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Disease risk stops Falluja return
...Sewage and rabid animals pose a significant health threat in Falluja, US military officials have warned....

..."Many streets are flooded with sewage water," Red Cross spokesman Ahmad Rawi, who has just returned from Falluja, told the BBC News website.

He said the city's water treatment plant has to itself be drained before an assessment can be made of how badly it has been damaged.

Another priority for the agency, Mr Rawi said, is the identification of "hundreds of bodies" collected and stored by US-led forces in a former potato warehouse...

...The Red Cross could not confirm whether the warehouse had refrigeration facilities to prevent the bodies from decaying....

Marines hunt down Fallujah's strays to head off rabies threat
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AFP) - US troops fire off another volley of shots amid the trashed houses of Fallujah, hunting down new adversaries carrying a potentially deadly weapon that threatens to plague reconstruction efforts.

But this time the marines are not chasing down the insurgents who they defeated in a devastating assault on the city last month. Their quarry is stray animals grown fat on the flesh from corpses and who could harbor rabies....

...But there was none of the bloodlust that many marines say they felt last month as they stormed the Sunni-Muslim enclave and wrested it away from insurgents during several days of vicious fighting.

A gunnery sergeant stalked past the convoy, tersely ordering his executioners to put on surgical gloves before handling the dead animals, his mouth pulled into the tight grimace of a man trying to finish the job before him as quickly as possible.

"This is hard on these guys, especially killing the dogs. But these animals have been eating dead bodies. They can spread disease," said Lieutenant Aaron Brown, grimly reciting the toll for the day -- several cats and at least one dog. ...