Do you have to be dirty?

In less than two weeks here in the island I finally caught something---and it's not crabs or syphilis, (can you still get those?) but it's this annoying dry cough. One thing you'll notice with the locals is that most of them are always either trying to clear their throat or suppressing a cough and when they do cough you'd want them to cough out their whole lung and replace it with a clear one. I know it's a mean thing to say, but if you hear me now, you'd say the same thing about me.

I am trying every herbal remedy I can think of so I don't get worse, but I blame our neighbors over the fence as the cause of my malady. There's about a million people living there in an area the size of my apartment in Dallas....they're like their own country minus the flag. Their number one product is kids and the word "work" or "ethics" applied only to their long dead parents. They follow no rules and they fear no one and nothing, not even dengue fever --or they'd try to clean that sewage in the middle of all of them. Humans will adjust and adopt whatever he's exposed to, but my question always has been: Do you have to be dirty if you're poor?