One of New York's most expensive neighborhoods will be sprayed this week with pesticide to combat the West Nile virus, officials said Tuesday.

The city regularly sprays against the mosquito-borne disease, which has seen a surge in outbreaks in the United States this year. Friday's spraying is notable because it will target Manhattan's prestigious Upper West Side neighborhood and parts of the famed Central Park.

"These neighborhoods are being treated due to rising West Nile virus activity with high and/or increasing mosquito populations," the Department of Health said in a statement.

Two more cows have died from anthrax exposure in northeast Colorado, expanding the first outbreak of the disease in the state in 31 years to three ranches. Last week, 60 cows died on a Logan County ranch, where anthrax was positively identified in one animal. Officials say it's likely they all died of the disease. The Colorado Department of Agriculture said Wednesday the additional cows were on two separate adjacent ranches. Both died from the disease. State Veterinarian Keith Roehr said all three ranches involved share fences and the new cases likely are the result of cows grazing in an area with soil containing anthrax spores.

Neighboring herds have been vaccinated. No cows left the affected ranches so none entered the food supply and no human infection has been reported, Roehr said. Anthrax kills livestock within hours of infection and can decimate herds if animals are not quickly treated, he said. Anthrax is caused by a bacterium that forms in spores and can lie dormant in soil for decades until ingested. Humans get anthrax most commonly through direct contact with infected animals usually when spores get into a cut or abrasion on the skin.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings on Wednesday declared the city's recent West Nile virus outbreak to be a state of emergency and authorized the first aerial spraying of insecticide in the city in more than 45 years. Dallas and other North Texas cities have agreed to the rare use of aerial spraying from planes to combat the nation's worst outbreak of West Nile virus so far this year. Dallas last had aerial spraying in 1966, when more than a dozen deaths were blamed on encephalitis. More than 200 cases of West Nile and 10 deaths linked to the virus have been reported across Dallas County, where officials authorized aerial spraying last week.

State health department statistics show 381 cases and 16 deaths related to West Nile statewide. "The numbers of cases, the number of deaths are remarkable, and we need to sit up and take notice," Rawlings said during a city council briefing. "We do have a serious problem right now." Aerial spraying for mosquitoes could begin Thursday evening, depending on weather conditions. The state health department, which will pay for the $500,000 aerial spraying with emergency funds, has a contract with national spraying company Clarke. Clarke officials have said two to five planes will be used in Dallas County. Dallas City Council members voiced concerns about aerial spraying's health effects on humans and animals. Rawlings said the aerial dosage will be much lower than the dosage used so far during ground spraying. He also said aerial spraying recently has been safely used in California, Massachusetts and New York.

The armyworm outbreak in China's key grain producing areas has posed a major threat to the corn and rice crops this year, authorities said Tuesday. The agriculture ministry has warned the local governments to heed to its pest control advice to ensure grain security, the China Daily reported. "We haven't seen such a pest plague in so many places in almost a decade," a spokesman for the ministry's crop production department said.

To date, at least two million hectares of autumn crops nationwide have been affected. The areas include Hebei, Jilin, Liaoning, Heilongjiang and Shanxi provinces, the Inner Mongolia region and Beijing and Tianjin municipalities. The government will allocate 200 million yuan ($3.5 million) to fight the pests, the official added. - NY Daily

A mysterious disease has killed 68 cows during the last week in Cholistan, a private TV channel reported on Monday.

According to Geo News, the disease, which starts with a light fever that leads to fits in the cattle leading to their death, had killed several dozen animals over the last week.

The channel, citing local residents, said that due to a drought this year, the animals were being forced to drink dirty water. Zoology expert Ali Raza said that dirty water was causing stomach and liver diseases.

Meanwhile, the managing director of the Cholistan Development Authority said that a committee had been formed to investigate the death of the cattle.

A novel avian influenza virus has acquired the ability to infect aquatic mammals and was responsible for an outbreak of fatal pneumonia that recently struck harbor seals in New England, according to scientists at the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, New England Aquarium, USGS National Wildlife Health Center, SeaWorld and EcoHealth Alliance.

Wildlife officials first became concerned in September 2011, when seals with severe pneumonia and skin lesions suddenly appeared along the coastline from southern Maine to northern Massachusetts. Most were infants (less than 6 months), and a total of 162 dead or moribund seals were recovered over the next 3 months.

An invasive insect commonly found in south-central Europe has been detected in southwestern Idaho, marking the first time the elm seed bug has been spotted in the U.S., according to federal officials.

A U.S. Agriculture Department specialist has confirmed the discovery of the pests that officials say don't pose a threat to trees, despite their name - but do tend to enter houses and buildings in huge swarms.

The Idaho Department of Agriculture issued a statement Wednesday warning that the bugs recently found in Ada and Canyon counties can prove to be a "significant nuisance" for homeowners. Elm seed bugs invade homes during the summer to escape heat, and then stick around through the winter, the department said.

The quarter-inch pests, which feed on elm tree seeds and resemble tiny, brown cockroaches with triangular back markings, do not pose a public health risk, officials said. But the bugs can have an unpleasant odor, "especially when crushed," said Pamela Juker, a spokeswoman for the Idaho Agriculture Department.

The south shore of Oahu is being invaded by something strange from sea, that even has sand crabs running for cover.

"It's the first time I've seen this, I've never seen it before," says beach goer Bruce Kuwana.

"It's really weird, it looks like you want to eat it like a little berry," says beach goer Sonya Lake.

"There are probably millions I'd say," says beach goer Scott Paddock.

If you look closely the entire shoreline is dotted with tiny, purple creatures all curled up.

"Looks like it has about it 6 legs on each side," says Lake. "Yeah it's like an avatar crab."

"When something washes up like this you don't know what to expect, maybe Tsunami stuff," says Kuwana.

Last month a virus broke out in several open water salmon farms in British Columbia that has the region's fish farm owners scrambling to mitigate their losses. Called infectious hematopoietic necrosis (IHN), the rabies-like virus was found among salmon in floating net pens belonging to Mainstream Canada, the biggest producer in the region. As a result, B.C. farms culled over 500,000 fish infected with IHN, which spreads rapidly and can kill up to 100 percent of a fish farm's population. And it's just the latest disease scandal to hit the province's salmon farming industry.

Critics of the industry say that the farms should have seen this coming. Their own alarm bells have been ringing ever since Rick Routledge, a professor at Simon Fraser University, claimed that wild sockeye tested by his lab in 2011 showed that another more serious virus, one that causes infectious salmon anemia (ISA), was present in B.C. waters. The government seized his samples and declared through their own testing that the virus was not present (since a verified case of the disease would be treated like other serious outbreaks such as mad cow disease under international convention, this would be devastating to the industry. In 2007, ISA caused a $2 billion loss to the Chilean salmon farming industry, and was found to be imported on Atlantic salmon eggs shipped from Norway).

Diseases like these are suspected by First Nations, activists, and fishing groups to be one cause of the drastic declines among some wild salmon populations that the province has witnessed in recent years. Home to some of the biggest wild salmon runs in the world, B.C.'s provincial government has also welcomed the salmon farming industry eagerly over the years, allowing 100 farms to be established in its waters. But activists charge that the open water pens are often located directly on the migration routes of wild salmon, where, as in the case of Chile, exotic diseases imported with the Atlantic salmon could multiply and spread into surrounding waters.

Hundreds and possibly thousands of open-billed storks have died mysteriously in Ang Thong, triggering fear of a new outbreak of bird flu.

The birds were found dead in open ground behind a deserted factory by the side of the Chamlong-Nong Jik road in tambon Chamlong in Sawangha district after residents noticed that the animals looked drowsy and lay around on the ground, causing a bad stench in the air, the kamnan of Chamlong, Suebsak Waewkaew, said.

Residents alerted authorities who inspect the site twice and then went away, Mr Suebsak said.

He demanded the authorities collect samples of the birds' remains and move quickly to identify the cause of the mass deaths as residents living nearby were worried that bird flu might be involved.

Suthee Srisuwan, head of the provincial natural resources and environment office, said he had instructed experts to launch an investigation into the incident. An initial inspection had found huge numbers of dead birds in two locations. He would not elaborate further other than to say an investigation is underway.