In Europe, officials urged people to carry on eating poultry meat despite outbreaks of the lethal H5N1 bird flu strain, saying European Union authorities had the means available to wipe out the disease.

A string of EU countries have now confirmed H5N1 in wild birds, knocking consumer confidence in poultry meat -- especially chicken.

"We have the measures and legislation for containment and eradication of such diseases," EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou told a news conference in Brussels.

In Germany, Tornado reconnaissance warplanes and soldiers in biohazard suits were deployed to prevent the spread of bird flu after H5N1 reached the mainland.

Sixty soldiers clad in disease protection suits and gas masks disinfected vehicles on the Baltic island of Ruegen while the air force jets searched the coast for dead birds.

In Italy, where demand for chicken meat has plunged by 70 percent, 30,000 workers have been laid off in the poultry industry.

At least 11 countries have reported bird flu outbreaks over the past three weeks, an indication that the virus, which has killed at least 92 people, is spreading faster.

India's health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, said the situation was "under control" and there were no human cases of avian flu in the country despite fears at the weekend that a farmer had succumbed to the disease.

Officials in the remote district of Nandurbar in western Maharashtra state launched a door-to-door check for people with fever, and continued a mass cull of up to half a million birds.

Six people, including three young children, with flu-like symptoms were hospitalized on Monday, joining a woman and a child who were placed in an isolation ward the previous day.

"Eight people are in isolation. We are keeping our fingers crossed," federal health secretary P.K. Hota told a news conference in New Delhi.

TAMIFLU STOCKS

He said the government had stocked 100,000 courses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu and planned to source another 50,000.

South Africa also announced it would start to stockpile Tamiflu.

Egyptian officials said bird flu had spread to new parts of the country, adding to the devastation in a poultry industry which provided a vital part of Egyptians' diet.

Malaysia reported its first case of H5N1 bird flu since November 2004, with the death of 40 chickens in central Selangor state last week. But Agriculture Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said the public need not worry as no human was affected.

Bird flu's relentless march into the heart of Europe from Asia continued with the virus reaching the German mainland at the weekend and Romania detecting further cases of dead poultry. Bosnia confirmed its first cases of bird flu on Monday and neighboring Croatia reported it second outbreak.

The Russian government said it planned to buy 100 million doses of vaccine to protect domestic fowl.

France gave the West African nation of Niger equipment to improve bird flu testing after H5N1 was confirmed in neighboring Nigeria.

A Reuters photographer in India's Nandurbar said health workers wearing blue overalls, anti-viral masks and goggles were culling chicken by wringing their necks or mixing chemicals in chicken feed.

Television images showed dead birds being dumped in pits covered up by heavy earthmovers. TV also reported hotels and airlines dropping chicken and eggs from menus.

On Monday, Pakistan banned poultry from its eastern and western neighbors India and
Iran, which found the disease in wild swans last week. Nepal also banned Indian poultry and Bangladesh said it had ordered a high alert along its porous border with India to prevent any poultry smuggling.

More than 200 million birds across Asia, parts of the Middle East, Europe and Africa have died of the virus or been culled.

So far, most victims of bird flu have had contact with chickens, but experts fear the virus might mutate into a strain easily passed among people, causing a pandemic in which millions could die.

Swans found at the Durankulak Lake in the Varna region and at aBurgas beach have tested positive for the deadly virus, the ministry said.

The veterinary authorities have already sealed off an area of 3km to 10 km away from the sites where the dead fowl were discovered, said the ministry, adding that temporary disinfection points had been established.

Meanwhile, Health Minister Radoslav Gaidarski issued a statement claiming that as of Monday, there were no registered cases of human-infected avian flu.

The system created for monitoring bird flu in fowl and humans iseffective and transparent, Gaidarski said, adding that it providedfull and timely information on the country's situation surroundingthe virus.

The minister also urged people not to trust any information that had not yet been confirmed by the government, while criticizing some local media for increasing tension with reports on cases undetermined.

According to reports from Sofia News Agency, four people have been tested for the deadly virus but all tests came out negative.

A young woman hospitalized last Friday in Bulgaria's second largest city of Plovdiv died on Monday morning after showing symptoms of bird flu.

Bulgaria's first bird flu case was reported in early February.

The H5N1 virus has killed tens of millions of birds since 2003,and there have been at least 165 confirmed cases of the strain spreading to humans, causing about 90 deaths, mostly in Asia.

Merkel raised the alarm on Sunday while visiting the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen, where Germany's first cases of bird flu were reported during the week.

German authorities ordered a limited cull of the island's poultry on Sunday in order to prevent the strain's spread from wild birds to domestic ones.

German troops ordered to the island to help contain the outbreak on Ruegen, where the virus has been confirmed in 18 birds.

Merkel joined local officials for an emergency meeting to discuss the outbreak of bird flu.

"The way I see it, it is serious," Merkel said. "I would like to say that there are many, many people helping out and they are doing their utmost."

Hours after the meeting, scientists confirmed that the first cases of the H5N1 strain had been confirmed in two dead birds in a northern area on the German mainland.

India conducts mass cull of birds

The H5N1 strain has killed more than 90 people and led to the cull of millions of birds since it was first detected in Southeast Asia in 2003.

Health officials are worried that the virus will mutate so that it can be spread easily from human to human, sparking a pandemic.

In related developments on Sunday:

* Farm workers and health officials in western India slaughtered more than 50,000 chickens and sprayed farms with disinfectant, a day after the country reported its first outbreak. Officials said they were also looking for any possible human cases, including by conducting house-to-house checks for any backyard poultry and anyone showing bird-flu-like symptoms.

* Egyptian authorities closed the zoo in Cairo, where some birds recently tested positive for the H5N1 strain. Health workers killed thousands of baby chicks and other domestic birds in the country.

* In France, some farmers in the southeastern Ain region began slaughtering their birds out of caution a day after officials confirmed that H5N1 was found in a wild dead duck in the region.

* The Italian Health Ministry said a wild duck and six wild swans had tested positive, bringing the country's total number of cases to 16.

* Bosnia was conducting tests on two swans thought to have died from the virus.

The most alarming of the current outbreaks, if only for sheer size, were the two widely separated episodes of avian flu in India, one of which has killed 50,000 birds in poultry flocks in the last few days. The Indian government, which has long been on alert for the virus because that country is on many migration paths in Asia, began killing half a million birds in the hopes of quashing the outbreaks, officials announced Sunday.

But the most perplexing report involved the single case in France — a wild duck found dead in the suburbs of Lyon — because migratory birds from Asia that carry the virus do not normally travel there at this time of year.

"After several years in one place, why is it now moving so rapidly?" asked Dr. Samuel Jutzi, director of the Animal Production and Health Division at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. "There is a lot about this that we just don't know."

The dead duck in France, he said, was "very odd, very difficult to explain." But he added, "What is known is that the width of flyways are very broad, and there may have been a swarm that went farther westward than normal."

In Western Europe, the disease has been confined to wild migratory birds, and authorities across the Continent were taking severe measures to protect domestic poultry. Many countries are now requiring that all poultry be kept indoors to prevent mixing with potentially infected wild birds.

In recent days, a wild duck in central Italy was also found dead from the virus, the first time it had been found so far north in that country.

On the German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea, 18 wild birds were confirmed to have the disease, bringing the total of infected birds there to 59 in the past week, mostly swans and hawks. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, visited the island on Sunday, a sign of how seriously European governments are taking the disease.

Germany is preparing to kill at least some of the 400,000 domestic birds on the island to make sure the virus does not spread into poultry flocks, local authorities said. When bird flu is detected in an area, the most effective way to control an outbreak is to kill all the birds in a surrounding area to isolate the highly infectious virus, and to ban movement of poultry in and out of the area.

But in India the disease is already in farm birds, raising more complicated issues, and the possibility that there will be human infections. Although the dreaded virus does not now readily infect humans or spread among them, more than 160 people have caught the disease worldwide, all of them people who had close contact with sick birds.

Experts are worried that A(H5N1) could acquire the ability to spread from human to human through natural processes, setting off a worldwide influenza pandemic.

Government officials in a rural district of western India on Sunday began to slaughter and inoculate roughly a million chickens, and dozens of people from the same area were dispatched to be tested, a day after test results confirmed the first outbreak of avian flu in this country.

Officials in New Delhi took pains to dismiss earlier press reports of a poultry farmer's death from suspected bird flu. The central government ordered state governments to step up surveillance efforts, urged the public to "maintain proper hygiene and sanitation," and announced that it was taking steps to increase the availability of bird flu treatment in India.

If it is not swiftly contained, bird flu could be disastrous in this country, where the population density and a feeble public health system, especially in the countryside, make it particularly vulnerable to a pandemic of this sort. India is the world's sixth-largest poultry producer, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

The poultry deaths took place in a district called Nandurbar, near the northern border of Maharashtra State. State health officials said by telephone that 68 people were being tested for the virus. Workers in the 16 poultry farms in the area, which until two days ago had exported poultry to neighboring states, had tested negative for the virus.

The home minister of India, Shivraj Patil, announced Sunday that chickens within a two-mile radius of the outbreak would be killed while others within six miles would be inoculated. A statement issued late Saturday by the central government information bureau said that the situation was "under control."

News reports on Saturday suggested that a 27-year-old poultry farmer, also in the Nandurbar area, had died of bird flu. On Sunday, the Indian government announced that "preliminary" test results had been negative.

About 50,000 poultry are reported to have died from the infection in recent days in the western state of Maharashtra. Officials were also testing for the A(H5N1) strain in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, after 1,400 birds died at a farm there.

United Nations health officials have long urged the governments of India and Egypt to be on high alert for bird flu.

But Dr. Jutzi, the United Nations health official, and other international experts added that the extent of the problem was still unclear in those two countries.

"How extensive the problem is in India is still not known," said Juan Lubroth, a senior veterinary official at the Food and Agricultural Organization, who said the United Nations first received an alert about the outbreak on Friday, and reports from India's states were still coming in.

There are 1,407 pathogens -- viruses, bacteria, parasites, protozoa and fungi -- that can infect humans, said Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Of those, 58 percent come from animals. Scientists consider 177 of the pathogens to be "emerging" or "re-emerging." Most will never cause pandemics.

Experts fear bird flu could prove an exception. Recent advances in the worldwide march of the H5N1 strain have rekindled fears of a pandemic. The virus has spread across Asia into Europe and Africa.

Controlling bird flu will require renewed focus on the animal world, including the chickens, ducks and other poultry that have been sacrificed by the tens of millions to stem the progress of the virus, experts said at a news conference late Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"The strategy has to be looking at how to contain it in the animal world, because once you get into the human side, you're dealing with vaccines and antiretrovirals, which is a whole new realm," said Nina Marano, a veterinarian and public health expert with the National Center for Infectious Diseases.

Bird flu has killed at least 91 people -- most of them in Asia -- since 2003, according to the World Health Organization. It appears to kill about half the people it infects. However, should it mutate so it can pass from human to human, it likely will grow far less deadly, said Dr. Stanley Lemon, of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

"It is very unlikely that it would maintain that kind of case mortality rate if it made the jump," Lemon said.

Each year, one or two new pathogens and multiple variations of existing threats infect humans for the first time. That pace appears to be unsustainable in the long run because it would imply that people run the risk of being overrun, Woolhouse told reporters.

"Humans have always been attacked by novel pathogens," Woolhouse said. "This process has been going on for millennia. But it does seem to be happening very fast in these modern times."

Woolhouse argues that many of those diseases and other afflictions will not persist in humans or there is something peculiar today allowing so many of them to take root in humans.

One explanation may be the recent and wide-scale changes in how people interact with the environment in a more densely populated world that is growing warmer and in which travel is faster and move extensive, Marano said. Those changes can ensure that pathogens no longer stay restricted to animals, she added. Examples from recent human history include HIV, Marburg, SARS and other viruses.

That prospect leaves open the question of what future threats await humans.

"It always surprises us. We think that avian flu will be the next emerging disease. My guess is something else might come out before that," said Alan Barrett, of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. "It's very hard to anticipate what comes next."

Lloyd, head of the educational studies department at Edinburgh University, claims that a lack of proper investigation by doctors and pressure from parents are leading doctors to diagnose ADHD inappropriately.

She said: "Our research shows that a lot of children are being categorised without evidence from school about their behaviour problems. There is no objective measurement for judging if ADHD is present. In many cases, decisions are being made on very general descriptions of behaviour. Some parents are even going private to get their children diagnosed."

Some 46,000 children are diagnosed as having the condition, with more than 9,000 eligible for drugs therapy, the Scottish Medicines Consortium reports. In the past year, 42,832 prescriptions were made for Scottish children with ADHD, an annual increase of 11.7%.

ADHD sufferers have difficulties with impulsiveness, lack of concentration and hyperactivity. The condition, which Lloyd accepts does exist, leads to tantrums and social clumsiness and is usually identified in early childhood.

However, in Lloyd's latest book, Critical New Perspectives On ADHD, which the child behaviour expert has written with two other academics, she argues many parents are looking for a quick fix when their child misbehaves at school.

She said: "Parents feel that the schools are blaming them when their child is behaving badly at school, but teachers do not have the time to deal with individual problems when they are teaching a class of 30 or more. Doctors think they are helping these families but they are actually clustering children together under a catch-all condition on the flimsiest evidence."

On the use of Ritalin, Lloyd added: "This kind of medication for children as young as six is crazy. Their brains are still developing and yet they are being given mind-altering drugs."

Disparities among Scottish health boards led the health standards watchdog, QIS Scotland, to launch an inquiry into Ritalin prescribing rates last year. NHS Fife is the largest single user of ADHD drugs, with 154.73 prescriptions per 1,000 population (aged six to 14) in 2004-2005. The average for Scotland in the period was 70.36.

Louise Brunton, from Glenrothes, whose son Aaron was diagnosed with ADHD six years ago, last night agreed with Lloyd that many parents wrongfully put forward ADHD as an excuse for bad behaviour.

Brunton, 34, who until recently was involved in a parents' support group, said: "Families would turn up and say that their son or daughter had ADHD, but they clearly didn't. They were just badly behaved. Some parents fail to acknowledge that their children can be bad and they are soft on discipline. It makes it harder for genuine cases of ADHD to be treated sympathetically by doctors."

Brunton, whose son was prescribed Ritalin but now uses Concerta, an alternative drug, added: "From a young age, Aaron did not have normal responses, his behaviour went well beyond misbehaving. He set fire to my old house twice and he has also flooded our home. He has no concept of danger."

However, Dr Chris Steer, a consultant paediatrician at Victoria Hospital, Kirkcaldy, said: "It is up to clinicians to diagnose ADHD, not academics or educationalists, but there are safeguards in place.

"The usual age for children being able to use medication [such as Ritalin] is school age. The aim is to improve their learning, not to sedate them. The drugs for ADHD have been thoroughly tested."

Eric Taylor, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, described Lloyd's views as "extreme".

He added: "ADHD is not easy to diagnose, as symptoms can be similar to other behaviour problems, but I am not aware of misdiagnosis being a problem in Scotland."

Over the past twenty years, our government has facilitated a nationwide experiment on our country's youngest citizens via the Mandatory Childhood Vaccine Schedule, and the tragic results of the experiment can be equally credited to the joint efforts of compromised regulatory officials and politicians, and the pharmaceutical industry that stood to make billions.

In a perverse twist of fate, the vaccine program has evolved into a grand profiteering scheme, second only to the military industrial complex's war on terror fiasco. Instead of prevention, the program has resulted in an epidemic of serious health problems for an entire generation of children and at the same time, produced an infinite market expansion for the sale of other prescription drugs, for the scheme's developers.

The start of the epidemic can be traced to the late 1980s, when public health officials dramatically increased the number of vaccines, which contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, without taking into consideration the impact of the cumulative mercury load on developing brains of infants.

Once the mercury poisoning was discovered by the FDA in 1999, vaccine-makers claimed they were eliminating thimerosal from vaccines but they never recalled the vaccines already on the market and children continued to receive mercury in vaccines for several more years. Even today, the flu vaccine recommended for 6-month-old babies and pregnant women still contain a full dose of thimerosal.

Instead of ordering drug companies to get the preservative out of all vaccines, Congressional Republicans and President George W Bush spent much of the past 3 years working on strategies to give the pharmaceutical industry protection against lawsuits from vaccine injured children. A handful of shameless Congressional Republicans remained lurking around in the shadows for years, just waiting for the right moment to attach the protective provision to some "anti-terror" spending bill until they succeeded in December 2005.

Before the age of two in this country, children receive at least 20 injections involving twelve diseases. By the time they reach first grade, they have had at least 24 vaccinations, if they are in compliance with the CDC's 2005 Immunization Schedule.

For good reason, many parents do not want their children to receive 24 injections for diseases they have never heard of. However, government officials use every trick in the book to force them to inject these poisonous concoctions into their children, including economic sanctions for refusing to comply.

Refusing vaccination can result in citizens being denied enrollment in daycare, elementary school, and college; denial of health insurance; denial of employment; and denial of federal and state benefits for poor children including cutting off medical care under Medicaid, and food, under the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program.

Medical professionals have been trying to get lawmaker to take notice of the health problems caused by vaccines since the 1990s. On June 14, 1999, Jane Orient, MD, Executive Director of the Associating of American Physicians and Surgeons, testified before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources of the Committee on Government reform and said:

"Striking increases in chronic illnesses have occurred in temporal association with an increase in vaccination rates," she said. "Asthma and insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, causes of lifelong morbidity and frequent premature death, have nearly doubled in incidence since the introduction of many new, mandatory vaccines."

"There is no explanation for this increase," Orient added.

"Even more alarming," she told lawmakers, "is the huge increase in reports of autism and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, with devastating, life-long impacts."

"Measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, and the whole panoply of childhood diseases are a far less serious threat," Orient warned, "than having a large fraction (say 10%) of a generation afflicted with learning disability and/or uncontrollable aggressive behavior because of an impassioned crusade for universal vaccination."

About 3 years later, across the country on the West Coast, Barbara Loe Fisher, President of the National Vaccine Information Center, testified before the California Senate Committee on Childhood Immunization Mandates: Politics vs Public Health on January 23, 2002. Fisher acknowledged that the CDC, and American Academy of Pediatrics, vigorously deny that the vaccines could have anything to do with more children being chronically ill.

"Yet, the haunting question remains," she said, "if we have wiped out polio and almost eliminated measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough and other childhood diseases with vaccines - why are so many of our children stuck on sick?"

"Why are our special education classrooms so crowded that we can’t find enough money or train teachers fast enough to care for these learning disabled, hyperactive, autistic, asthmatic, diabetic, emotionally disturbed, sick children?" Fisher asked.

Since 1982, she charged, "the numbers of American children with learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder and asthma have doubled; diabetes has tripled; and the incidence of autism has reached epidemic proportions, increasing 200 to 600 percent in every state, marking a staggering 3400 percent increase in the prevalence of autism in our children."

Scientist have also been warning lawmakers about the vaccine injuries. Dr Mark Geier, holds a PhD in genetics, and was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health for10 years. He has studied vaccines for over 30 years. Dr. Geier and his son, David Geier, are the only independent researchers who have gained access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink database controlled by the CDC, to conduct studies on the connection between vaccines and the epidemic in neurological problems.

In a March 22, 2003 letter to Senator Hillary Clinton, the Geiers reported: "we have concluded in our studies that a causal relationship exists between mercury from thimerosal in childhood vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders."

"Our best estimates are that the thimerosal contributed to about 75% of the cases of neurodevelpmental disorders while the MMR contributed to about 15%," they said. "The remaining 10% of the cases were related to mercury in Rhogam, a shot given to Rh-negative women, and to other sources of neurotoxicity."

On June 18, 2004, Representative Dave Weldon (R-FL), a doctor by calling, was on the floor of Congress waving red flags, and literally begging Congress to recognize the seriousness of the epidemic in children with neurological disorders all over the country.

"Mr. Speaker, something dreadful is happening to our youngest generation, and we must sound the alarm and figure out what is going on with our children," he said.

He quoted the Department of Health and Human Services when explaining that one in every 167 children was being diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. "Furthermore," Weldon reported, "one in 7 children is being diagnosed with either a learning disability or a behavioral disability."

On June 19, 2002, James Bradstreet, MD, Clinical Director of The International Child Development Resource Center in Florida, testified in Washington before the Government Reform Committee, and warned lawmakers about the cost of the autism epidemic back then.

"ICDRC estimates the minimal cost in present value, to care for those 420,000 existing children with autism is $1,260,000,000,000 (based on $3million/lifetime and 420,000 children affected)."

"So a little over a $1 trillion in the next 50 years would be required if we stopped creating new cases today," Bradstreet said.

"Because autism is doubling every four years, this is likely an overly conservative estimatem" he added. "The societal cost could easily be $3-4 trillion."

On June 20, 2005, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, a relatively new advocate calling for the removal of thimerosal from vaccines, appeared on the Don Imus Show on MSNBC, and warned the public that our government is allowing drug companies to ship thimerosal-containing vaccines for use on children in other countries.

"They're giving this now to kids all over the third world," Kennedy warned. "In China, autism was unknown five years ago," he said. "They started giving them American vaccines containing thimerosal and now they've got 1.8 million cases of autism," he added.

Autism is also exploding in Argentina, India, and Nigeria, Kennedy said.

"What's going to happen when our enemies around the world realize that the United State's most heralded foreign policy which is vaccinating the children of the world is poisoning the brains of developing third world children?" he warmed.

"This is just a disaster," Kennedy told Imus.

But it gets worse. Over the past 15 years, the vaccine scheme has resulted in a full-circle cycle of profits for the pharmaceutical industry. After poisoning an entire generation, drug companies are now making record profits from drugging their victims.

And the true irony of the situation is that due to their partnership with compromised officials and lawmakers, they were able to pull most of it off on the tax payer's dime. Federal and State government programs, are the largest buyers of vaccines, administered "free" beginning with pregnant women all the way up to seniors citizens in nursing homes.

The vaccine racket is raging on at full-throttle. In 2005, more vaccines were administered to infants under the age of 1 in the US than in any other country. The current immunization schedule calls for 3 doses of Hepatitis B, the first at birth, 3 doses each of DTAP, HIB, IPV, Prevnar, and one dose of flu vaccine before a child's first birthday.

The first year of childhood vaccines costs $620, and the second year costs $340, according to Pediatric Preventive Care Cost, Estimated US Average, 2005, by Patient Age, Recommendations for Preventive Pediatric Health Care (RE9939) and Recommended Childhood and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, US, 2005.

For the year 2004, the CDC reported the US birth rate to be 4,115,590. Without an industrial size calculator, it would be impossible to do the math to multiply the birth rate by the vaccine costs above. Suffice to say that the total amount represents major profits for vaccine makers especially when most of the bill is sent directly to the tax payers.

As for making money off the vaccine-injured children, between 2000 and 2003, the number of children treated for "severe behavioral conditions" related to conduct disorder and autism rose more than 60%, according to Behavior Drugs Lead in Sales for Children, New York Times, May 17, 2004.

Tax dollars are being directly funneled to the pharmaceutical industry through the damaged children. Public funds currently account for 63% of all mental health spending and Medicaid spending has risen more than 50% since 2000 to more than $300 billion per year, according to Parity-Plus: A Third Way Approach to Fix America's Mental Health System, Progressive Policy Institute, June 22, 2005; Medicaid Largest US Payer, Daily Health Policy Report, March 30, 20005.

Drug companies have also been raking in major profits from the sale of attention deficit drugs, with much of it coming from the public trough. The National Center for Health Statistics, reports that the number of children aged 3 to 17 with ADHD went from 3.3 million in 1997 to 4.4 million in 2002. Between 2000 and 2004, use of attention deficit stimulant drugs rose 56% among children, according to data compiled Medco Health Solutions, one of the largest prescription benefit managers in the nation.

According to testimony at the February 18, 2004, FDA hearing, by Dr Gianna Rigoni, of the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, a combined total of approximately 10.8 million prescriptions were dispensed for SSRI antidepressants and atypicals antipsychotics to the 1 to 17-year-old population in 2002, and children between 1 and 11-years-old, accounted for about 2.7 million of those prescriptions.

In 2004, SSRIs and antipsychotics became the third-and fourth-biggest classes of drugs in the country, with sales of $20.7 billion. And much of that cost was borne by government health-care plans, according to the July 27, 2005 Wall Street Journal.

As for the continued use of thimerosal-laced flu vaccines with infants, according to the ACIP report of July 29, 2005 / 54(RR08);1-40, actual deaths from influenza are uncommon among children with and without high-risk conditions. A study that modeled influenza-related deaths estimated that annually, an average of 92 deaths, or 0.4 deaths per 100,000, occurred among children under 5 during the 1990's.

So, are the risks associated with injecting a full dose of thimerosal into 4,115,590 six-month-old babies worth it when weighed against the benefits, if any, of flu vaccines? More and more parents think not.

Water is being trucked in to the town but can't meet demands, said the report.

Tests were ordered after a water company official noticed the water had turned yellow last Tuesday. The water contains high levels of fluoride, nitrogen and carbolic acid, said the newspaper.

There have been no reports of sickness caused by the polluted water, said the report.

It's the latest in a series of water supply spills in China in recent months.

Earlier this month, 2,000 tons of alkaline waste spilled into the Yellow River after tanks at a chemical company collapsed.

In November, millions of people in northeastern China lost water for several days after a chemical plant exploded and sent a slick of benzene into the Songhua River.

Local authorities didn't announce the benzene leak until a week after it happened.