The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 2006, brings it home to the US with an article named "Defying Treatment, A New virulent staph infection sparks health fears." The article starts with a story about a 17 months old toddler that died from a new strain of the staph infection known as CA-MRSA. The bacterium is extremely hardy, resistant to drugs and is highly virulent. Once the bacteria gets going it produces a poison that kills white blood cells and destroys the body's tissues. The Journal of Infectious Disease Control and Prevention says that more than two million people carry the drug resistant staph without symptoms and public health officials see it as a silent epidemic on the rise. Carriers can spread the disease and become ill as well. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) held an expert meeting on the subject of CA-MRSA in the summer of 2004 and has issued a call to doctors to increase vigilance. It plans to publish the finding with educational materials for doctors and the public. And this is just the beginning: The Infectious Diseases Society of America, an association of 8,000 infectious-disease specialists, has announced a hit list of the six most worrisome germs doctors now face in clinical practice. The hit list, includes five bacteria and one fungus, is described in the current issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases. All six of these organisms are resistant to drugs and are highly virulent.

A new report by the World Bank underscored that close to one-fifth of the burden of disease in developing countries can be attributed to environmental risks including climate change and pollution - with unsafe water, poor sanitation and hygiene as leading risk factors, causing 1.7 million premature deaths/year; and urban air pollution estimated to cause about 800,000 premature deaths/year. Meanwhile, according to the research arm of the Chinese Government's environmental protection agency, over 400,000 people in China die prematurely annually from indoor and outdoor air pollution. 77% of schools in Beijing tested in a recent survey showed high levels of deadly pollutants, and new satellite data revealed Beijing's to be the 'air pollution capital of world'. A study in Brazil, concluded that high levels of air pollution are reducing the number of boys born and could be linked to increased rates of miscarriage. In US press, articles warn about pollution from school buses and new research linking childhood asthma to traffic pollution. Rising rates of asthma brought initiatives to reduce household environmental triggers of asthma, including tobacco smoke. continued >

---