It is a potentially fatal intestinal illness that strikes mostly in developing countries and sickens hundreds of thousands of people each year.
Cholera causes vomiting, diarrhea and extreme dehydration.
It's linked to contaminated food and drinking water. In the United States and other industrial nations, cholera cases are very rare. But it remains a serious problem in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where water supplies are often impure. Vibrio cholerae is the second bacterium to be genetically sequenced. The first was Escherichia coli in 1997.