The appearance of a "mole man" reflects the past and realities of a hardscrabble town.

"We are soothed by the authoritative acronym-loaded binder delivered to us ages ago by the gentleman-embodiment of the U.S. Department of Energy and stored in its secure glass-faced case beside the MSDS and the Terror Alert Color Wheel, for since there are no people who dug the dark tunnels of Yucca Mountain, nor people working as stewards of the nation’s nuclear waste deep inside, then it is only a rumor that there is a subterranean population at the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, only local lore that below us, in a town perhaps identical to ours, move once-human creatures whose genes the Department has tweaked over generations until their skin went translucent, until a scrim of skin grew over their useless eyes, until two thick, cord-like and translucent whiskers sprouted from their faces, sensitive as a catfish’s barbels, and their mouths gone a little catfish too, a side effect."

The U.N.’s role in creating an epidemic in Haiti.

A dispatch from the early days of AIDS:

It is as relentless as leukemia, as contagious as hepatitis, and its cause has eluded researchers for more than two years.

The Canadian scapegoat of the AIDS epidemic.

A brutal story from the Times’ cub Metro reporter:

''We're dying,'' he said. ''Why is this happening? Is it because we loved each other too much or not enough?"

It was the worst AIDS crisis in years—until it wasn’t.

Pathologists and epidemiologists take on “the confounding killer known as AIDS.”

The story of H1N1 and one of the lives it claimed.

“You can treat a lot of people, and India has,’’ says an epidemiologist working on TB. “But if you have tests that cause misdiagnosis on a massive scale you are going to have a serious problem. And they do.”

How smallpox went from eradicated disease to the ideal weapon of bioterrorists.