ABSTRACT
The revival of the West's interest in cholera started with a bang in September 1947, when there was a rogue outbreak of classical cholera of unknown origin in Egypt which captured the interest of Commander Robert Allan Phillips, MC, USN, who happened to be in Egypt at the time in command of the US Naval Medical Research Unit Number 3 (NAMRU-3) in Cairo. NAMRU-3 owes its particular origins to the US Typhus Commission which was set up by order of President Roosevelt in December 1942, following the landings of American and British forces in French North Africa the previous month. The object of the commission was to deal with typhus during the war and to anticipate the possibility of postwar typhus epidemics such as had occurred in the wake of the First World War. The cholera outbreak in Egypt came to an end in December 1947.
