"The current urban population of the world… is greater than the entire population of the world in 1960. Seventy-eight percent of the urban dwellers in the so-called developing world live in slums. From the West African littoral to the mountainsides of the to the banks of the , the , the , and the Irrawaddy, new gigantic slums spread like immense laboratory growth media, waiting to host epidemic disease cultures. , Nigeria, for example, grew from a city of 300,000 in 1950 to over ten million today. But Lagos, writes Mike Davis, "is simply the biggest node in the shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from to : probably the biggest continuous footprint of urban poverty on earth." Most of the world's new, exploding slums have only the most rudimentary sanitary arrangements, open sewers running along the corridor-like "streets." In the slums of Bombay, there is an estimated one toilet per five hundred inhabitants. Currently, two million children die every year from waste-contaminated water in the world's slums. The enormity of this urban disaster is poorly comprehended in advanced nations like the United States, where the drinking water is still safe and even the poor have flush toilets connected to real sewers. But the slums of the world will… be the breeding ground of the next pandemic, and chances are, once it is underway, […] [we] will not be spared."