At least seven cases of cholera in Germany and the United Kingdom have been linked to the use of water from a popular “holy well” in Ethiopia, which happened to be contaminated with Vibrio Cholerae bacteria. In February of this year, European authorities were on high alert regarding a cholera outbreak after three people in Germany and four in the UK fell ill with the contagious disease.
A quick investigation found that two of the German patients and three of the UK patients had travelled to Ethiopia a month prior, and some of them visited a holy well called Bermel Giorgis in the African country’s Quara district.
Named after Saint George, Bermel Giorgis is considered a holy site by members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church who drink the water and wash their faces with it to benefit from its supposed healing properties.
The European visitors reportedly did the same, and the German travellers and at least one of the UK visitors brought some holy water back with them and shared it. Before long, they started exhibiting symptoms like watery diarrhoea and vomiting.
After analysing the plastic bottles of holy water that the tourists had brought back, doctors found that it was contaminated with Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria responsible for causing cholera. The water was actually teeming with bacteria, as researchers suggest in their report published by Eurosurveillance, the European infectious diseases monitoring agency. “As the infectious dose of V. cholerae O1 has been estimated to be 105–108 [100,000 to 100 million] colony-forming units (CFU), this suggests the holy water was heavily contaminated and bacteria remained viable at ambient temperature during the flight and in Europe,” doctors wrote.
More troubling yet was the fact that this variant of Vibrio cholerae was resistant to many antibiotics, including fluoroquinolones, trimethoprim, chloramphenicol, aminoglycosides, beta-lactams, and macrolides. The bacteria had developed specialized resistance genes called plasmids, but tetracycline antibiotics were still effective against and the patients all made full recoveries. Luckily, a cholera outbreak in Europe was narrowly prevented, but the case has been publicized as a cautionary tale, with infectious diseases experts urging travellers to exercise caution even when visiting places with religious significance.
“Travellers should be well informed about the hygiene conditions and infectious disease risks in the places they are visiting and should not drink water, even if it has religious significance,” Eurosurveillance warned.
Culled from www.odditycentral.com