Word: bangkok
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Until Big got sick, Luk Koong gave his job little thought. At least four times a day for the past 15 years, the stocky Bangkok resident has stripped off his tattered shirt, donned a pair of antiquated goggles and slipped into the murky waters of one of the capital's klongs, or canals, to untangle debris from the propellers of riverboat taxis. The service takes no more than 10 minutes and nets him $2.50 for each dive. Luk Koong, 33, who was raised on the klongs and whose nickname in Thai means "shrimp baby," considered it easy money...
...doctors initially thought. Four months and four brain operations later, Big is in a coma in a Bangkok hospital. The odds are that he will die?not from injuries sustained in the car crash but from an infection by a lethal fungus that blooms in Bangkok's klongs. The fungus entered Big's bloodstream when his heart stopped and his lungs filled with water. Undetected, it attacked blood vessels in Big's brain, causing a massive hemorrhage two weeks after the crash...
...smell," he says. "But after Big's accident, I started smelling it again, and I had second thoughts about jumping into the water every day." Other residents are also taking a newly wary whiff of the centuries-old klong network, which had inspired 17th century European missionaries to dub Bangkok the "Venice of the East." The city's 10 million residents produce 2.4 million cubic meters of wastewater per day but just 500,000 cubic meters are subsequently treated. The rest is simply poured into the klongs. As only 2% of homes in Bangkok are connected to proper sanitation systems...
...This helps explain why Pornpot Kannasoot, the water-quality chief of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, fidgets when he talks about the issue. He says he has tried everything within his budget to fix the problem and, so far, nothing has worked. He has dredged canals and built two new wastewater treatment plants, with two, possibly three, more in the pipeline. Despite it all, lab tests show the water in the klongs did not improve. In fact, it got worse. The press and the public didn't seem to care, says Pornpot: "People just got used to it. I could...
...levels are printed in newspapers. Radio stations have been swamped with callers complaining about skin diseases they suspect they have contracted from riverboat taxi rides. Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is demanding answers from bureaucrats. Pornpot has none. "The problem should have been dealt with 20 years ago when Bangkok's population began to boom," he says. "But it wasn't and now we are in serious trouble...