"I didn't know what was going on," Jones said. "I just went ahead and thought she had a kidney infection. And we went on antibiotics and still it didn't clear it up."

Skyla was eventually sent to Andrew Muir, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Medical College of Georgia, who knew exactly what was going on.

Skyla was menstruating and was experiencing other unmistakable signs of puberty.

"That's what he told me that it was -- that she was having a menstrual cycle," Jones said. "I was really freaked out."

Studies have tracked an increasing trend of early sexual development.

By age 8, almost half of African-American girls and 15 percent of Caucasian girls start developing pubic hair or breasts.

"The switch that normally gets turned on for pubertal development gets turned on too early," said Dr. Diane Stafford of Children's Hospital in Boston.

Until recently most doctors didn't expect to see these signs until age 10.

"It can have many causes," Muir said. "Some are related to genetics, environmental factors, and sometimes we just don't know why it happens."

For Skyla, a thyroid problem caused her symptoms.

While she was too young to really understand what was happening, her mother worried that other kids might.

"I was worried kids would make fun of her because kids are cruel," Jones said.

Because Skyla started treatment for her thyroid problem, all her symptoms have gone away.

Muir expects her next experience with puberty to be at a more reasonable age.

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong, in collaboration with scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, said the new virus -- called Fujian-like, or FL -- appears to be responsible for the increased occurrence of H5N1 poultry infections in China since October 2005, as well as recent human cases.

FL has also been reported in Laos, Malaysia and Thailand, resulting in a new bird flu outbreak wave across Southeast Asia that has caused human infections as well, according to the Hong Kong-St. Jude team.

Investigators warn it is possible the new H5N1 variant will spread farther across Asia and into Europe, as it evolves to form other sublineages that vary from place to place.

The findings are significant, since experts believe H5N1 is the most likely virus to trigger a human influenza pandemic.

A report on the findings appears in the November online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The problem is visible not only in the Mediterranean, but also in Spain's Atlantic and Cantabrian fishing grounds.

'We are catching less and less fish,' observes fisherman Emilio Louro from the northwestern Galicia region.

'Our income is shrinking, young people are leaving, the village is becoming a place of old people,' he told the daily El Pais.

Louro realizes that overfishing puts the livelihood of thousands of fishermen in danger, but not everyone is that smart.

Many small fishing companies are waging a desperate battle against large, sometimes multinational ones, which see the sea only as a source of money.

The number of fishermen has halved to about 50,000 since 1990 in Spain, which has the largest fishing fleet in the European Union (EU).

At the same time, improved technology has increased the size of catches, leading to an unscrupulous pillage of the sea's resources.

Many Spanish and French fishing companies have used EU subsidies to overhaul their fleets, installing sonar systems and new engines.

Fishing boats may have engines four times as powerful as the law allows them to have in the Mediterranean, according to El Pais.

They also use banned gear such as drift nets, which haul up vast quantities of unwanted fish and other marine life, and target juvenile fish despite size restrictions.

Large companies even use radar and spotter planes to track down schools of bluefin tuna, the consumption of which has been fuelled by the growth of the global sushi market.

Tuna are fattened in special ranches around the Mediterranean for the Japanese market, and taken away by Asian ships which pick up the cargo off shore without informing the authorities, according to media reports.

About 50,000 tons of bluefin tuna are captured annually in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, more than three times as much as what experts consider a sustainable amount.

'If this goes on, new generations will see bluefin tuna only in photographs,' says Jose Luis Cort of the Oceanographic Institute in the northern city of Santander.

The consequences of overfishing could be tragic for other species as well. Last spring's catch of anchovy from the Gulf of Biscay, for instance, amounted to 1,200 tons, compared to up to 80,000 tons in the 1960s.

Other endangered species include the hake, swordfish, red mullet and cod.

The results of overfishing are becoming visible in the rapid increase of jellyfish off touristic beaches in the Mediterranean. The phenomenon has been attributed to the animals now having less predators and competitors.

Environmentalists blame lax European government enforcement, while European officials say regulations are insufficient and fishing a difficult activity to monitor.

The environmental group Greenpeace believes the Mediterranean can only be saved from overfishing, industrial waste and oil spills by turning 40 per cent of it into marine reserves.