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let it be London or Paris, or perhaps Naples.
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The outbreak would tend to begin with
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what the nineteenth-century medical community termed sporadic cholera.
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By that they meant a small trickle of cases.
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These would be transmitted in a neighborhood, a family, a house.
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The transmission might be by contaminated clothing or bed linen,
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contaminated food, hand to mouth transmission
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from tending a patient and then not washing the hands.
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Let me give you an example from Venice in 1885.
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There was a particularly persistent outbreak,
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in a single street, before the disease
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became an epidemic in the city as a whole.