Trace amounts of anthrax have been found at a postal facility that sorts mail for Oxford, Connecticut, where 94-year Ottilie Lundgren mysteriously died of the disease last month. The source of her exposure baffled officials, who were investigating how she could have come in contact with tainted mail.
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Nasty new viruses that use devious tricks to infect computers will become even more common in the future. The anti-virus software company Sophos says that the Nimda worm was the most widespread virus this year, even though it first appeared late in the year, in September.
?Nimda was effective because it could infect computers with a variety of techniques,? says Graham Cluley, Sophos senior technology consultant. ?It is likely that we will see more multiple-pronged attacks in the future.?
Sophos warns that personal computer users are increasingly likely to be the victims of hacker attacks, due to the growth of ?always-on? high-speed internet connections, such as Roadrunner and DSL.
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It?s been discovered that people who take a garlic supplement each day catch fewer colds. The common cold is the most common disease of humans and adults catch between two and four colds a year. Infants and young children get between six and 10 colds each year. A 75-year-old man has suffered through about 200 colds during his lifetime. There are more than 200 known different viruses which cause a cold, and each person spends between two and three years of his life with a cold.
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An epidemic is sweeping along the borders of Pakistan and Iran, among Afghan refugees, and officials fear that it may be caused by former Soviet biological weapons.
In Quetta, Pakistan, at least 75 people have been diagnosed with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever in the largest outbreak of the disease ever recorded. Eight have already died. All the infected people are refugees who recently arrived from Afghanistan or people who live close to the border. An isolation ward surrounded by barbed wire has been established at the Fatima Jinnah hospital in Quetta.
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