It has recently been known that local high-gradient regions of an advected scalar, such as temperature or mass contaminant, in a turbulent state of fluid form thin sheets, randomly oriented and moving around with turbulent motion. Here is presented a joint multifractal model for velocity and scalar dissipations in isotropic turbulence which can predict the statistical distributions of the worms, vorticity-concentrated regions, as well as the above-described scalar-gradient sheets. This model allows us to derive turbulent diffusion coefficient in isotropic turbulence scaled by Reynolds number and Prandtl number, which predominates far over molecular diffusion coefficient. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.