Free Republic

Australian researchers are sounding the alarm over cases of a highly infectious intestinal illness that appear to be resistant to all forms of standard oral antibiotic treatment. The disease is called shigellosis, a form of dysentery. So far, most cases have involved gay and bisexual men in the Australian state of Victoria, the researchers said.

Multidrug-resistant shigellosis, much of it associated with international travel, is spreading in the U.S., the CDC is warning. Over a 9-month period, a strain of Shigella sonnei resistant to several antibiotics caused intestinal illness in 243 people in 32 states and Puerto Rico, the agency said in the April 3 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. ... Working with state and local health officials, CDC disease detectives found 157 such cases had occurred from May 24, 2014, through Feb. 28, 2015, with large clusters in three states -- 45 cases in Massachusetts, 25 in California, and 18 in Pennsylvania....

Some of you may have a Berkey water purifier. It is touted as the best there is. From their wabsite: "Berkey® Systems are the World’s Most Powerful and Cost Effective Personal Water purification Systems Providing Reliable and User-friendly Water Purification in Both Normal and Hostile Filtration Environments." "Moreover, Berkey® systems are capable of purifying both treated water and untreated raw water from such sources as remote lakes, streams, stagnant ponds and water supplies in foreign countries, where regulations may be substandard at best. So powerful, this system is able to remove red food coloring from water without removing the beneficial...

You've heard of the Berkey water purifier, right? It is supposed to be the best of the best. And they charge according to that reputation. For years, that reputation was well deserved. However in 2010, they had a batch of bad filters. The ceramic filter was not properly glued to the plastic base, and this allowed unfiltered water to rush around the filter, rather than through it. They thought they fixed that problem, and released more filters in early to mid 2011, that were also bad. This time, they used an adhesive that sticks to the ceramic element, but doesn't...

North Korea’s armed forces are capable of carrying out 13 kinds of viral and bacterial attack, the South Korean Government said yesterday in one of the most detailed assessments of the dictatorship’s biological weapons arsenal. In a submission to the South Korean National Assembly, the Defence Minister also said that the North had 5,000 tonnes of chemical weapons, believed to include mustard gas, phosgene and sarin. Among its biological agents are cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, typhoid fever and dysentery. Despite the alarming assessment, Kim Tae Young also said that his country’s armed forces had the capacity pre-emptively to destroy...

A glass-sided bus filled with sand, palm trees and bikini-clad beachgoers is roaming the wintry streets of nearly 20 US cities, from New York to Chicago, writes Amy Yee in New York. This is not a hallucination induced by frigid temperatures. It is part of Mexico's marketing campaign to say it is open for visitors after Hurricane Wilma devastated some of the country's important tourist spots. Nearly 90 per cent of international tourists to Mexico last year came from the US and the Mexico Tourism Board has spent $10m (€8.3m, £5.7m) on a campaign primarily aimed at North American visitors....

HAVANA -- A former political prisoner whose case was highlighted by President Bush urged Cuba's government Friday to hold a referendum on whether to change the communist island's political system. In a 10-page report called "The Cuba We Want," Leonardo Bruzon Avila and fellow dissident Carlos Rios Otero called for the referendum and laid out a plan for Cuba's transition to a multiparty, democratic system and free-market economy. The report was delivered Friday to the offices of Cuban Justice Minister Roberto Diaz Sotolongo. There was no public reaction by the President Fidel Castro's government to the recommendations. The proposal echoed...

CORE to hold teach-in, demand end to “Eco-Imperialism”; Greenpeace co-founder to denounce his former colleaguesThe Congress of Racial Equality, one of America’s premier civil rights organizations, will convene a teach-in on Tuesday, January 20, at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers, to condemn the global green movement’s oppression of poor people in the Third World. “The environmental movement I helped found has lost its objectivity, morality and humanity,” says Greenpeace co-founder and conference panelist Dr. Patrick Moore. “The pain and suffering it inflicts on families in developing countries can no longer be tolerated.” Moore will be one of eight...

TOKYO - A self-confessed Japanese war criminal called on the government to apologise for testing biological weapons on thousands of Chinese prisoners yesterday in advance of a legal ruling on the activities of a germ warfare unit during the second world war Yoshio Shinozuka, a veteran of the top-secret Unit 731, told reporters he had done what no man should do in developing bubonic plague viruses and conducting vivisections on captives near Harbin in China. "These human beings were called logs. We said we have chopped one log, two logs," the frail and bespectacled 78-year-old said. "This unit cruelly murdered...