While nearly all health professionals deny a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, rates of measles are rising in the US and the author of the discredited study is unapolegitic, writes Stav Ziv

President Barack Obama appointed an ebola tsar for the US, and the government said a Texas health worker who may have had contact with specimens from an ebola patient was isolated on a cruise ship.

Fact is more frightening than fiction in this real Ebola crisis, says Max Brooks.

The first person diagnosed with ebola in the US died yesterday as the government ordered five airports to screen passengers from West Africa for fever.

A man who flew from Liberia to Texas has become the first patient infected with the deadly ebola virus to be diagnosed in the United States, health officials said, a sign the outbreak ravaging West Africa may spread globally.

A scary problem lurks beyond the frenzied efforts to keep people from spreading ebola: No one knows exactly where the virus comes from or how to stop it from seeding new outbreaks.

A toddler known as ‘patient zero’ who died before Christmas is believed to be the first victim who sparked the ebola crisis.

Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has apologised for the high death toll among the country’s health workers, who have fought an ebola outbreak which has killed nearly 1,000 people in three countries.

Africans battling to contain the spread of ebola will have to wait for months until a potentially life-saving experimental drug used on two Americans infected with the dreaded disease would be manufactured, officials said.

THE drought and famine in Somalia have killed more than 29,000 children under the age of 5, according to US estimates, the first time such a precise death toll has been released related to the Horn of Africa crisis.

SEVEN patients who have contracted a hospital acquired infection US statistics say kills 40% of people it infects are continuing to be treated at the Mid-Western Regional Hospital in Limerick.

AT LEAST 142 people have died in a cholera outbreak, and aid groups were rushing in medicine and other supplies yesterday to combat Haiti’s deadliest health problem since its devastating earthquake.

THE World Health Organisation declared a swine flu pandemic yesterday – the first global flu epidemic in 41 years – as infections in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and elsewhere climbed to nearly 30,000 cases.

FEARS of a global swine flu pandemic grew with new infections in the US and Canada yesterday and millions of Mexicans hid indoors to avoid a virus that has killed up to 81 people.

About 700,000 health workers were aiming to vaccinate some 25 million children up to age five today as part of Bangladesh’s continuing efforts to eliminate polio, the Health Ministry said.

A two-year-old boy and his mother contracted a rare and life-threatening infection from his soldier father’s smallpox vaccination, according to a published report.

A new, deadly strain of tuberculosis has killed 52 of 53 people infected in the last year in South Africa, the World Health Organisation said today, calling for improved measures to treat and diagnose the bacteria.

AFRICA'S first outbreak of a deadly strain of bird flu has spread to at least four farms, Nigerian officials said, as the continent braced itself for a possible epidemic.

THE SARS outbreak is “over its peak” around the world, including in the hardest-hit country, China, a World Health Organisation official said yesterday.

BEIJING city officials told 4,000 people suspected of being exposed to SARS to stay home yesterday, as quarantined medical workers in Taiwan held a rowdy protest and Hong Kong hospitals were accused of failing to protect frontline doctors from the deadly bug.

SCIENTISTS in Hong Kong yesterday said they had identified the virus behind a mystery pneumonia that has killed more than 50 people worldwide.

Anthrax found in a letter mailed to Chile is not the same as the strain discovered in letters received in the US, investigators said.

Ugandan health officials are conducting a countdown as they work towards declaring the outbreak of Ebola fever over in Uganda with only one death reported in the last six days.