Between 2003 and 2004, Marion Le, a Canberra-based lawyer, made regular trips to the remote island of Nauru in the South Pacific. But she wasn't going for a beach holiday. At the time, Nauru was part of the so-called Pacific Solution, Australia's policy of processing and detaining asylum seekers arriving by boat in offshore detention facilities. From 2001 to 2007, thousands of asylum seekers were in offshore detention centers while Australian immigration officials decided their fate. Le, who ...

LORI CROWN THOUGHT she was doing the right thing last year when she moved to a dryer climate in Bakersfield, California, after being plagued by asthma attacks during her six years in Hawaii. A few months later, Crown, 35, was suffering from severe headaches, a prolonged fever of 102 degreesF, swollen feet and painful bumps on her hands and legs. The diagnosis: "valley fever," or coccidioidomycosis, a dust-borne disease caused by the microscopic spores of a fungus, Coccidioides immitis. As ...

It's mid-March in Muzaffarpur, and the lychee trees are almost in bloom in this remote corner of northern India. When the flowering begins, beekeepers like Manoj Kumar Singh will take their hive boxes to the edges of the nearby orchards, leaving their bees to produce the region's renowned lychee honey. Beekeeping is a tradition in Muzaffarpur, and for decades, so was poverty. "If you had guests, you'd wonder, How are we even going to offer them a cup of tea?" ...

The nervous system is somehow involved in so many diseases and disorders, from fleeting, no-account headaches to crippling paralyses, that doctors are often at a loss to know what part of the patient to treat first. Some forms of liver disease, for example, cause emotional disturbances that can be mistaken for mental illness or signs of brain damage. Merely to diagnose many cases in which the nervous system is involved takes an almost infinite variety of sensitive electronic devices. Treatment ...

Imagine what it must be like to stroll down a street and then suddenly lurch like a drunkard. To see double images of a coffee cup, a friend's face, a newspaper. To feel dizzy because rooms seem to spin like merry-go-rounds. The onset of such symptoms 10 years ago sent Chicago sales representative Suzanne Arens, now 39, stumbling to a neurologist. The diagnosis: multiple sclerosis. "It was devastating," she recalls. "The disease progressed to where I would have an attack ...

Among the top Nazis, Heinrich Himmler was the leading racial fanatic. As Reichsfuhrer and SS chief, he personally set up the Lebensborn program in 1935 to turn the German population into a superrace through selective breeding. Thousands of carefully selected German women were encouraged to have intercourse with SS men, who were presumed to be among the racial as well as the political elite. Once pregnant, the women were signed into one of twelve special maternity centers, where they received lavish medical and personal care. When one ...

You've heard or read the headlines: that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is deadlier than AIDS; that the killer bug is alarmingly more widespread than anyone thought; that it's in your kids' locker rooms and at your gym. Stories abound of young high-school athletes becoming infected with MRSA and dying within weeks, and you're starting to worry about whether that nick or scrape you just got could be your last. So here's what you really need to know. Yes, ...

The Great Recession turned out to be quite good at keeping troubled unions together. Divorce rates fell every year in America during the economic downturn. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks marriage statistics, there were 63,550 fewer divorces in America in 2009 than there were in 2006. Numbers aren't out for 2010, but divorce lawyers and marriage counselors say 2010 was likely the first year since the financial crisis that more couples ...

The west side of Killeen, Texas is like countless other places in America's heartland, freshly carved out of prairie pastures with wide streets in bucolic neighborhoods like "Sunflower Estates" and "Bridgewood." But on a glorious cloudless fall day, the flags at the home sales center nearby are at half mast in honor of the 13 fallen at Ft. Hood, victims of a gunman whose deadly attack was stopped thanks to a petite, long-haired blonde mom from the neigborhood. ...

Swine flu vaccines are rolling out this month -- finally. Health-care workers in Indiana and Tennessee were the first to get the nose-spray version, while New Yorkers clamoring for the H1N1 vaccine finally had their chance too. However, the onslaught of information about H1N1 -- be it playground rumors, employer signs telling you to cover your cough, memos from your kids' school, or scary-sounding news reports -- is making it pretty hard to figure out what you should be doing ...