Ashgabat, Turkmenistan
The totalitarian state of Turkmenistan is suffering an outbreak of plague and has no functional health care system to combat it, the Los Angeles Times reported this week. Dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, a megalomaniac who has ruled the country since it emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union, in 1991, has fired all doctors with foreign training and declared illegal any mention of infectious diseases such as plague, TB, or AIDS. Meanwhile, aid organizations and opposition groups report that plague, carried by fleas that infest the large gerbils of the Turkmen deserts, has been spreading, although accurate numbers are impossible to come by. The Black Death of the 14th century, the worst global pandemic in human history, originated among Central Asian rodents.
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