When the economy gets tough, the tough make meth. Or so it seems. The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader's Bill Estep reports that the number of meth labs in Kentucky has jumped over the last 18 months, as meth "cookers" have found ways to circumvent laws meant to limit production. Kentucky, like may other states, passed a law in 2005 aimed at limiting access to an ingredient needed to make the addictive drug. (Have you tried to buy a cold medicine recently?) As states have placed monthly limits on how many cold or allergy pills an individual can purchase, meth producers have recruited small armies of buyers to buy drugs containing pseudoephedrine, which is used to produce methamphetamine. "It's like anything else — give them two or three years, and they'll find ways around it," one agent told Estep.

The U.S. placed limits on the exports of pseudoephedrine to Mexico, where meth "superlabs" were built. This has slowed production south of the border, but, in turn, that has increased production here, according to Estep. Meth producers have also figured out how to produce the drug in a two-liter soda bottle.

There are still many states without restrictions on cold medicines. None of the states bordering Kentucky have limits on the sales of drugs containing pseudoephedrine. Kentucky law enforcement officials say a national law is needed. Meanwhile, the number of meth labs discovered in Kentucky fell from 604 in 2004 to 302 in 207, but then increased to 405 in 2008.

Living in a rural community is no protection against the spread of an infectious disease, according to researchers at Kansas State University. In fact, closer ties among rural residents may help to spread a contagion more efficiently and more widely, according to computer models developed by the KSU engineers.

Urban residents are less likely to interact with sick neighbors and are therefore less likely to either contract or to spread the disease. In rural communities, the researchers found in a survey they conducted, the number of people who would be willing to visit others during a major disease epidemic is double that of urban areas. In cities, people may have more informal contact with many people, but close contact with few. "In a rural setting, you're maybe more likely to watch out for all of your neighbors, and your neighbors may also be your uncles, aunts and other family members," one of the researchers said.

As a result, the researchers found that epidemics will spread further and faster in rural communities. Add to that a decreased access to hospital and doctors and rural areas are "especially vulnerable during an epidemic." The K-State researchers suggested that vaccines be given first to those rural residents who have the most contact with the largest number of people. Those living in small towns know exactly who those very important people are.

What’s the real cost of health care for rural residents? Richard Oswald explains how labor and delivery equal debt to most young families. And the price only goes up.

Has the way we raise hogs helped create the swine flu variant that is now spreading across the globe? Mike Davis, in a column in the Guardian, writes that "corporate industrialisation of livestock production" in China and now across the world has transformed animal husbandry "into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers." He quotes a report from the Pew Research Center last year warning that industrial animal production causes a continual cycling of viruses that "increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in a more efficient human to human transmission."

Davis' column is based on a warning that appeared in a March 2003 article in Science magazine. Bernice Wuethrich wrote that "after years of stability, the North American swine flue virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fast track, churning out variants every year. Changes in animal husbandry, including increased vaccination, may be spurring this evolutionary surge. And researchers say that the resulting slew of dramatically different swine flue viruses could spell danger for humans, too. The evolving swine flue 'increases the likelihood that a novel virus will arise that is transmissible among humans,' says Richard Webby, a molecular virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee."

Pigs are good "mixing vessels" where human, bird and hog viruses can swirl and match, producing new and sometimes deadly strains. The last two flu pandemics occurred when avian and human flu viruses swapped genes in pigs.