Effect Measure reports and comments on cholera in Iraq. One of the main weapons against cholera is chlorine; chlorine is also usable as, and has in Iraq been used as, a weapon.
Cholera is expected to make its way to the capital by late September or early October. There is a shortage of chlorine because insurgents have used it as a weapon. Chlorine is extremely toxic and was used in World War I. as a poison gas. Since even rudimentary protection of water supplies doesn’t seem possible, the solution was to curtail chlorine imports. Instead we have cholera.
Cholera is primarily a waterborne disease that kills by sudden dehydration of its victims from a profuse, watery diarrhea. It can be prevented by simple disinfection of the water supply with chlorine and treated with oral rehydration. That neither of these can be readily accomplished in US occupied Iraq, where the occupiers expend $300 million a day to kill people, speaks volumes.