US: Running water is back in some houses in New Orleans but nobody is drinking it and some are even afraid to wash in it.
Disease is replacing drowning as the greatest hazard the city's people face and the danger will grow as flooded districts are drained to recover thousands of bloated, decomposing corpses.
The air in New Orleans is thick with human excrement, decomposing flesh and decaying rubbish, as well as the fumes from dozens of fires that break out all over the city each day.
There have been no outbreaks of cholera, chigella or salmonella but nobody is feeling healthy and some of those still in the city complain of skin infections, diarrhoea and conjunctivitis.
Environmental teams are testing the floodwaters to see how badly they have been contaminated by sewage, chemical waste and other toxic substances.
Built in a swamp, New Orleans has always had a big, hardy mosquito population which now has a bumper breeding ground with half of the city still under water. I counted 25 bites this morning.
The risk of an epidemic in water-borne diseases is one reason Mayor Ray Nagin is threatening to force all remaining residents to leave the city. Mental health is a concern too, notably for the police officers who tried to keep order in the Superdome and the Convention Centre as thousands of desperate people waited for days in the dark without food.
The stress was so great that two New Orleans police officers took their own lives last week and officers are now getting time off. One police officer who spent all of last week at the Superdome told me that it was the worst experience of his 22 years in the homicide squad.
"There were only 60 of us and there were 20,000 people in a building with no windows. When the power went, it was dark and after the water went off there were no bathrooms. The stench was terrible. These people had no food for two and a half days," he said.
The officer claimed that, contrary to media reports, the evacuees in the Superdome were well behaved and he claimed that just 10 people died there - all of respiratory failure.
"All these reports that 250 people died and that they were shooting each other in there are bullshit. There was one shooting, when a National Guardsman accidentally shot himself in the leg," he said.
The New Orleans Police Department has taken a pasting in the press for failing to control looting and violence after the hurricane. Many officers walked off the job last week, although some were trying to save their families from the flood while others simply could not get to their precinct or communicate with headquarters.
New Orleans is now almost crime-free for the first time in this violent city's history. The fact that nearly everybody has left the city means there are fewer criminals around and thousands of heavily armed soldiers and police SWAT teams are scaring off those who remain. The military presence is overwhelming, with platoons of soldiers on almost every street in the city centre and army helicopters clattering overhead.
"I remember when the sounds of New Orleans were jazz and people laughing and having a good time. Now the sounds of New Orleans are helicopters and army vehicles. It's almost surreal," Mayor Nagin said this week.
As the media pack in New Orleans grows, local patience is starting to snap. It's not the journalists' behaviour that causes offence but their stories, particularly those based on lurid rumours that turn out to be untrue . . . US television reporters have been the worst offenders, claiming, among other things, that sharks had escaped from the zoo and were swimming around the French Quarter.
The city is full of whispered rumours, few of which can be verified and in a competitive media market, the most grotesque are often the most attractive to producers.
Many TV crews are based at the airport but some are camped in the city centre, around the corner from the convention centre.
For newspaper reporters without a satellite phone, communication is patchy at best and impossible most of the time.
Finding somewhere to stay is a big challenge, although a few hotels have partially reopened now that electricity has returned to a few streets. Every hotel within a 100-mile radius of New Orleans is fully booked, either with evacuees from the city or recovery and reconstruction workers who have just arrived.
The reporters who feel most at home in New Orleans these days are those who have spent most of their careers covering wars and famines.
Soldiers just back from Iraq feel comfortable too and one National Guardsman told me the only difference between New Orleans and Baghdad was the suicide bombers.