How political neglect lets an epidemic of blindness go unchecked

By Russell Skelton, The Age

HUGH Taylor's war on trachoma began 35 years ago. As a young doctor, he travelled the red dirt roads of the Tanami Desert in a beat-up Land Rover with the late Fred Hollows dispensing medical help to an estimated 10,000 Aboriginal men, women and children with the catastrophic eye disease.

Dengue, aka “Breakbone Fever,” Is Back

By Maryn McKenna, Slate


In the autumn of 1885, people in Austin, Texas, began to feel sick. One after another, they developed a chill and then a soaring fever. They vomited and broke out in rashes. Their most distinctive symptom was agonizing pain behind their eyes and in the bones of their arms and legs. And when the fever subsided, lack of appetite and deep exhaustion left them unable to work for weeks or months.