No one knows just how many people Patrick Sawyer came into contact with the day he boarded a flight in Liberia, had a stopover in Ghana, changed planes in Togo, and then arrived in Nigeria, where authorities say he died days later from Ebola, one of the deadliest diseases known to man.

A 65-year-old Frenchman is hospitalised after contracting France’s first case of a deadly new respiratory virus related to Sars.

The United Nations is asking for $164m (€119m) to fight the cholera outbreak in Haiti, which has now claimed 724 lives.

HEALTH experts are looking very closely at the spread of swine flu among people in Spain, Britain and Japan, a World Health Organisation official said yesterday, as Japan confirmed dozens of new cases among teenagers and shut down affected schools.

The global swine flu outbreak has worsened as US authorities said hundreds of students at a New York school have fallen ill and federal officials said they expected to see US deaths from the virus.

A new form of the deadly Ebola virus has been detected in an outbreak in western Uganda that has so far killed 16 people, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said today.

Members of an Indonesian family who died of bird flu probably passed the disease among themselves, but world health officials said there was no evidence the virus had mutated and decided against raising the pandemic alert level.