Today's Globe: Burma health disaster, autism cases, disabled veterans, NH medical board, Annella Brown

An estimated 1.5 million Burmese are on the brink of a "massive public health catastrophe," the British charity Oxfam warned yesterday, as desperate survivors of Cyclone Nargis poured out of the devastated Irrawaddy Delta into regional towns in search of water, food, and other help.

Families who think a mercury-based preservative in vaccines triggers autism will take their case to the US Court of Claims today (second item).

Increasing numbers of US troops have left the military with damaged bodies and minds, an ever-larger pool of disabled veterans that will cost the nation billions for decades to come - even as the total population of America's veterans shrinks.

Eight years after botched surgery left a Manchester man dead, both the patient's widow and the surgeon involved are speaking out against the New Hampshire Board of Medicine (sixth item).

Dr. Annella Brown (left), a pioneering Boston surgeon and art collector who served at several Massachusetts hospitals before moving her practice to Milton Hospital in 1961, died of congestive heart failure on April 13 at her home in Miami. She was 88.