Workers kick pigs into a huge grave. AP Photo--Andy Wong

Night after night, Mrs. Param sleeps on the hospital floor. She hasn't left the building for more than a week. Her husband is delirious, talking nonsense about a way of life that ended with the outbreak of a deadly virus in the pig-farming town of Bukit Pelandok on Malaysia's west coast. "This morning he woke up and said 'I have to go and fetch corn for the pigs,'" she says, huddling in a crowded waiting room of Seremban Hospital. "When I see him I feel pain in my heart."

That pain is being felt by hundreds of Malaysians--and the crisis is far from over. As the death toll reached 58 last Wednesday, the government finally declared a national emergency. With the count at 63 three days later, at least 18 of those victims had succumbed to Japanese encephalitis, or JE, a mosquito-borne virus that is typically transmitted to humans via pigs and that kills up to 10,000 Asians each year. More disturbing, the Ministry of Health confirmed by Friday that 12 people were infected with something new. It is similar to the Hendra virus, which was first isolated in Australia in 1994 and has since killed three people there. International experts arrived in Kuala Lumpur last week to study the new menace. They have shunned media inquiries, as has the Malaysian government, which recently barred reporters from entering some of the worst-affected areas. All of which has only increased the fear sweeping the country. "The doctors cannot do anything," says Jean Lim, an evangelical pastor who came to Seremban to pray for the sick. "The Angel of Death is passing through this place."

Malaysia's agony is no isolated case. Viral outbreaks--including previously unknown strains--are on the rise worldwide. Over the past decade, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta have identified more than 50 new viruses that cause illness in humans. "We have seen some quite new things and it will take a little while to work out what is going on," says Brian Mahy, CDC's director for viral and rickettsial diseases. "There is the potential for the emergence of a new virus against which we would have no resistance and for which there would be no vaccine." Malaysians can only hope this isn't it.

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