Cholera Kills 4 in Iran

TEHRAN (FNA)- Four people have died of cholera and another 100 are infected by an outbreak of the disease in Iran, a top health official said Saturday.

The daily Hambastegi quoted Deputy Health Minister Mohammad Mahdi Gooya as saying that the outbreak had been reported in the capital Tehran and five other provinces in central, western and southern Iran.

Health Minister Kamran Bagheri Lankarani said two of the dead were Afghan nationals.

Lankarani said that lack of sanitation and unhealthy water pumped from wells had led to the outbreak.

Cholera breaks out every summer in the country due to the neglect of individual sanitary as well as water or vegetable pollution, Iran’s Deputy Health Minister Hassan Imami Razavi also said.

He further called on people to be very careful in the following months.

The Health Ministry recently released an announcement warning people of cholera and suggesting them to care about sanitation.

Cholera, sometimes known as Asiatic cholera or epidemic cholera, is an infectious gastroenteritis illness caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae.

Transmission to humans occurs through ingesting contaminated water or food. The major source for cholera was long assumed to be humans themselves, but a considerable body of evidence has shown that unclean water sources can serve as reservoirs of the bacteria.