Dr. B's Finest Kind Medical clinic and Fish Market

The battle of the pump handle solved a cholera outbreak, but what REALLY has prevented cholera/dysentary are the construction of decent sewers.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0614_040614_tvcholera.html

http://www.victorianlondon.org/mayhew/mayhew00.htm

http://www.swopnet.com/engr/londonsewers/londontext3.html

You find marvelous things on the internet: While searching, I found that article in a magazine published for residential and municipal cleaning contractors...

We doctors like to think of ourselves as gods, but the dirty little secret is that more peoples lives have been saved by garbage men than brain surgeons...

The reason for literally millions of deaths in Africa is because of poor infrastructure.

When I worked in Africa, we got a grant from Germany to build wells. But we didn't build wells, we held classes in villages on where and how to build wells.

You see, we have two seasons in Southern Africa. The wet season, which is "Summer" in the south, and the dry season, where the rivers dry up. You can identify ground water areas by trees and green grass. So you dig the wells in these areas, usually to 10-20 feet. And you line the well with rock to keep out the dirt.
But animals smelling water tend to fall into the wells and die, contaminating the water. So you have to cover the wells. The best way is a concrete slab and a simple pump. This is what we used the grant money for.

Of course, the water was a shallow well, so still might be contaminated with fecal runoff...building latrines won't correct the problem for another generation...(The local term is not "To go to the bathroom" but "to go to the forest", where there was privacy. Latrines were dirty and avoided. However, children were taught about latrine building and use in their lessons). We attempted to build the wells upstream from the local forests, to minimize contamination.

When you hear of "contractors" being kidnapped and killed, remember that an uncovered story of Iraq is that Sadam didn't fix the sewers, especially in Shiite areas, to punish the people.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/12/26/BUGO83U3QO1.DTL

Many in the "coalition of the willing" are also rebuilding the infrastructure, along with US Army engineers and multinational contractors, with the help of local engineers and men, are slowly rebuilding the infrastructure that was never fixed with the funds from the "oil for foods program" of the UN...and Mark Steyn points out that the naysayers of today who wrongly predicted hundreds of thousands of wardeaths "from cholera and dysentary" now are cheering on those who attack those fixing the infrastructure...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;sessionid=HEWGWI3QMDRPHQFIQMGSM54AVCBQWJVC?xml=/opinion/2004/09/19/do1902.xml&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=14035

http://www.usinfo.pl/iraq/docs/pmo.htm

http://www.waterwebster.com/IraqWater.htm

So the next time you hear of "militants" kidnapping "foreign contractors", remember: the contractors are saving hundreds of thousands of lives by doing thankless work on sewer lines, electricity, and water supply...and never get thanks from Dan Rather or a headline in the LATimes...

Micheal Moore, call your office.

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