America's pork industry has been gripped by an outbreak of porcine diarrhea since mid-May, the first appearance of the condition in North America. US farmers have reported 768 cases of the disease, known as porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), through the first week of October, which implies that many more thousands of animals could be affected.

Although the disease is not transferable to humans, it has been devastating for the US pork industry. It causes severe "watery diarrhea and vomiting in nursing pigs," according to information from the US's National Pork Board. Almost all the piglets who get the disease die because of it, and farmers are reportedly filling "wheelbarrows of dead piglets."

Now researchers at the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech say they've traced the virus back to eastern China's Anhui province. Anhui is one of China's major pig-farming areas, home to companies like the fast-growing Anhui Antai Agricultural Industry Group, which slaughtered 500,000 pigs last year.

Pinpointing the origin of the virus isn't going to provide much reassurance to US farmers. Years after it spread in China, it still hasn't been controlled.

The largest of the wildfires wreaking havoc across New South Wales was started by the Australian military, investigators have found.

One man has died and more than 200 homes destroyed in the country's most populous state since Thursday as a result of more than 100 different fires.

Investigators were called after reports that the biggest of them, near the city of Lithgow to the west of Sydney, started at around the same time as the army was performing training exercises.

Today, the Rural Fire Service issued a statement which said the blaze "was started as a result of live ordnance exercises" at an army range.

Though it has not caused any deaths or injuries, as the single biggest fire it has burned through 47,000 hectares (180 square miles) of land and destroyed a number of homes. It was only downgraded from the highest emergency category this morning.

The Australian Defence Department said it would not comment further on the fire service investigators' findings, but it had previously confirmed it was engaged in exercises at the time and has been carrying out its own inquiries.

Moose die-off, this is a term that is not going away anytime soon as moose are disappearing at an alarming rate across North America. This moose-die off is seen in several northern states where ticks are prevalent and according to the N.Y. Times on Oct. 14, moose have been found with over 100,000 ticks on them.

According to the Northern Wild website, moose are testing positive for Lyme disease.While climate change is considered a variable in the moose-die off, it is also a factor in the amount of ticks you will find during any given year. Ticks thrive when the weather is warmer.

The winter tick is one of several types of ticks found on animals in the wild, and according to the website, Moose in Minnesota, this state is one of the states seeing the moose die-off, the moose population are visibly suffering from the ticks.

This is seen with moose that are missing massive spots of fur, as they have tried to remove the ticks from their bodies by rubbing up against trees. While a few ticks sucking the blood of a moose doesn't lead to much blood loss, but a hundred thousand ticks sucking blood can leave the moose with substantial blood loss.

The winter tick, found on moose, take their final blood meal in the spring, a time when the moose are at their weakest from a winter of very little food. According to Lymedisease.org, a moose calf can lose their entire blood supply from ticks, killing them.

Lymedisease.org reports researchers blaming climate change for the population explosion in ticks. This is because ticks live longer when it is warmer and "reproduce in greater numbers if there's less snow on the ground by spring."

British scientists believe they have found small bugs from outer space in the Earth's atmosphere.

Tiny organisms were discovered by University of Sheffield experts on a research balloon they had sent 27 kilometres into the atmosphere during last month's Perseids meteor shower. The microscopic bugs were detected when the balloon landed back on the ground in Wakefield, West Yorkshire in England.

But the scientists insist the samples could not have been carried from the Earth's surface into the stratosphere - the second layer of our atmosphere, which stretches up to 50 kilometres from the ground. Strict tests were taken to avoid any contamination, they said.

Professor Milton Wainwright, who led the team, said: 'Most people will assume that these biological particles must have just drifted up to the stratosphere from Earth, but it is generally accepted that a particle of the size found cannot be lifted from Earth to heights of, for example, 27 kilometres.

'The only known exception is by a violent volcanic eruption, none of which occurred within three years of the sampling trip.' He went on: 'We can only conclude that the biological entities originated from space.

'Our conclusion then is that life is continually arriving to Earth from space, life is not restricted to this planet and it almost certainly did not originate here.' The findings are to be published in the Journal of Cosmology.

'If life does continue to arrive from space then we have to completely change our view of biology and evolution,' Prof Wainwright added. 'New textbooks will have to be written.'

He said further 'crucial' tests on the samples are planned and researchers will carry out further experiments during a meteor shower in October.

Globally, great fear has been generated by the CDC Director's recent description of a "Nightmare Bacteria" resistant to all medications, capable of killing 1 in every 2 people whose blood becomes infected with it. But isn't the primary problem that the drugs aren't working, and that natural medical solutions are needed now more than ever?

According to a recent CDC report titled, Lethal, Drug-resistant Bacteria Spreading in U.S. Healthcare Facilities, drug-resistant germs called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriacea, or CRE, are on the rise and resistant to all, or nearly all of the antibiotics within the conventional drug armamentarium.

The CDC describe CRE bacteria as a "triple threat":

• Resistance: CRE are resistant to all, or nearly all, the antibiotics we have - even our most powerful drugs of last-resort.
• Death: CRE have high mortality rates - CRE germs kill 1 in 2 patients who get bloodstream infections from them.
• Spread of disease: CRE easily transfer their antibiotic resistance to other bacteria. For example, carbapenem-resistant klebsiella can spread its drug-destroying weapons to a normal E. coli bacteria, which makes the E.coli resistant to antibiotics also. That could create a nightmare scenario since E. coli is the most common cause of urinary tract infections in healthy people.

Tom Fieden, MD, MPH, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, generated quite a bit of alarm by referring to CRE as "nightmare bacteria":

CRE are nightmare bacteria. Our strongest antibiotics don't work and patients are left with potentially untreatable infections. Doctors, nurses, hospital leaders, and public health, must work together now to implement CDC's "detect and protect" strategy and stop these infections from spreading. [emphasis added]

'Nightmare Bacteria' or Rude Intellectual Awakening?

Truly this is a lesson in humility for the conventional medical system, and if the situation really is a "nightmare" as the CDC's Director describes, it will probably result in waking quite a few folks up, who despite appearing to have been awake were actually slumbering -- at least in the intellectual sense.

Sewer rats and mice that are resistant to common rat poisons have been found in four locations across Sweden, confirming long-held suspicions about why common anti-rodent agents seemed ineffective.

Pest control experts have theorized that rats and mice in various parts of Sweden had developed some sort of immunity to commonly deployed rat poisons. Now their suspicions have been confirmed.

The results of 80 random tests performed across the country by Swedish extermination company Anticemex revealed poison-proof rats and mice in four locations: Kristianstad in the south; Linköping and Växjö in south central Sweden; and Uppsala in eastern Sweden.

Pest control expert Håkan Kjellberg with Anticemex said chemicals are likely to blame for the rodents having developed immunity to rat poison.

"It may have been rat poison, but also chemicals in their immediate environment that have caused the genetic makeup in their body to change," he told Sveriges Radio (SR).

According to SR, rats that are resistant to poisons have been found in many other countries, including Denmark, but this Anticemex study is the first to confirm the phenomena in Sweden.

The company said it may now be forced to resort to more potent poisons in more cases in order to keep Sweden's rodent population in check.

Emporia - A disease is killing dogs across Lyon County and veterinarians do not know what it is. Vets at Kansas State University are working with the Emporia Animal Shelter to find out.

Dozens of dogs that seemed to be healthy quickly became deathly ill at the shelter. "We're in the process now of hoping it's not some virus that we're not aware of ... some new form of distemper or this new circle virus that's been reported around the country," said Emporia veterinarian Floyd Dorsey.

Dorsey thinks it started with dogs found wandering out in the country that were picked up and brought to the shelter. "We've been trying to contain it since then and each time we think it's contained, it seems to break out again," said Dorsey.

In the coastal redwoods of central California, scientists trying to unravel the mystery surrounding the reproductive problems of dozens of endangered condors think they have uncovered the culprit: the long-banned pesticide DDT.

Kelly Sorenson, executive director of Ventana Wildlife Society and a co-author of a new study on Big Sur-area condors, says researchers who spent six years studying their reproductive problems have "established a strong link" to DDT in the birds' food: dead sea lions.

The peer-reviewed paper is being published this month in the University of California journal The Condor.

The soaring scavengers were reintroduced to Big Sur in 1997 after a century-long absence and quickly started eating dead marine mammals, whose blubber often has high levels of DDT, a pesticide banned in 1972.

Coronavirus has claimed two lives in Saudi Arabia and one in Qatar, bringing total number of fatalities globally to 50.

Two women have died of the coronavirus MERS in Saudi Arabia, the health ministry said, bringing the total number of fatalities in the kingdom to 44.

The victims were identified on Saturday as a 41-year-old health sector worker in Riyadh and a 79-year-old woman who suffered from chronic illnesses and who came into contact with a patient stricken by the virus in the northeastern city of Hafr Al Baten.

Meanwhile, a Qatari man has also died from the virus, becoming the second fatality from the SARS-like virus to be recorded in the Gulf state, a health authority said on Saturday.

The people of Colcord, Oklahoma, might need something a little stronger than Brita filters to remove the impurities from their drinking water. Blood worms -- small, red insect larvae -- have been appearing in water glasses and filters in the rural town.

Authorities have warned Colcord's 800 residents not to drink, cook with or brush their teeth with the worm-infested tap water. Schools in the area have been closed since Tuesday as officials try to figure out where the bright-red creatures came from and how long it will take to get rid of them.