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Q: Can you just flesh out in a little more detail the kinds of logistical problems you're facing? Are they problems of transportation, with coordination and other things? Just describe in a little more detail how that's unfolding and what you're facing. Mr. Egeland: Our main problems now are in northern Sumatra and Aceh. We have problems all over, and I agree that it is beyond the reach of all our combined resources in these five massive parallel operations from Somalia to Indonesia. In Aceh, today 50 trucks of relief supplies are arriving. They will have arrived because it's already...

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazilian (news - web sites) authorities urged residents of Rio de Janeiro on Friday to be careful after lab samples of cholera and typhoid fever were stolen with a biologist's car. Doctors and police in the Brazilian city said the bacteria had been securely packed and represented no risk if not opened, but acknowledged the samples could be dangerous if removed from the package. Silvio Valle, a biosecurity expert with the government's Fiocruz research institute, graded the biohazard of the stolen material as two on a scale of four in televised comments, asking viewers...

Protests over health chief as cholera hits Basra By Donald Macintyre in Baghdad 08 May 2003 A total of 17 confirmed cases of cholera were reported yesterday by the World Health Organisation in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. The number of confirmed cholera cases pointed to a probable outbreak of the waterborne disease among "several hundreds of people", the World Health Organisation said. The city's water treatment system shut down after US-led air strikes damaged the electric grid, leaving large parts of the city without clean water for several weeks. Meanwhile, doctors in Baghdad angrily confronted the new head...

Issue 11.04 - April 2003 Pg 1 of 3>> Print, email, orfax this article for free. The Bacteria WhispererBonnie Bassler discovered a secret about microbes that the science world has missed for centuries. The bugs are talking to each other. And plotting against us.By Steve SilbermanTrim and hyperkinetic at 40, Bonnie Bassler is often mistaken for a graduate student at conferences. Five mornings a week at dawn, she walks a mile to the local YMCA to lead a popular aerobics class. When a representative from the MacArthur Foundation phoned last fall, the caller played coy at first, asking Bassler if...

TOKYO - A self-confessed Japanese war criminal called on the government to apologise for testing biological weapons on thousands of Chinese prisoners yesterday in advance of a legal ruling on the activities of a germ warfare unit during the second world war Yoshio Shinozuka, a veteran of the top-secret Unit 731, told reporters he had done what no man should do in developing bubonic plague viruses and conducting vivisections on captives near Harbin in China. "These human beings were called logs. We said we have chopped one log, two logs," the frail and bespectacled 78-year-old said. "This unit cruelly murdered...