The Ice Berge of Cholera in Hodeidah , Yemen : The Contact Exposure

Abstract

Cholera is a diarrheal disease caused by a bacterial infection of the intestine. The bacterium is Vibrio cholerae, which can either be of type O1 or O139. It can infect both children and adults . A cross sectional design was carried out to investigate the variations between cholera patients and control (contacts). Data were collected from a total of 15 suspected cases from 7 districts in Hodeidah, Yemen and 16 contacts from the same houses of the patients.  Data at first fed to the excel program then imported to the SPSS version 23 for statistical analysis. Most of the patients were under 5 years of age with the mean age was 2.1 years (±1.2) with a great variation ,the median age of patients was 5 years. It was a great difference with contact age where the mean age was 34 years (±13) (p-value = 0.000) . Al though watery diarrhea was present in 13 out of 15 patients (68.4%) and being more than contacts (6/16; 37.5%) (p-value = 0.006) . Two controversial observations were reported in this study regarding history of vaccination and the laboratory result of the stool culture for V. cholerae. Most of the patients were vaccinated (86.6%) than contacts (p- value = 0.000) and the accepted explanation for this difference is that it may be due that the contacts are adults and may they did not remind their history of vaccination.  But the presence of positive culture result for V. cholerae  in one contacts (6.3%) and never in any of suspected cholera patients raining the questions either of the performance of the laboratory diagnosis of the surveillance or both .