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Researchers say most of the human diseases of the future will be passed to us from animals. Right now, bird flu from Asian chicken farms is killing people in Vietnam. That seems too far away to affect us, but then so did SARS, when it was first discovered in China. The World Health Organization thinks avian flu may become an even bigger epidemic than SARS. In South Korea, Vietnam and Japan, officials are killing massive numbers of chickens, trying to prevent the spread of avian flu to more humans. All the people who’ve contracted the flu have gotten it directly from poultry; there’s been no person-to-person contact so far. If the flu virus can be controlled before it mutates to a form that allows people to pass it on, the epidemic will be stopped before it starts.
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In Anne’s new diary, she talks about her recent adventures living a middle class life in an all-gay building in Los Angeles and how she discovered that there are some lessons you just have to learn from experience.

NOTE: This news story, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.read more

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And in the Best Places – Bedbugs are something most people in the U.S. have heard of, although few of us who haven’t traveled extensively in third world countries have ever actually experienced them. But now 28 states are reporting bedbug infestations (some of them in expensive hotels).

Charles Laurence writes in The Telegraph that foreign travelers and immigrants are being blamed for the bugs. How do you know if you’ve got them? You wake up with red, itchy welts on your skin and there are blood stains dotting the sheets.
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It’s been discovered that the quakes produced by the San Andreas Fault in California occur at regular intervals. This previously unnoticed cycle gives researchers hope that they’ll be able to predict them in the future.

Robert Sanders of U.C. Berkeley News writes that a new study by seismologists shows the frequency of tiny microquakes rises and falls over a three year period, and that quakes of the magnitude 4, 5 and 6 are six to seven times more likely to occur within a year of when this cycle is most active. Geophysicist Robert Nadeau says, “This has promise for forecasting larger quakes, though this is our first look and it needs to be refined more.”
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