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U.S. health officials say that Ottilie Lundgren, a 94-year-old woman from Connecticut, has died of inhalation anthrax, the deadliest form of the disease. No one can figure out how she contracted the disease, since she lived by herself in a small ranch house in Oxford, a town of less than 10,000 residents about 70 miles from New York City, with one bank and no hotel.

Lundgren?s niece, Shirley Davis, says her aunt no longer drove her car and rarely went out. ?She went to the hairdresser?s and to (church) when she was up to it. I nearly fainted when the doctors told me they suspected anthrax.?
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The Taliban have abandoned plans to surrender their spiritual heartland in Kandahar because of a prophetic dream Mullah Mohammed Omar had, according to his brother.

The southern city of Kandahar was where the Taliban first emerged, and Kandahar is where they are taking their last stand. It is one of only two cities in Afghanistan still under Taliban control, and Mullah Omar, their one-eyed commander, is believed to be inside the city. Kandahar is the main city of the ethnic, Pashtun-dominated south, where the Northern Alliance, who swept through most of the country including the capital of Kabul, have no support.
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The flu bug let us off easy last winter, but experts predict that this coming flu season will be a different story. ?We usually do not have mild years back to back,? says Dr. Kristin Nichol, an influenza researcher at the Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center. ?I can?t explain why it is biologically, but I would certainly encourage people not to expect another mild season.?

Kris Ehresmann, an epidemiologist who tracks the influenza virus for the Minnesota Department of Health, agrees. ?We are expecting more disease activity this year than what we had last year,? and adds that the flu strains expected to predominate are the type that make people the sickest.
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Scientists in Germany say the black rat is back, in higher numbers than ever before.They say Rattus rattus is now widespread even in areas where it was thought to be extinct. The black rat, also known as the ship?s rat, spread bubonic plague through Europe in medieval times.

Researchers from the Zoological Institute at Cologne University say the black rat population in Germany has been underestimated because damage is automatically blamed on the more aggressive, and more common, brown rat. The plague in Europe finally ended when brown rats, which do not carry plague, drove out the black rats.
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