NEW DELHI, Aug 2, Reuter - Typhoid and hepatitis are threatening to follow the cholera epidemic now raging in New Delhi, doctors say.

Their warning comes as city officials accused each other of criminal negligence in allowing the health crisis to arise.

By Tuesday, in the month since monsoon rains brought cholera to the slums of east Delhi, city officials say 215 people have died. Hospitals are littered with victims.

The rains sent sewage seeping into the water supply pumped up by slum residents from government-installed handpumps.

"Cholera is the waterborne disease that takes hold first, but typhoid and hepatitis thrive in the same filthy conditions," said a doctor at the World Health Organisation (WHO).

"There is a very real danger that they will surface in east Delhi on the same scale cholera has done."

In the worst hit area, where sewage raked from open drains lies in stinking heaps by the road, typhoid and hepatitis are already on the rise.

"My doctors tell me there has been an increase in both diseases, but we have yet to determine the scale of it," said K. Agarwal, head of a hospital surrounded by slums.

Since Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited east Delhi on July 22 and said he was appalled by the squalor, political heads have rolled.

Health, development and administrative bodies have accused each other of criminal negligence in allowing a third of the capital's people to live in desperately unhealthy conditions.

Last Friday, the lieutenant-governor of New Delhi, the city's chief executive, resigned and health officials have been replaced.

"All these people are there sitting in their offices pointing at one another. But that doesn't solve a thing," communist politician Inderjit Gupta said in parliament.

"In the view of the government, these people are only good for votes at election time. After that, nobody cares whether they live or die."

The opposition accuses the government of sinking dangerously shallow pumps, which now spew out contaminated water, just before 1984 general elections to curry favour with slum residents.

"And all this innoculation, all this..." said a resident on Tuesday, waving his hand around a makeshift ward where a visiting health minister fussed over emaciated children on drips.

"They do it when Rajiv comes, but after a month they have forgotten us again," he said.

Mass inoculations, held up by Delhi officials as a mark of their concern, are of dubious value, doctors said.

"Once the epidemic is under way, inoculation does more harm than good. It gives people a false sense of security, and they go on drinking contaminated water thinking they're safe," said a doctor who asked not to be identified.

Slum dwellers said they returned to handpumps, now painted red to warn of their danger, not out ignorance but out of necessity.

The administration was bringing water in tankers, but there was not enough to go around, they said.

"I had to go on giving my children the same water even after they got sick. There was nothing else," said a woman tending one of her children in hospital.

Beside her, a tiny girl was being weighed on kitchen scales as doctors tried to guage the depth of her undernourishment.

Doctors' worries over typhoid and hepatitis are compounded by their fear that the scale of the cholera epidemic may have been seriously underestimated.

"We only hear about the ones that die in hospital. But as often as not if a little girl dies in a slum, her mother just buries her quietly and gets on with caring for the rest of her children," a WHO official said.