Cholera spreads in Bush’s ‘new’ Iraq

This video is called Baghdad’s drinking water: ‘this video shows how the drinking water sometimes looks like in Baghdad, just notice the floating things in the cup’.

From George W. Bush’s brave ‘new’ Iraq; where over a million people have been killed; where millions have fled their homes; where torture is worse than under Saddam Hussein; where workers, women, gay people, Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, children, etc. etc. are worse off than ever. Where the only construction is prisons, segregation walls, and the new US colonial governor’s building embassy (with slave labour).

From that Iraq, the New York Times reports:

Cholera Now Appears in Baghdad

By ANDREW E. KRAMER
Published: September 21, 2007

BAGHDAD, Sept. 20 — The first cases of cholera appeared in Baghdad on Thursday, in a sign the epidemic that has already sickened thousands in northern Iraq is now spreading more widely in a population made vulnerable by war to a normally preventable disease.

The World Health Organization and Iraqi Red Crescent Society confirmed two cases here and Iraqi television reported another case, in a 7-month-old baby in Basra, far to the south.

People contract cholera by ingesting water or food contaminated with the feces of an infected person. Roughly one in 20 infected people become severely ill, with profuse diarrhea, vomiting and leg cramps, while others have mild or no symptoms but carry the disease.

While cholera can kill its victims in a matter of hours, it is easily controlled through basic water treatment and sanitation measures. But in a sign of how difficult that may be in Iraq, the director of the Basra health ministry, Dr. Ryadh Abdul Ameer, said Thursday that some waterworks in his city were now entirely without chlorine because imports of the chemical dried up this year after insurgents began using it in bombs.

Also about Iraq; from AFP news agency:

US President George W. Bush on Thursday declared there were no more “Mandelas” left to help aid reconciliation in Iraq because former dictator Saddam Hussein had killed them all.

What a chutzpah by Bush to mention Nelson Mandela, a staunch opponent of his Iraq war. Nelson Mandela, whom Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney considered a “communist terrorist” when he was still in the South African Apartheid’s regime jail. And, oh yeah, Saddam Hussein killed many people in Iraq, but definitely less than George W. Bush in a much shorter time.

Cholera update: here.

And here.