A LOT of printed material has come through the letterbox in the past week.

Some is extremely boastful and it’s all designed to appeal to self-interest usually by suggesting we will be better off financially if we vote a particular way.

Some of the political ‘literature’ is plain nasty and aims to stir up hatred and fear by suggesting people ‘not like us’ are about to steal our lifestyle, and income.

The rest falls into the ‘bonkers’ category – full of promises no-one would disagree with but which we’d need the equivalent of a UK-wide lottery win to afford.

But one item, a few pages of cheaply printed, A4 paper, was none of the above. It was all about kala azar.

Before you ask, that’s not a word made up by someone who’s picked up all the ‘a’s in a game of Scrabble.

It’s an infection, also called visceral leishmaniasis, which is spread by that horrible creature the sand fly.

I say horrible because anyone who has ever become a sand fly snack in tropical climes will know just how unpleasant it is to be bitten by this insect.

And that’s without getting infected by the kala azar parasite which it often carries.

The parasite multiplies in the white blood cells and attacks the immune system.

The good news is that with prompt, and fairly routine, medical treatment the cure rate is 95%.

But if you don’t see a doctor or nurse the spleen becomes enlarged, fever and wasting follows and you are dead within a few weeks. Without treatment the death rate from kala azar is 100 per cent.

And that’s what the typed handbill was all about.

Every year about 500,000 people get kala azar across 64 countries.

It seems to come in waves and an epidemic is about to hit southern Sudan, an area twice the size of the UK with less than ten miles of Tarmac road.

People can walk for days in search of medical help, and not find it.

The leaflet was an appeal from a fantastic charity called Medicins Sans Frontieres (Medicine without frontiers) which sends medical teams into just such areas to try and stop such easily treatable conditions become a death sentence for thousands of people and ultimately a lot more dependant children and elderly relatives.

And my point?

Well, but for the accident of being born in a prosperous part of an extremely prosperous continent we could have found ourselves living in an arid landscape where your future depended on not being bitten by an insect.

It kind of puts all the political hyperbole into perspective.

The ‘problems’ we’ve been hearing about non-stop for the past few weeks are nothing compared with what many millions have to worry about every day.