Click here for our free newsletter. By Joannie Schrof Fischer From New York to Boston, residents are being urged to stay indoors while trucks spray insecticides through the streets to ward off outbreaks of West Nile fever, a mosquito-spread disease that last summer sickened dozens and killed seven. Last week, mosquitoes harboring the imported virus were found in Central Park, and infected birds dropped from the sky in New Jersey and Massachusetts. No one knows how the tropical virus entered the United States. It can cause meningitis and encephalitis, and kills fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 infected people.
Activists object that the spraying is overkill, harming as many people as the disease does.
More foreign diseases may stage attacks. Ford will create a gasoline-electric model of its Escape, and make other models lighter, sleeker, and more efficient. The move is driven as much by demand as by social responsibility, and other companies will soon follow Ford's lead. DaimlerChrysler AG may soon make a gas-electric model of its Dodge Durango. In a move to prevent the wrongly convicted from wasting away in prison, prosecutors in southern California are offering free DNA testing to any prisoner who could be cleared by the results.