Hundreds of cattle including sheep, goats, cows, buffaloes and camels have died of mysterious diseases in a month in different villages of Kachho area lying between Khirthar mountain range in the west and the plains along the river Indus on the east side.

The villagers told PPI, that animals so far included 700 goats, 300 sheep, 40 cows, 25 buffaloes and 15 camels.

The villagers said that 200 goats, 95 sheep and 3 cows died in Pat Gul Muhammad area of Kachho while 160 goats, 5 cows, 3 buffaloes and 6 camels died in village Raju Dero, Sim and Torr within 20 days.

Similarly, over 175 goats, 7 cows, 3 buffaloes and 4 camels died in village Bari, Heero Khan and surrounding areas.

Thirteen children have died of a mysterious disease in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district during the past five days, officials said Saturday. Of these, five children succumbed in the last 48 hours.

"In the last five days, a total of 13 children have died of a mysterious disease and over 50 children have been admitted to different hospitals," a district health official said.

A.P. Singh, district civil surgeon, told IANS on phone from Muzaffarpur that the cause of the deaths could not be ascertained till now.

"We cannot say what disease led to the death of the children here. The disease is yet to be identified. Whether it is encephalitis or some unknown disease, we can say only after medical reports come," he said.

International horse charity World Horse Welfare has been made aware of two outbreaks of the serious equine disease dourine in Europe. Evidence of the disease has been reported in Catania and Sicily and World Horse Welfare is monitoring the situation closely.

According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which announced the outbreaks, no horses can be exported from Sicily for at least six months, and they recommend that horse owners and keepers of breeding animals understand the clinical signs for dourine. Dourine is a notifiable disease, so if you suspect your horse might have contracted it then you are legally obliged to notify your local Animal Health Office.

Defra reported that one of the affected horses was humanely euthanized while the second was still alive, but critically ill, at the time of notification (27 May 2011).

A widespread wheat plague is threatening farms, raising bread prices and unleashing fresh political and economic unrest, according to experts.

The disease strain has shown up in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and has hiked food prices in the Arab world, Mexico, Haiti and beyond.

"Stem rust, when it goes epidemic, destroys a crop," said Ronnie Coffman, a leading expert on wheat disease and chair of the department of plant breeding and genetics at Cornell University.

"There is nothing left but black stems, zero grain. It is just an absolute devastation," Coffman told the AFP news agency.

The last major epidemic of the fungal disease broke out in 1953 but was quelled with the introduction of a resistant strain of plants in the 1970s, an initiative spearheaded by the late Norman Borlaug.

A new wave of the stem rust fungus, Ug99, turned up in Uganda in 1998, overcoming crops that were once resistant and wielding the potential to kill as much as 90 percent of the world's wheat.

Winds can transport spores as many as 100 miles per day, raising concerns among scientists about where the epidemic could turn up next.

In the small, freshwater streams of South Dakota, a horrible menace is creeping along the rockbeds. Known as rock snot, it's a form of algae that clings to rocks and spreads rapidly until it takes over the entire ecosystem of the stream, often killing off local plants and microbes. The stuff has spread from North America all the way to New Zealand. But what's really weird is that rock snot can grow even in rivers that appear to have almost no nutrients in them at all. What is helping this algae grow so fast? Is it feeding on our fear?

A group of scientists wanted to find out. So they set about studying Didymosphenia geminata (its scientific name), also called Didymo, in one South Dakota waterway called Rapid Creek. What they discovered was that the algae could actually suck extra nutrients from water that appeared to be nutrient-free. And they do it by creating vast bacterial farms beneath the mats of rock snot. Essentially, the algae uses other life forms to create food for it.

A Saudi farmer who went into his barn to take his 300 sheep on their daily pasturing was shocked when he found them all dead, a newspaper in the Gulf Kingdom said on Saturday.

The farm said he checked the sheep an hour earlier and they were all alive in their barn at his far in the western town of Qunfudha.

The unnamed farmer had owned the sheep for years and they were his sole source of living for his family of 16.

When South Australian farmer John Gregory entered his piggery he could not believe what he saw - mice attacking his pigs.

Since he first saw them dining out on his prized stock he has been at his wit's end about how to get rid of them.

Now, as a desperate last resort, he is covering his pigs at a farm property in Wynarka, 130km east of Adelaide, in engine oil to protect them from the mice, with the rodents apparently turned off by the taste.

"The mouse problem got really bad in April," Mr Gregory said.

"We went away in the school holidays and when we came back we drove up the driveway and it looked like the ground was moving - there were hundreds of thousands of them."

Mr Gregory, 50, said he put engine oil on his 15 pigs to protect them from the sun about once a month.

Unpredictable weather coupled with a decline in natural predators is responsible for a recent plague of caterpillars in parts of the country.

Though the phenomenon is centered largely in Probolinggo, East Java, smaller reported outbreaks in Central Java, West Java, Bali and, most recently, Jakarta have prompted fears of a widespread infestation.

But Aunu Rauf, an entomologist at the Bogor Institute of Agricultural (IPB), says there is no connection between the outbreaks in Probolinggo and those in the other areas.

"There are at least 120,000 types of caterpillars in the world, so those found in Bekasi [West Java] and Probolinggo would be different from each other," he told the Jakarta Globe on Wednesday.

"I'm sure the ones in Tanjung Duren [West Jakarta], where people have claimed to have been 'attacked' by caterpillars, are also a different type."

Since March, millions of hairy caterpillars have cropped up in at least five subdistricts in Probolinggo, invading fields and homes. They have also caused itchy rashes among residents.

The Colombo City is facing the worst dengue epidemic ever Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) said yesterday revealing that there had been 195 cases reported this month. CMC which dropped a bomb shell, said in and round the National Hospital Colombo, Military Hospital and vicinity of the Colombo Port had been identified as the major mosquito breeding grounds in the city.

There had been 885 reported dengue cases in the city this year out of which 50 percent is reported to be school children.

Chief Medical Officer CMC Dr. Pradeep Kariyawasam told a news conference yesterday that few doctors attached to the National Hospital Colombo had fell victim to Dengue while the nurses quarters is also found to be a breeding ground. In addition, several Chinese nationals who were working at development projects in Colombo were also infected.

He also warned that new complication of dengue DEN 3 had also raised its head in the city.

Dr. Kariyawasam claimed that the school principals have turned a deaf ear to the repeated requests made by the CMC to keep the schools clean while lack of public support as a whole had been one of the reasons for the epidemic.

He said all school principals in the city had been called for a meeting by the Special Commissioner, CMC, Omar Kamil on Thursday to brief them on the situation.
However, he said the Colombo City only accounts to 7 percent of the country's total number of cases though there is a school of thought that most reported cases are from the capital city. He said the disease had come from elsewhere though there is an idea that the germs had existed within the city itself.

He said the CMC had conducted dengue prevention campaigns but lack of public support, legal impediments have not brought much results.

Another natural phenomenon has hit the Southern States as swarms of cicadas return after 13 years hibernating underground.

Every 13 years the inch-long insects emerge from their underground lairs to plague America's Deep South in a feeding and breeding frenzy.

It adds to the natural phenomena the region has battled with after tornadoes last month and floods in Mississippi this week.

Apart from their intense 120-decibel mating racket and the frustration of finding them in hair, clothes and lunch-boxes, they're completely harmless to humans.