Today stores stock between 30,000 and 50,000 items from all over the globe. Food ailments can spread widely and be hard to trace. E. coli outbreaks are increasing in Australia, Africa, Europe, Japan, and the United States. Victims of guinea worm ingest its larvae when they drink murky water. A year later, one or more white, threadlike, parasitic worms, some three feet long, poke through the flesh for a month-long departure from the body.
Farmers lie disabled, grown men weep with pain, and a few victims die.
Once worldwide, guinea worm now is confined to India, Pakistan, and 16 countries across equatorial Africa and is close to being eradicated. Multidrug therapy cures leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease, within two years and could eliminate it as a public health threat by the year 2000. Among the top 10 killer diseases, malaria takes the lives of 2 to 3 million people every year in 91 countries. The mosquito-borne parasitic disease threatens about 40 percent of the world's population. Once common in the United States, it was virtually eliminated by the 1930s.