These high-profile tragedies are a symptom of a larger disease: rising rates of domestic violence.

FORBES: The Brookfield Shooting is Part of a Rising Tide of Domestic Violence

If new symptoms turn up after taking a new medicine, they could be a side effect of the drug, not a symptom of the disease.

FORBES: Tips For Preventing Medication Errors

Dean noted the administration blocked attempts to ban from the food supply beef from cows slaughtered when they were unable to walk -- a symptom of the disease -- and resisted efforts to create a better system to track cows.

CNN: Democrats criticize administration over mad cow

Farmers in the area are hoping that the lesions in the cows' mouths - feared to be a symptom of the disease - were actually cuts from brambles.

BBC: New disease rules for autumn

In the case of study 329 although a numerical difference in adverse events was observed by the company and the study's investigators, for patients taking Seroxat compared to placebo, these findings were not, by themselves, considered clinically meaningful due to the limited number of patients involved and the fact that suicidal thinking and behaviour is a recognised symptom of the underlying disease.

BBC: GlaxoSmithKline logo

Claudication is most often a symptom of peripheral artery disease.

CNN: Claudication

But Dr Robert Green, who led the study, suggested depression could adversely affect the brain or could be a very early symptom of the disease.

BBC: Clue to old age memory loss

But abdominal distension - being permanently bloated - was more frequently associated with a diagnosis and was a symptom present even in the earlier stages of disease.

BBC: Ovarian cancer 'is being missed'

When it arrived in America it was detected within months thanks to the vigilance of the country's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in noticing clusters of a previously rare skin cancer that is often a symptom of immune-system collapse.

ECONOMIST: Bird flu and public health