A major study has shown evidence of increased levels of hyperactivity in young children consuming mixtures of some artificial food colors and the preservative sodium benzoate. The possibility of food colours and preservatives affecting children's behaviour has long been an unresolved question for parents. This significant new research provides a clear demonstration that changes in behaviour can be detected in three-year-old and eight-year-old children.

The Marburg virus, like its fearsome cousin Ebola, belongs to the Filoviridae family. It carries the name of the German town where it was first detected in 1967, after a mysterious epidemic had hit employees of the Behring laboratory. The workers had been contaminated as they took organ samples from green monkeys imported from Uganda. Up to the end of the 20th Century, rare cases of violent haemorrhagic fever attack linked to Marburg virus were subsequently registered, essentially in East Africa. However, in 1998, a more extensive epidemic affected 149 people near Durba, a town in the North-East of the Democratic Republic of Congo. More than 80% of these people succumbed to the haemorrhagic fever the virus caused.