5.8 quake hits south of New Zealand; no reports of injury or damage

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A strong earthquake struck in the ocean southwest of New Zealand late Tuesday, the U.S. Geological Survey reported, but police said they had no immediate reports of injury or damage. The agency did not mention any tsunami alert.

The quake, which registered magnitude 5.8, struck at 11:35 p.m. (6:35 a.m. ET), and was located 165 miles west of the uninhabited sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands and 506 miles southwest of the city of Dunedin on New Zealand's South Island, the geological service said. The epicenter was 6.3 miles below the surface, the USGS said.

Strong quake hits Papua New Guinea

SYDNEY (AFP) - A strong earthquake with a magnitude of up to 6.8 has struck the New Britain region of Papua New Guinea, sparking a tsunami warning in a region recently shaken by a violent volcanic eruption.

The US-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre warned regional authorities Tuesday to stay alert after reporting the temblor -- which it rated at 6.8 -- struck to the south of the island of New Britain in the Solomon Sea at 0125 GMT.

"Earthquakes of this size sometimes generate local tsunamis that can be destructive along coasts located within 100 kilometres (60 miles) of the earthquake epicentre," the bulletin warned.

Hawaii asseses quake damage; power restored

HONOLULU — Electric power was restored across Hawaii on Monday as state and federal officials looked for signs of damage a day after the strongest earthquake in two decades rocked the Hawaiian islands.
The quake that struck near Kailua Kona on the island of Hawaii on Sunday morning was revised upward a notch in strength to 6.7, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

More than 60 aftershocks struck the islands, the strongest registering 6.0 — itself big enough to be considered a strong earthquake.

At least four dead as severe storms pound Texas and Louisiana

Unrelenting rains in Southeast Texas turned highway feeder roads into rivers, yards into moats and cars into death traps on Monday.
The skies teased residents with brief, sporadic cessations of the downpours, but driving rain characterized most of the overcast, soppy day.

Some people returning to work from the weekend got stranded in their commute. LBJ Hospital sent vans to a nearby Whataburger to pick up two dozen employees who were unable to get past flooded streets. Other people gave up on their stalled cars and gave public transportation a shot.

For at least four people, the storms were fatal.

China to remove cattle to combat "snail fever"

BEIJING, Oct 17 (Reuters) - China may have finally found an answer to control "snail fever", an age-old disease caused by a parasite that leaves people so weak they are unable to work, a senior Chinese health official said.

"Snail fever", or schistosomiasis, is a neglected tropical disease affecting developing countries and victims suffer fever, abdominal pain, cough, diarrhoea, fatigue and distended bellies in advanced stages of the illness.

Although there are effective drugs, people get infected repeatedly because they are constantly exposed to the parasite, which thrives in paddy fields, freshwater lakes and rivers.

China's answer to the problem comes in removing cattle -- a key host -- from the lifecycle of the culprit parasite, called schistosomes. Humans are also ideal hosts of the parasite.

Scientists who carried out studies have proposed that farmers rely more on tractors than cattle to till the land to prevent the spread of the disease.

"One cow can infect 15 people, we want to control the population of (working) cattle," Hao Yang, deputy director general of the bureau of diseases prevention and control at the Ministry of Health, told Reuters in an interview.

Infected humans and cattle shed the parasite in their stools, which in turn infect freshwater snails in paddy fields and lakes. The snails then shed larvae, called cercariae, which are well-adapted to infecting mammals -- by tunnelling through the tiny pores on their skin.

Some 840,000 people suffer from the disease in China. The liver and the spleen malfunction and victims are unable to expel waste, thereby causing the stomach to bloat up.

"It is particularly serious in the provinces of Hubei, Hunan, Anhui, Jiangxi and Jiangsu. Some places in Sichuan and Yunnan are also hit," Hao saiD.

In a 12-month pilot project in Nanchang district in southeastern Jiangxi province in May 2005, the government persuaded farmers in three villages to give up some 1,000 working cattle in exchange for tractors and cash.

BURUNDI: Cholera breaks out in Bujumbura

BUJUMBURA, 17 October (IRIN) - Health officials in Burundi have moved to control an outbreak of cholera in the capital, Bujumbura, and the surrounding Bujumbura Rural Province, where a total of 90 cases of the disease have been recorded, an official said on Tuesday.

The Health Ministry has launched a campaign to spray households of those affected in a bid to prevent the spread of the disease. No deaths have so far been reported.

"All the affected people who manage to reach health centres are attended to free of charge," Dr Patrice Barasukana, the health manager for Bujumbura Rural, said.

The health manager of Bujumbura city, Dismas Nduwimana, said 76 cases had so far been recorded while Barasukana said 13 cases had been reported in the province.

Efforts to control the disease include mobilising health teams to ensure rules of hygiene were being observed in the affected areas, Barasukana said. Meetings to assess the magnitude of the situation were also being held. "The major challenge is lack of water in our health centres," he said, adding that this was likely to exacerbate the situation.

Health officials were also providing anti-cholera drugs in the city as well as in the province to curb the spread of the outbreak.

Nduwimana said besides the lack of clean water, consumption of food prepared in the street had contributed to the cholera outbreak.

Some of the patients had started to leave health centres after receiving medical care.

HIV complicates Africa's "super TB" threat says WHO

PRETORIA, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Highly drug-resistant tuberculosis could become a major killer in AIDS-hit parts of Africa where governments have been slow to roll out TB control programmes, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.

Urgent efforts are underway to redirect donor funds to fight virulent strains of TB, known as extremely drug resistant or XDR-TB, after an outbreak in South Africa that has killed at least 74 people since January 2005.

Most of those cases were among HIV-positive people whose immune systems were already weakened by the AIDS virus.

"The XDR-TB crisis will not in most parts of the world be solved unless HIV is properly considered. We have for now been paying lip service," Teguest Guerma, of the HIV department of WHO, told health officials at a TB workshop in Johannesburg.

"Underlying HIV will add significant challenges to the clinical response." Tuberculosis is the leading killer of AIDS patients and both diseases are on the rise in southern Africa.

Tuberculosis could have a disastrous impact in sub-Saharan Africa -- the hardest hit region in the global AIDS epidemic -- which has a poor health infrastructure.

The best way to fight the dual problems of HIV/AIDS and TB is to overlap strategies to combat them, said experts.

A big hurdle is that no new medical antibiotics for TB have been developed in four decades and it will be at least 2020 before new treatments are widely available.

It could also be difficult to attract new funds as the $4.7 billion required by the Global Plan to Stop TB each year consistently comes up short, said officials.

Houston swamped as storm moves east

HOUSTON - The unrelenting rain that flooded southeast Texas, killing four motorists and sweeping two children down a drainage ditch, moved into Tennessee with less of a punch early Tuesday, headed for the East Coast.

The heaviest rainfall Tuesday morning was in the Chattanooga area, where about 1.5 inches of rain fell, well short of the 10 inches that swamped parts of Houston on Monday, said National Weather Service forecaster Shawn O’Neill in Morristown, Tenn.

Radar showed 50 mph wind gusts in the higher elevations of the Great Smoky Mountains along on the Tennessee-North Carolina line.

“It’s scary looking at all this water like this. It concerns me a whole lot,” Charles Smith said as he looked at his submerged front yard south of Houston on Monday. “If we get any more rain, it will be in my house.”

Three more deaths tied to Buffalo snowstorm
Work to restore power 'ranks among the most significant we've ever had'


Tree trimming contractors haul branches towards a wood chipper at Buffalo State University in Buffalo, N.Y., on Sunday. Downed trees and branches have taken power lines with them, causing outages to nearly 400,000 homes and businesses at one point.

BUFFALO, N.Y. - The death toll has climbed to six from last week's record-setting snowstorm here, as tens of thousands continue to cope without power.

Three deaths have been blamed on carbon-monoxide poisoning from a generator. Three others died earlier in the storm, which dumped up to two feet of snow on Buffalo and the surrounding area last Thursday and Friday.

The mayor of Buffalo says some community warming centers were filled to capacity Monday as about 195-thousand customers remained in the dark.

"This is certainly a storm and restoration effort that ranks among the most significant we've ever had," Bianchetti said.

Australia sees severe drought, water shortages
'It's the worst in a century,' prime minister says

SYDNEY - Worsening drought has pitched bone-dry rural Australia into a recession, its riverbeds cracked and empty.

Firefighters said Australia was facing an extreme fire danger a month before the start of summer, with hundreds of blazes in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia last week.

Prime Minister John Howard said the drought was the worst in 100 years and would eat into the country’s economic growth.

“It’s the worst in a century,” he said. “I would expect this drought to leave a very big impression on the Australian psyche.”

But the rural crisis is not merely environmental and financial. With many farmers debt-laden and being forced off the land, there are concerns that rural suicides may rise.

“We can expect a lot of pressure, particularly on rural families as they juggle drought and debt,” said Christopher Pyne, parliamentary secretary for health and aging.

“So suicide is going to be very much an important issue in the months and years ahead,” Pyne told reporters last week.

Warning over global bird flu plan

"We cannot expect to vaccinate more than 14% of the world's population within a year of pandemic."

Lead author of the study, Lori Uscher-Pines, said resources would need rationing if there was a flu pandemic.

"We learned that individual countries have not consistently prioritised population groups for vaccines and antivirals.

"No countries prioritised population groups to receive ventilators, face masks and other critical resources," she said.