US GOVERNMENT researchers knew they were violating ethical standards by infecting Guatemalan prison inmates and mental patients with syphilis in the 1940s, according to a presidential commission.

A wildlife biologist is believed to have died after catching the plague from a mountain lion, US officials said.

SEAN FLEMING’S letter about water fluoridation communicated some inaccuracies and made some scientifically unfounded connections between water fluoridation and the incidence of a range of diseases (Irish Examiner, April 11).

US doctors, working for the federal government and the state of Louisiana, are carefully monitoring people in dozens of shelters state-wide for outbreaks of serious and infectious diseases.