Stopping cholera spreading between members of the same household could be key to reducing cases.
The claim comes from a new large-scale genomic study looking at how samples of cholera are related to each other.
The authors found that nearly 80% of infections were related to the first case of the disease entering the household, rather than to other strains of the disease that were circulating in the same area.
There are up to five million cases per year globally and around 120,000 deaths every year, according to Unicef.
Researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge looked at samples taken from cholera patients at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh.
They sequenced the genomes of all 303 samples to see how the strains were related to each other and compared them with strains from other parts of the globe.
They found that nearly 80% of the secondary infections were linked to the first case in that household within the first five days.
Daryl Domman, lead author of the study, said: “Preventing this spread within the household could enormously reduce cholera outbreaks, and highlights the need for prioritising local control strategies.
“This could have a huge impact, not only on the individual households, but also on the entire region.”
Image Credit | Science Photo
