansu, China,” Acta Tropica 77, no. 2 (2000): 167–77.
54. Jillian P. Fry et al., “Investigating the Role of State and Local Health Departments in Addressing Public Health Concerns Related to Industrial Food Animal Production Sites,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 1 (2013): e54720.
55. JoAnn Burkholder et al., “Impacts of Waste from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations on Water Quality,” Environmental Health Perspectives 115, no. 2 (2007): 308.
56. Robbin Marks, “Cesspools of Shame: How Factory Farm Lagoons and Sprayfields Threaten Environmental and Public Health,” Natural Resources Defense Council and the Clean Water Network, July 2001; Burkholder, “Impacts of Waste from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations”; Wendee Nicole, “CAFOs and Environmental Justice: The Case of North Carolina,” Environmental Health Perspectives 121, no. 6 (2013): a182–89.
57. Lee Bergquist and Kevin Crowe, “Manure Spills in 2013 the Highest in Seven Years Statewide,” Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, Dec. 5, 2013; Peter T. Kilborn, “Hurricane Reveals Flaws in Farm Law,” The New York Times, Oct. 17, 1999.
58. Xiuping Jiang, Jennie Morgan, and Michael P. Doyle, “Fate of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in Manure-Amended Soil,” Applied and Environmental Microbiology 68, no. 5 (2002): 2605–609; Margo Chase-Topping et al., “Super-Shedding and the Link Between Human Infection and Livestock Carriage of Escherichia coli O157,” Nature Reviews Microbiology 6, no. 12 (2008): 904–12; CDC, “Escherichia coli O157:H7, General Information—NCZVED,” Jan. 6, 2011; J. A. Cotruvo et al., “Waterborne Zoonoses: Identification, Causes, and Control,” WHO, 2004, 140.
59. NDM-1’s capacity to move into bacterial species peaks at ambient, as opposed to body, temperatures. That may explain why it’s already been found in environmental strains of both Vibrio cholerae and Shigella boydii, a culprit in severe dysentery. T. R. Walsh et al., “Dissemination of NDM-1 Positive Bacteria in the New Delhi Environment and Its Implications for Human Health: An Environmental Point Prevalence Study,” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 11, no. 5 (2011): 355–62.
60. Drexler, Secret Agents, 146; McKenna, Superbug, 60–63; S. Tsubakishita et al., “Origin and Molecular Evolution of the Determinant of Methicillin Resistance in Staphylococci,” Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy 54, no. 10 (2010): 4352–59.
61. Maryn McKenna, “E. Coli: Some Answers, Many Questions Still,” Wired.com, June 22, 2011; Yonatan H. Grad et al., “Comparative Genomics of Recent Shiga Toxin–Producing Escherichia coli O104:H4: Short-Term Evolution of an Emerging Pathogen,” mBio 4, no. 1 (2013): e00452–12.
62. Ross Anderson, “Sprouts and Bacteria: It’s the Growing Conditions,” Food Safety News, June 6, 2011.
63. G. Gault et al., “Outbreak of Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome and Bloody Diarrhoea Due to Escherichia coli O104:H4, South-West France, June 2011,” Eurosurveillance 16, no. 26 (2011).
64. McKenna, “E. Coli: Some Answers; “‘A Totally New Disease Pattern’: Doctors Shaken by Outbreak’s Neurological Devastation,” Spiegel Online, June 9, 2011; Gault, “Outbreak of Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome.”
65. Ralf P. Vonberg et al., “Duration of Fecal Shedding of Shiga Toxin–Producing Escherichia coli O104:H4 in Patients Infected During the 2011 Outbreak in Germany: A Multicenter Study,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 56 (2013).
66. Haiti Grassroots Watch, “Behind the Cholera Epidemic—Excreta,” December 21, 2010.
67. George, The Big Necessity, 89, 99.
68. Solomon, Water, 265.
69. Interview with Brian Concannon, July 23, 2013.
70. Haiti Grassroots
Watch, “Behind the Cholera Epidemic.”
71. Associated Press interview, “UN Envoy Farmer Says Haiti Cholera Outbreak Is Now World’s Worst,” Oct. 18, 2011.
72. Walsh, “Dissemination of NDM-1 Positive Bacteria.”
73. In January 2011, a man in Hong Kong was found to be infected with an E. coli strain with NDM-1. With no history of hospitalizations, experts suspect he may have picked up the infection from excreta-contaminated waters or soils. In May 2011, NDM-1 was detected in a patient in Canada. This eighty-six-year-old man hadn’t left western Ontario in at least ten years. A polluted local environment may have exposed him to the bug, too. McKenna, “The Enemy Within”; J. V. Kus et al., “New Delhi Metallo-ss-lactamase-1: Local Acquisition in Ontario, Canada, and Challenges in Detection,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 183, no. 11 (Aug. 9, 2011): 1257–61.
4. CROWDS
1. Despite not being noticeably ill, carriers could still unknowingly contribute to cholera’s spread, excreting as much as 500,000,000 cholera vibrio every day. (Calculated as 1,000,000 cholera vibrio per gram of feces, with each person producing 500 grams of feces/day.) Feachem, Sanitation and Disease. C. T. Codeço, “Endemic and Epidemic Dynamics of Cholera: The Role of the Aquatic Reservoir,” BMC Infectious Diseases 1, no. 1 (2001); Atkins, Reports of Hospital Physicians.
2. Cholera immunity is understood to be long-lasting but the mechanisms behind it remain unclear. Eric J. Nelson et al., “Cholera Transmission: The Host, Pathogen and Bacteriophage Dynamic,” Nature Reviews Microbiology 7, no. 10 (2009): 693–702.
3. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 35.
4. James D. Oliver, “The Viable but Nonculturable State in Bacteria,” The Journal of Microbiology 43, no. 1 (2005): 93–100.
5. Anbinder, Five Points, 14–27; Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean, 178; Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
6. Simon Szreter, “Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: On the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development,” Population and Development Review 23 (1997): 693–728.
7. John Reader, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
8. Ian Steadman, “Mystery Irish Potato Famine Pathogen Identified 170 Years Later,” Wired UK, May 21, 2013.
9. Reader, Potato; Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Free Press, 2003), 452; W. C. Paddock, “Our Last Chance to Win the War on Hunger,” Advances in Plant Pathology 8 (1992), 197–222.
10. Duffy, A History of Public Health, 273.
11. Cormac Ó. Gráda and Kevin H. O’Rourke, “Migration as Disaster Relief: Lessons from the Great Irish Famine,” European Review of Economic History 1, no. 1 (1997): 3–25.
12. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, ed. David Leviatin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996 [1890]), 67; Anbinder, Five Points, 74.
13. Anbinder, Five Points, 81.
14. Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City.
15. Anbinder, Five Points, 74–77.
16. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 65.
17. Anbinder, Five Points, 14–27, 69, 71, 74–79, 175, 306; Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 34.
18. Davis, The Monster at Our Door, 154.
19. Koeppel, Water for Gotham, 287.
20. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 104, 106, 113–14, 121, 145; Anbinder, Five Points, 119.
21. Michael R. Haines, “The Urban Mortality Transition in the United States, 1800–1940,” National Bureau of Economic Research Historical Paper no. 134, July 2001; Michael Haines, “Health, Height, Nutrition and Mortality: Evidence on the ‘Antebellum Puzzle’ from Union Army Recruits for New York State and the United States,” in John Komlos and Jörg Baten, eds., The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998); Robert Woods, “Urban-Rural Mortality Differentials: An Unresolved Debate,” Population and Development Review 29, no. 1 (2003): 29–46.
22. Woods, “Urban-Rural Mortality Differentials.”
23. Duffy, A History of Public Health, 291.
24. Adam Gopnik, “When Buildings Go Up, the City’s Distant Past Has a Way of Resurfacing,” The New Yorker, Feb. 4, 2002; Michael O. Allen, “5 Points Had Good Points,” Daily News, Feb. 22, 1998.
25. G. T. Kingsley, “Housing, Health, and the Neighborhood Context,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 4, supp. 3 (April 2003): 6–7.
26. Davis, The Monster at Our Door, 154.
27. Nature Conservancy, “Global Impact of Urbanization Threatening World’s Biodiversity and Natural Resources,” ScienceDaily, June 2008.
28. Davis, The Monster at Our Door, 152.
29. Danielle Nierenberg, “Factory Farming in the Developing World,” World Watch magazine 16, no. 3 (May/June 2003).
30. Xavier Pourrut et al., “The Natural History of Ebola Virus in Africa,” Microbes and Infection 7, no. 7 (2005): 1005–14.
31. E. M., Leroy, J. P. Gonzalez, and S. Baize, “Ebola and Marburg Haemorrhagic Fever Viruses: Major Scientific Advances, but a Relatively Minor Public Health Threat for Africa,” Clinical Microbiology and Infection 17, no. 7 (2011): 964–76.
32. Todd C. Frankel, “It Was Already the Worst Ebola Outbreak in History. Now It’s Moving into Africa’s Cities,” The Washington Post, Aug. 30, 2014; “Ebola Virus Reaches Guinea’s Capital Conakry,” Al Jazeera, March 28, 2014; “Seven Die in Monrovia Ebola Outbreak,” BBC News, June 17, 2014; “Sierra Leone Capital Now in Grip of Ebola,” Al Jazeera, Aug. 6, 2014.
33. The transmission rate was not found to have increased in the capital city of Sierra Leone, however, for reasons that are unclear. S. Towers, O. Patterson-Lomba, and Chavez C. Castillo, “Temporal Variations in the Effective Reproduction Number of the 2014 West Africa Ebola Outbreak,” PLoS Currents Outbreaks, Sept. 18, 2014.
34. Interview with James Lloyd-Smith, Nov. 30, 2011.
35. Frankel, “It Was Already the Worst Ebola Outbreak.”
36. Barry S. Hewlett and Bonnie L. Hewlett, Ebola, Culture and Politics: The Anthropology of an Emerging Disease (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008), 55.
37. Paul W. Ewald, Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancers, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 25.
38. “Pathogen Safety Data Sheet: Infectious Substances: Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Complex,” Public Health Agency of Canada, Oct. 6, 2014; Michael Z. David and Robert S. Daum, “Community-Associated Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus: Epidemiology and Clinical Consequences of an Emerging Epidemic,” Clinical Microbiology Reviews 23, no. 3 (2010): 616–87.
39. Lise Wilkinson and A. P. Waterson, “The Development of the Virus Concept as Reflected in Corpora of Studies on Individual Pathogens: 2. The Agent of Fowl Plague—A Model Virus?” Medical History 19 (1975): 52–72; Sander Herfst et al., “Airborne Transmission of Influenza A/H5N1 Virus Between Ferrets,” Science 336, no. 6088 (2012): 1534–41; Dennis J. Alexander, “An Overview of the Epidemiology of Avian Influenza,” Vaccine 25, no. 30 (2007): 5637–44.
40. Yohei Watanabe, Madiha S. Ibrahim, and Kazuyoshi Ikuta, “Evolution and Control of H5N1,” EMBO Reports 14, no. 2 (2013): 117–22.
41. Les Sims and Clare Narrod, Understanding Avian Influenza: A Review of the Emergence, Spread, Control, Prevention and Effects of Asian-Lineage H5N1 Highly Pathogenic Viruses (Rome: FAO, 2007).
42. James Truscott et al., “Control of a Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Avian Influenza Outbreak in the GB Poultry Flock,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 274 (2007): 2287–95.
43. M. S. Beato and I. Capua, “Transboundary Spread of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Through Poultry Commodities and Wild Birds: A Review,” Revue Scientifique et Technique (International Office of Epizootics) 30, no.
1 (April 2011): 51–61.
44. Shefali Sharma et al., eds., Fair or Fowl? Industrialization of Poultry Production in China, Global Meat Complex (Minneapolis: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, February 2014).
45. S. P. Cobb, “The Spread of Pathogens Through Trade in Poultry Meat: Overview and Recent Developments,” Revue Scientifique et Technique (International Office of Epizootics) 30, no. 1 (April 2011): 149–64.
46. Truscott, “Control of a Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Avian Influenza Outbreak.”
47. Alexander, “An Overview of the Epidemiology of Avian Influenza.”
48. Cobb, “The Spread of Pathogens Through Trade in Poultry Meat.”
49. Beato and Capua, “Transboundary Spread of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza”; interview with Malik Peiris, Jan. 17, 2012.
50. Debby Van Riel et al., “H5N1 Virus Attachment to Lower Respiratory Tract,” Science 312, no. 5772 (2006): 399.
51. Interview with Malik Peiris.
52. Beato and Capua. “Transboundary Spread of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza”; interview with Malik Peiris.
53. A. Marm Kilpatrick et al., “Predicting the Global Spread of H5N1 Avian Influenza,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103, no. 51 (2006): 19368–73.
54. Scientists suspect that’s because H5N1 can’t yet bind well to the easily accessible cells in our upper respiratory tracts. (It does bind to the cells in our lower respiratory tracts, including our lungs, which is why it makes us so sick.) Watanabe, Ibrahim, and Ikuta, “Evolution and Control of H5N1”; World Health Organization, “Cumulative Number of Confirmed Human Cases for Avian Influenza A(H5N1) Reported to WHO, 2003–2014,” July 27, 2014.
55. Sims and Narrod, Understanding Avian Influenza.
56. Watanabe, Ibrahim, and Ikuta, “Evolution and Control of H5N1.”
57. Kevin Drew, “China Says Man Dies from Bird Flu,” The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2011.
58. Davis, The Monster at Our Door, 181.
59. Donald G. McNeil, “A Flu Epidemic That Threatens Birds, Not Humans,” The New York Times, May 4, 2015.