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INFANT MORTALITY

Baby girls in India are twice as likely to die from treatable diseases such as diarrhoea as baby boys, say doctors based in Delhi and New Delhi. They compared causes of infant death in records collected by midwives at a community hospital in Delhi (British Medical Journal, vol 327, p 126). A majority of victims of sudden unexplained deaths were girls, with 13 girls dying for every 10 boys. However, death rates for less treatable diseases such as septicaemia were similar for both sexes. Prenatal sex tests were outlawed in India in 1994.

NO NEW NETSCAPE

There are to be no new versions of the Netscape web browser, the software that helped fuel the web’s stellar rise in the mid-1990s. The news follows the decision by Netscape’s owner, America Online (AOL), to make redundant 50 developers working on updating the Netscape software. A legal settlement with competitor Microsoft gives AOL little reason to continue developing Netscape. AOL won $750 million in damages from Microsoft and agreed to license Microsoft’s dominant browser, Internet Explorer, for seven years.

WILDLIFE OFF THE MENU

China’s government has banned 1800 species of wild animal from Chinese menus in Beijing, in a bid to stop the virus that causes SARS from spreading in food. The ban follows the discovery last month by Hong Kong scientists that masked palm civets from Guangdong province – where SARS originated – had antibodies to the virus, and so might be carriers. The ban could end a centuries-long Chinese tradition of eating wild animals, including snakes, civets, pangolins, turtles, sparrows, mynah birds and peacocks.