Baby Elisa Chomane lies on a sweat-drenched hospital sheet, a reedy cry coming from her occasionally as she tosses and turns in the grip of a malarial fever that has been worsening for days.

Her mother, Amelia, stands by the bedside praying that her 21-month-old infant will survive the debilitating disease which kills a child every 30 seconds, a death toll that far exceeds that of AIDS.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says up to 500 million people suffer from acute malarial infection each year, with Africa bearing the brunt of the disease with more than 90 percent of the cases.

"Unlike most other major diseases in the world, malaria is spreading," the WHO says in recently-released documents on an initiative by Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland to roll back the disease.

Mozambican health authorities say that at any given time up to 70 percent of the country's 18.5 million people are infected.

While the global geographical area affected by malaria has shrunk over the past 50 years, the WHO says control is becoming increasingly difficult and gains are being eroded by the emergence of multi-drug resistant strains of the plasmodium parasite that causes the disease.

The costs to the health system and the economy are enormous. David Nabarro, leader of a team appointed for the WHO's Roll Back Malaria program based in Geneva, said the economic cost, in days lost to malaria, could be as high as eight to 10 percent of a country's gross domestic product.

Insect of the Year for the year 2000 may be the millennium bug. But in the shady gardens of northern Johannesburg, 1999 belongs to the real thing, the tiny scourge known as the Parktown prawn.

Johannesburg is rife with stories of locals who have leapt shrieking from their beds, flung shoes out windows and nearly crashed their cars, all because they found themselves mandible to mandible with a big orange wiggly-antennaed, barbed-leg prawn.

"The males have very large jaws, and the females have big, scimitar-shaped ovipositors, so they're quite fierce-looking," said Caroline Crump, curator of the zoology museum at the University of the Witwatersrand. "And if they're cornered, they may jump at you."

The prawn's tough hide makes it newspaper- and slipper-resistant. At up to three inches long (7.5 cm.), it has enough body mass to shake off most household insecticides--the first shot just makes it more jumpy. Worst of all, when threatened, it empties its bowels of a noxious black effluvium that disgusts predators and people alike.

In truth, Libanasidus vittatus is no prawn. It is a king cricket. But no one is blasé about them. The squeamish scream. The first human words heard by most prawns intrepid enough to explore houses are "Eww, gross!"

Jenny Crwys-Williams, a talk show host on Radio 702, occasionally encourages listeners to call in and describe their worst prawn days. A disturbing number of her listeners describe moments in which their first realization that they weren't alone in the bathroom was a faint tickling sensation on their bare bottoms.

The growing problem of pesticide resistance means an increasing number of mites and beetles are turning up in cereal-based foods. In a new study reported in New Scientist, the little creatures were detected in bread, biscuits and baby food.

The study was conducted by Ken Wildey and colleagues at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food's Central Science Laboratory in York. The team studied grain from 279 commercial stores. Eighty-one percent of the grain stores contained mites and 27 percent contained beetles.

The public will be most alarmed to hear that in the testing of 567 cereal-based food products--including flour, bread, breakfast cereals and biscuits--about a fifth were shown to contain mites.

"The detection level was set at one mite per 20 grams of foodstuff, so I guess that measures up to 75 mites in a bag of flour," Wildey told the BBC.

"They are very tiny, they're almost invisible to the naked eye, they're less than half-a-millimeter long, they're soft-bodied, they're slightly hairy--they're just little blobs."

It is possible that dead mites could trigger allergic reactions in sensitized people, but, in general, the creatures presented no major health risk, he said.

A tropical virus that has killed dozens of people in Malaysia is the first of its kind and virologists are stumped as to how it spreads, an American health official said.

Nine scientists from the U.S. and other experts from Australia, Taiwan and Japan arrived in Malaysia several weeks ago to help the Southeast Asian country determine the nature of the virus believed to be spreading from pigs to humans. The outbreak has killed 90 people.

"This is a new, previously unrecognized virus found in humans," Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta told The Associated Press. "This virus has never been seen before."

"We don't know if it's highly infectious. We don't know how people are being infected," Skinner said. "It doesn't appear, right now, that this is being transmitted from person to person, but we're still not going to rule that out."

Local medical authorities confirmed Monday an outbreak of bubonic plague in Namibia's populous north-central region that has killed three of the 73 people with the disease. Dr. Naftali Hamata of the Namibian health ministry said tests done at the South African Institute for Medical Research last week showed that six of 11 samples sent for analysis proved positive for bubonic plague. He said the other five cases may also still prove positive, but more testing must be done. "Even though not all of them are confirmed to have the disease, we are taking no chances and testing everyone," he said.

Bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe between 1346 and 1351, wiping out nearly one-third of the population. The disease is transmitted by fleas infecting rats which in turn infect humans. If left untreated, it can kill within three to five days. Today, it is easily treatable by powerful modern antibiotics.

Hamata said his ministry suspected the outbreak was caused by young cattle herders who came into contact with rats carrying the virus while hunting them for food. Outbreaks of the disease in the area have been reported since the early 1960s, Hamata said. "We are having all the affected homesteads in the area sprayed (with pesticide) at the moment, but you have to catch every rat to be sure it is gone," he said.

AP reported that the death toll from a meningitis outbreak has risen to nearly 1,500 in the past week. More than 20,000 people have been infected since the outbreak in December, the Akhbar Al-Yom daily quoted the Sudanese health minister as saying. The British Red Cross recently warned that more than 1 million people in the eastern Sudan are at risk of infection. Meningitis epidemics in the region usually begin during the dry season from December to February and sometime last more than a year. The disease is fatal in 50 percent to 80 percent of cases if left untreated.