Before Rita Colwell’s groundbreaking research in the 1960s, doctors and scientists believed the deadly disease cholera spread via water contaminated by human sewage. However, she discovered something other researchers until then had missed: that the Vibrio cholera bacterium could latch onto zooplankton — microscopic organisms — in water and survive, essentially dormant, until conditions became right for it to once again become infectious.

That discovery not only helped to change our understanding of how cholera is transmitted, but helped efforts to combat and prevent the disease’s spread.

Rita Colwell (Photo credit: John T. Consoli/University of Maryland)

For that and other scientific advances she’s contributed to, Colwell today was awarded the 2010 Stockholm Water Prize. Colwell was presented with the award — which includes $150,000 and a crystal sculpture — during a ceremony in Stockholm’s City Hall as part of the World Water Week event.

Colwell, 76, is a professor at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. In awarding her the 2010 Stockholm Water Prize, the Stockholm International Water Institute, which administers the prize, credited Colwell for research that has “helped protect the health and lives of millions.”

Throughout her career, Colwell has worked extensively to spread community-based water safety education and viable, low-cost technological innovations in communities throughout South Asia and in Africa. Access to safe, clean drinking water, she says, is the key to improving the lives of people across the developing world.

“Clearly, the relationship of water and development is very dramatic,” she said, adding that, when safe drinking water supplies are assured, “the economy improves, the national social ability is enhanced and even national security (benefits).”

World Water Prize (Photo credit: Stockholm International Water Institute)

Colwell’s work has also demonstrated how changes in climate, adverse weather events, shifts in ocean circulation and other ecological processes can create conditions that allow infectious diseases to spread. Her efforts in that area have helped to create preemptive strategies for minimising outbreaks of disease. For example, she showed how warmer surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal have stimulated the growth of cholera-hosting zooplankton and caused the number of cholera cases in the region to rise.

Colwell was also one of the first researchers to study how El Niño affected the aquatic environment and human health, and to conduct research into how climate change affects the spread of infectious diseases.

In 1984, Colwell was also appointed by then-President Bill Clinton as the first woman to lead the National Science Foundation.

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