Deadly fire ants are on the march across America after developing a mutant strain that can survive winters. The ants, whose venom has killed dozens of people in the southern states, also cause damage to crops, lawns and electrical equipment estimated at £1.5 billion a year. In the past, they could survive only in the humidity of the American south. Now they are heading north.

Children in the suburban south are regularly stung. Most come away with a painful blister which subsides after a few days. Two in every 100, however, need immediate hospital treatment or they die. In the American southeast, the ants have overtaken wasps and bees as the major source of allergic insect reactions.

They travel across country on livestock or bundle into giant balls that can float down flooded rivers. After swarming on to a human victim, they are believed to emit an alarm pheromone, at which point they all sting at once, causing maximum pain.

AIDS epidemic is marching through Russia on the back of a dramatic surge in drug use. From the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, AIDS has made speedy inroads against the futile resistance of under-funded hospitals and clinics. By year's end, officials at the federal AIDS Prevention and Cure Center in Moscow predict, at least 500,000 Russians will be infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS.

"The outbreak is horrifying," said Vadim Pokrovsky, director of the AIDS center. "The epidemic is developing geometrically." Nowhere has the alarm been sounded more desperately than in Kaliningrad. The region, separated from the rest of Russia and surrounded by Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea, is Russia's per-capita AIDS leader. Officially, the city of the same name is home to 2,621 people who have tested positive for HIV.

Russian officials say the first AIDS case appeared in Russia in 1987; the first case in the United States was reported in 1981.

Afghanistan has asked the World Health Organisation for help dealing with an epidemic that is killing dozens of people a day near the Tajik border in Afghanistan, a UN official disclosed here. Due to the gravity of the situation and fear that the epidemic might spread into more areas, the WHO is sending an urgent medical help to Afghanistan to help the authorities cope with the alarming situation.

The illness, thought perhaps to be plague or cholera, has spread during the last week through several impoverished villages in Badakhshan mountains of Afghanistan. A lack of qualified medical personnel and diagnostic equipment has complicated efforts to identity the disease. As a result dozens of people are dying everyday. However, the help is rather slow given the tense situation in Afghanistan and the security aspects as well. Plague is typically spread by rodents or other small animals. Untreated, it is often fatal, but it can be treated with antibiotics. Latest statistics show that over 2,000 people are affected by the epidemic. About 250 people have so far died due to lack of medical treatment. Symptoms of the epidemic are fever, cough, pain, vomiting and diarrhea, with elderly women and children the worst affected.

AFP adds: A "mystery disease" has killed 250 people in remote villages in northeast Afghanistan, a UN spokesman said Friday. Experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) plan to attempt to travel to the villages in the Darwaz region in the next few days, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said. Last week officials in Darwaz told the WHO that 2,000 people were suffering from the illness, and that 250 of them had died. Symptoms of the sickness include fever, cough, aches, vomiting and diarrhea, he said. The WHO plans to send two epidemiologists to Dushanbe, in neighboring Tajikistan. From their they will attempt to reach the affected villages, he said. The villages, located in narrow valleys between high mountains, are normally accessible only by foot or on donkey, and take 10 days to reach, Eckhard said.

The New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a man whose infection would not respond to even the most potent antibiotic although his germs were killed after his death using a "novel drug combination therapy." CNN said that the incidence of drug-resistant strains of bacteria has more than doubled in New York City’s major hospitals.

A Center for Disease Control specialist said, "Drug-resistant staph infections are not only nationwide but worldwide. Some countries seem to be doing a better job of controlling them in hospitals than we are here in the United States, but they're in every community in the country. I'd love to say we're winning the war, but I don't think I can say that we're winning it."

A supergerm that has proven resistant to one of the most potent antibiotics available has killed a Hong Kong woman, a newspaper reported today, raising fears that more such germs could develop as doctors continue to misuse or overuse antibiotics, AP reported. The woman died last year at Queen Mary Hospital after becoming infected with a strain of staphylococcus aureus bacteria, or staph, despite two weeks of intensive antibiotics treatments, the South China Morning Post reported.

A decade earlier, Hong Kong doctors discovered a case of streptococcus pneumonia that was resistant to penicillin, but now 70 percent of the cases here are resistant. Many doctors fear the time is coming when some patients will have no alternative antibiotics to turn to -- for the first time since antibiotics hit the market in the 1950s.

According to a study conducted by Russian and Finnish researchers, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of new HIV-1 A/B recombinant subtype cases in the Russian region of Kaliningrad, which borders Poland and Lithuania. Since June 1996, there have been about 100 new cases of HIV-1 infection reported a month in the region, with 1,709 cases reported as of December 1997.

The strain is derived from Ukrainian A and B viruses; the report indicates that there may have been a single source for infections among intravenous drug users. At the Sixth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, the researchers said they believe that the virus could be introduced into Europe through the open borders of Poland and Lithuania, and asserted that prevention strategies are needed. (Source: Reuters)