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Although preventable diseases like respiratory infections,
diarrheal diseases, and malaria take the largest proportion
Global Microbial Threats This page is produced by the White House. It contains a lot of information about microbes and emerging diseases, emphasizing both international and domestic problems. Wonderful World of Disease is a quixotic page describing some diseases (e.g., Martha Stewart disease) that are more fashionable than mortal. But it is well designed and offers some useful information in an approachable format. ProMed is probably going to be your primary source of recent information about emerging infectious diseases. This site is big and very comprehensive. Outbreak is a web site devoted to collecting and spreading information about epidemics and diseases worldwide. Outbreak has general information and news about the old and new diseases below. It is easy to be anxious about new diseases that kill rapidly and mysteriously. Emerging diseases such as Ebola, Hantavirus, and Legionnaire's Disease are frightening, but your chances of contracting them are lower than your chances of winning the lottery and being hit by lightning on the same day. This site is an excellent place to explore epidemics. Its map section is especially interesting. Here you can see visual representations of nine different epidemics, both small and large. You can see and compare the spatial differences between Ebola and a really serious epidemic such as the influenza pandemic of 1918. After you have seen clear estimates of the dangers of Ebola, you might want to look at a good example of disease hysteria. The Ebola hysteria web site shows how out of proportion and just plain silly the frenzy over a new disease can get.
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This page created and maintained by James Trostle, Mary Ellen Rodgers,
and Christine Maltese.
Copyright 1998.
of lives worldwide, new and exotic diseases often catch
the headlines instead. Outbreaks of new diseases, and reappearances of familiar
ones, pose new challenges to the health and well being of the world. This
page looks at some of these new and re-emerging diseases. 
Many web pages are devoted to creating or minimizing hysteria
about fashionable diseases. One disease now prominent in the news is Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as Mad Cow Disease.
To see an example of the British government's efforts to control the frenzy
around this disease, take a look at