By now you've probably read how Google can help pinpoint flu outbreaks based on search terms submitted by users. Could a similar technique be used to track "paranormal" activity?

Deadly New Virus Thought to Be Contained

A new virus that causes fatal hemorrhagic fevers has been discovered in southern Africa. It killed four people in South Africa and sickened a fifth, but health authorities believe the outbreak has been contained.

Nuclear Nightmares: Twenty Years Since Chernobyl

Mutiny of the Soul

What if there is something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response? Withdrawal, followed by a reentry into a world, a life, and a way of being wholly different from the one left behind?

Dangerous animal virus on US mainland?

The Bush administration is likely to move its research on one of the most contagious animal diseases from an isolated island laboratory to the U.S. mainland near herds of livestock, raising concerns about a catastrophic outbreak.

In Kansas, no less; I won't be far from ground zero.

Mythical 16th-century disease critters

Long ago in Japan, human illness was commonly believed to be the work of tiny malevolent creatures inside the body. Harikikigaki, a book of medical knowledge written in 1568 by a now-unknown resident of Osaka, introduces 63 of these creepy-crawlies and describes how to fight them with acupuncture and herbal remedies.

Oddly, the disease-causing critters are more cute than frightening. I was half-expecting to stumble across a depiction of Hello Kitty.

Microscopic 'astronauts' to go back in orbit

"Wherever people go, germs will follow," said Nickerson, who is also an associate professor at ASU's School of Life Sciences. Last fall, she completed a multi-institutional study that showed for the first time that microbes could be affected by spaceflight, making them more infectious pathogens. The results were from a payload flown onboard space shuttle Atlantis in 2006.

Spaceflight not only altered bacterial gene expression but also increased the ability of these organisms to cause disease, or virulence, and did so in novel ways. Compared to identical bacteria that remained on earth, the space-traveling Salmonella, a leading cause of food-borne illness, had changed expression of 167 genes. In addition, bacteria that were flown in space were almost three times as likely to cause disease when compared with control bacteria grown on the ground.

Next plague likeliest to emerge from poor tropical countries

Scores of infectious diseases have emerged to threaten humans in the past decades as viruses leap the species barrier from wild animals and bacteria mutate into antibiotic-resistant strains, scientists reported on Wednesday.

Presenting the first-ever map of "hotspots" of new infectious diseases, they predict that the next pandemic is likeliest to come out of poor tropical countries, where burgeoning human populations come into contact with wildlife.

[. . .]

The emergence of new diseases have roughly quadrupled over the past 50 years, says the study, appearing in the British journal Nature.

Sixty percent of them are so-called zoonoses, or diseases that have been transmitted from animals to humans.

Risky Chemical Found In US Hurricane Trailers

Tens of thousands of people lost homes in Katrina in 2005 and many have been living for about two years in trailers bought by the government for temporary housing. Some residents have attributed health problems to formaldehyde exposure.

The CDC conducted indoor air-quality tests for formaldehyde between Dec. 21 and Jan. 23, 2008 on a random sample of 519 travel trailers and mobile homes in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Formaldehyde is a chemical used widely in the manufacture of building materials. It also is used in embalming fluid. It can irritate the skin, eyes, nose and throat, and high levels of exposure may cause some types of cancers.

Not surreal enough for you? Try this:

Pentagon Plans To Shoot Down Disabled Satellite

The Pentagon plans to shoot down a disabled US spy satellite before it enters the atmosphere to prevent a potentially deadly leak of toxic gas from the vehicle's fuel tank, officials said on Thursday.

President George W. Bush decided to have the Navy shoot the 5,000-pound (2,270 kg) minivan-sized satellite with a modified tactical missile, after security advisers suggested its reentry could lead to a loss of life.

'Safe Ebola' created for research

Scientists have made the lethal virus Ebola harmless in the lab, potentially aiding research into a vaccine or cure.

Taking a single gene from the virus stops it replicating, US scientists wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Ebola, currently handled in highly secure labs, kills up to 80% of those it infects.

However, one expert said the new method may not yet be a fail-safe way of dealing with the virus.

(Via AJGulyas.com.)

Plague a growing but overlooked threat: study

Plague, the disease that devastated medieval Europe, is re-emerging worldwide and poses a growing but overlooked threat, researchers warned on Tuesday.

While it has only killed some 100 to 200 people annually over the past 20 years, plague has appeared in new countries in recent decades and is now shifting into Africa, Michael Begon, an ecologist at the University of Liverpool and colleagues said.

On the bright side, researchers note that it rarely transforms victims into bloodthirsty zombies.

Let the End Times Roll

From transgenic experiments destined to go awry to the imminent culmination of the Mayan calendar's 13th baktun cycle, we'll have to dodge a hell of a lot of bullets to make it to the next century. In a cold panic, Radar sifted through mountains of data, interviewed the world's top experts, and prayed to several long-forgotten deities in an attempt to assemble a list of the planet's most pressing doomsday scenarios and, more important, your best bets for staying alive.

(Via BB.)

Using rabies to deliver drugs directly to the brain

Marilyn sez, "Harvard Medical School researchers have developed an ingenious way to deliver drugs directly to the brain (in order to kill a tumor, for example), that uses the virus that causes rabies, which is extremely effective in infiltrating the blood brain barrier that blocks most other kinds of molecules."

This sounds alarmingly like the set-up for a biomedical disaster flick.

Peter Watts blogs about evolution, shape-shifting and cancer.

Paleovirology

Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), like the more typical retroviruses such as HIV, rewrite the DNA of the cells they infect; the endogenous retroviruses do so not just to the somatic (body) cells, but to the germline (reproductive) cells, becoming part of the DNA we pass down to the next generation. These aren't rare -- more of our DNA comprises these old retroviruses than genes that actually code for proteins. New ERVs generally will quickly lose their potency as viruses, but can come to play critical roles in how our bodies operate.

Makes you wonder if there could be a literal Burroughsian "word virus" lurking in our neurological source code . . .





Chernobyl: Lost world

Scientists have had access to limited data when it comes to assessing the true facts within the 4,000 square kilometres of the "zone of alienation". Photographs of the abandoned city of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, reveal that trees and shrubs have started to sprout through the roads and buildings. Nature has begun to reclaim what was originally lost to urban development and agriculture.

"Zone of alienation" has such a dire existential ring to it, don't you think?

(Both items cribbed from Beyond the Beyond.)

Does this not sound like the set-up for a zombie flick?

Minn. Slaughterhouse Workers Fall Ill

Over eight months from last December through July, 11 workers at the plant in Austin, Minn. -- all of them employed at the head table -- developed numbness, tingling or other neurological symptoms, and some scientists suspect inhaled airborne brain matter may have somehow triggered the illnesses.

The use of compressed air to remove pig brains was suspended at Quality Pork earlier this week while authorities try to get to the bottom of the mystery.

(Via Boing Boing.)

A new plague: The epidemic is coming

We're in for another epidemic. You probably don't want to hear that; we've had enough with bluetongue, foot-and-mouth and bird flu in animals. We're only just beginning to calm down as the bird flu threat to humans apparently recedes, but mad cow disease seems only yesterday and our hospitals are cesspits of MRSA and C.difficile. Haven't we had enough? And how can I be so sure that we're due for more?

Tree man 'who grew roots' may be cured

The welts spread across his body unchecked and soon he was left unable to carry out everyday household tasks.

Sacked from his job and deserted by his wife, Dede has been raising his two children - now in their late teens - in poverty, resigned to the fact that local doctors had no cure for his condition.

To make ends meet he even joined a local "freak show", parading in front of a paying audience alongside victims of other peculiar diseases.

(Via Reality Carnival.)

Dede's malady is so grotesque it borders on the awe-inspiring. Scenes from "The Fly" spring to mind.

6 die from brain-eating amoeba in lakes

It sounds like science fiction but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.

So this explains Creationists!

But it gets even better:

"This is definitely something we need to track," said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better," Beach said. "In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases."

CDC Requests Bay Area Morgellons Study

KTVU Channel 2 has learned the federal Centers for Disease Control has asked Kaiser Permanente to begin the nation's first epidemiologic study of "Morgellons Disease," a mysterious ailment that the government terms an "unexplained and debilitating condition that has emerged as a public health concern."

KTVU Health and Science Editor John Fowler was the first in the nation to report on this "mystery disease" as it was called in 2004. He reported the skin disorder seemed to cause fibers and filaments to emerge from the skin of sufferers, and also seemed to cause neurological problems patients described as "brain fog."

(Via PAG E-News.)

"Morgellons Disease" has long been the stuff of late-night radio and stillborn conspiracy theories. If it's real, the implications are not a little disturbing.