A century before Ebola, SARS, or avian flu began making head-lines, another invisible killer was carving a swath of death and fear across the Russian Empire: the plague.

Brad Fitzpatrick"We've got skinks. A lot of different skinks," notes Mike Osborn, an inspector with the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) in Los Angeles. It is a small shipment: about 1,000 gecko-like lizards from Egypt, packed in what appears to be squirmy pillowcases thumb-tacked to the sides of thin wooden crates. Osborn methodically opens the sacks to check whether they indeed hold skinks as it says on the manifest. They do: 25, 50, 75 per bag.Far from the familiar bustle of LAX's passeng

UNEXPECTED ROUTES:Top: Courtesy of Thomas Strömberg; Bottom: Courtesy of David J. Jefferies http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/D.Jefferies/bird/Any time animals are brought together in unnatural densities, it raises the potential for disease disaster. Bullfrogs, mass farmed in South America, are shipped to the United States without disease inspection. Their discarded skins might spread amphibian fungal plagues. Outbreaks of House Finch conjunctivitis and salmonellosis in song birds have sp

Click to view a PDF of the virus' spread across the U.S. (244K) Humans, birds, and mosquitoes propelled the spread of West Nile Virus in the US from coast to coast in less than four years. Various secondary cycles played a part as well. (see West Nile: The Virus that Came to Stay) Map adapted from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data; other information compiled by Janet Ginsburg (jgstories@yahoo.com). function sendData() { document.frm.pathName.value = location.pathname; re

Last April, about a week after the snow finally melted in central Minnesota, Casey, a five-year-old mare near the small town of Brainerd, became a statistic - the first horse to die of West Nile virus in 2003. "That worried us since it was so early in the season," says David Neitzel, epidemiologist with the state's health department. Seven horses died in the area the previous year, but it was not considered a hot spot. "This virus can pick up where it left off," notes Neitzel. In 2003, West