A PREVIOUSLY unknown strain of cholera is sweeping Bangladesh. World Health Organisation officials are warning that it could become a world epidemic.
The new strain is believed to have originated in the squalor of Calcutta and spread across the border.
Meanwhile holiday companies have cancelled trips to Russia because of an outbreak of diphtheria in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
anis outreak is coviously connected to the growth of mass poverty, homelessness, food shortages and the semicollapse of many health seryices in the ex-USSR.
The new epidemics come hard on the heels of the cholera outbreak which swept much of Latin America in the last three years.
Cholera is carried in dirty water; the only sure way to stop it is to provide clean water - something which millions in the 'third world" have no access to.
It AIDS is included, the new epidemics are the third and fourth in the past decade.
The cholera epidemics are certainly attributable to worsening economic conditions, as is the diphtheria epidemic in the ex-USSR.
It is difficult to imagine a more damning indictment of the effects of the world capitalist crisis.