NEW ORLEANS—It is the height of the social season here. Every year around Mother's Day, emboldened by humidity as dense as wet laundry, tens of thousands of couples, romantically lit by gaslights, descend upon the historic French Quarter to mate.

It is Formosan termite swarm season, a time of year when termite wing cases flutter in the breeze and homeowners wonder if they have stumbled into a 1950s horror film.

Formosan subterranean termites with an insatiable appetite have been devastating the French Quarter, drawn to its moist, porous bricks and centuries-old wood.

The Formosan, the most destructive species of termite in the world, is capable of building colonies of up to 10 million writhing white bugs, which devour an average of 1,000 pounds of wood a year. Native termite colonies, one-tenth the size, eat a meager 7 pounds per year.

An exotic species probably imported in the 1940s in infested planks aboard military cargo ships, the Formosan termite has spread through 11 states, creating an estimated $1 billion a year in damage.

With powerful mandibles, Formosan subterranean termites are more intrusive foragers than their native counterparts, tunneling through plaster, creosote, plastic, asphalt, electrical high-voltage wire, utility poles, even espresso makers, to find food and water.

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras—On the bright yellow wall inside a small orphanage here is an infant’s handprint. When she dies, a nun will paint a tiny red cross beside the hand. Eleven crosses already adorn the wall. Mercy House is a sanctuary for babies and children with AIDS.

The orphanage is a mere footnote in an unfolding tragedy in northern Honduras. The HIV plague, some doctors fear, may soon approach the catastrophe of sub-Saharan Africa. Here AIDS is the second leading cause of death.

Violence is first. The third is motorcycle accidents. To grasp that fully, one must understand that this is a country where gas station attendants sling AK-47’s over their shoulders. The routine traffic safety technique for trucks passing on blind mountain curves at night is to turn off headlights to see if anyone is approaching.

"I believe that this is the worst health epidemic in the history of Central America," said Dr. Carlos Lopez, the executive director of the largest and oldest private anti-AIDS organization in Honduras. "Tuberculosis was bad, but its outbreaks were always controlled quickly. This is the big one, with no cure. And our people don’t have the opportunity to survive. They cannot afford the medicines."

Honduras, a haven for sweatshops and prostitution, a region still reeling economically from Hurricane Mitch’s epic fury 16 months ago, is pathetically poor. Eighty percent of its six million inhabitants live below the poverty line.

Accurate AIDS statistics are hard to come by. Until this year, no one even kept score on reported AIDS patients. Officials and doctors disagree sharply about the numbers.

Lopez, who is president of a coalition of non-government AIDS organizations, figures "there are about 520,000 HIV-positive people in Honduras." Using the statistical models developed in Africa, that is conservative, he said.

AIDS figures are like cockroaches: you multiply by some number for every one you actually see. In Africa they multiply by 60. Lopez thinks that in Honduras you should multiply by 40. "We are finding new cases every single day."

Originally founded in 1995 for ten HIV-positive children, the Heart of Mercy orphanage currently houses twice that number. "Each child makes us realize that every moment is precious and that God has given us this moment to share with others and have joy," said one nun.

"In explaining to the children the concept of living with an illness, we talk about living and dying. All of us will die. They will die from this illness."

A 30-year campaign in Egypt to eradicate a blood parasite went disastrously wrong, causing an epidemic of hepatitis C that now infects up to a fifth of the country’s population, according to research just made public. American and Egyptian epidemiologists, in a report in The Lancet, the British medical weekly, said the hepatitis had been transmitted across the Egyptian population through unsterilized needles and syringes reused in a fight against a blood parasite.

As an instance of a medical campaign spreading blood-borne virus, they said, the case is the world’s most extensive. The campaign against the parasite illness, schistosomiasis, which is widespread in Africa, was conducted across Egypt from the 1950s to the ’80s. But the injections were often administered unsafely, with needles either improperly sterilized or used for multiple doses.

PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa — Doctors scribble notes into patients’ folders while a young man lies nearby on a gurney, dying from AIDS-related tuberculosis. The doctors will not transfer him to a bed in the intensive care unit because of lack of space. "He’s busy dying," says Dr. Iwan Bekker, sweeping past the youth in Dora Nginza Hospital. "Sometimes we have to play God."

The AIDS epidemic is overwhelming South Africa so badly that some public hospitals are turning people away, limiting treatment and forcing doctors to make hard decisions about whom to save.

With an estimated 4 million South Africans—one of every 10 people—already infected with the AIDS virus, the epidemic poses a huge challenge to the country’s public health system.

In the developed world, debates sometimes arise over whether heroic measures should keep a critically ill person alive. In state hospitals in South Africa, as in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, such expensive measures are rarely an option.

"We can’t afford to spend money on people who are going to die," said Karen Michael, a researcher on AIDS at the University of Natal in Durban. "Hospitals are now stretched to capacity. Staffers are working chronic overtime without overtime pay, and they’re having a flood of patients who are not able to look after themselves. It’s pretty bleak."

Tuberculosis, cholera, dengue--they're back, threatening millions of people in the Americas. Once thought virtually eradicated, the diseases have re-emerged for reasons ranging from the development of drug-resistant strains to the mushrooming of vast urban areas with poor sanitation, say the hemisphere's top health officials.

"Drug-resistant strains of microbes are having a deadly impact on the fight against tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, diarrhea and pneumonia (which) together kill more than 10 million people worldwide each year," said Dr. George A. O. Alleyne, director-general of the Pan American Health Organization.

In a 120-page report, Alleyne described the surprising reemergence of diseases like dengue--the highly debilitating and untreatable disease some call "breakbone fever"--that infected 770,000 people in the Americas last year and killed about 100.

"There was a time when a lot of this region was free of (the dengue-carrying) mosquito, but now we find virtually the whole region reinfected," Alleyne said.

Tuberculosis, affecting 400,000 a year in the region, was another concern, "killing 137 people every day."

• Other diseases identified as reemerging in the last decade:
• Cholera, reintroduced to Central and South America following an absence of almost a century.
• Bubonic plague, which has returned to Peru since 1992.
• Hantavirus, a rat-borne disease that was discovered again in the U.S. state of New Mexico.
• Drug-resistant malaria, which has infected a great swath of the Amazon region, attacking entire villages in Guyana.

At least 30 previously unknown diseases have appeared globally since 1973, including HIV-AIDS, Hepatitis C, Ebola hemorrhagic fever and the encephalitis-related Nipah virus that emerged in Indonesia last year, said John Gannon, chairman of the [U.S.] National Intelligence Council. "Many are still incurable," he added. Twenty well-known infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and cholera have reemerged or spread since 1973, some reappearing in "deadlier, drug-resistant forms," Gannon said.