[NYTimes] Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline will supply hundreds of millions of doses of their pneumonia vaccines to the world’s poorest countries at heavily discounted prices under a novel agreement announced Tuesday.
But at least one expert maintains that the prices are still too high.
The deal was announced by the GAVI Alliance, a nonprofit organization, which estimated the [...]

A third man has died of pneumonic plague in north-western China where a town of more than 10,000 people has been sealed off, officials say.

 
[BBC] The 64-year-old man was a neighbor of the first two people to die from the plague in Ziketan in Qinghai Province.
Police have set up checkpoints around Ziketan, as medics are [...]

GENEVA, June 11 [Reuters] – The World Health Organisation was poised on Thursday to declare that the new H1N1 virus has caused the first influenza pandemic in more than 40 years, health sources said on Thursday.
The move will trigger heightened health measures in the WHO’s 193 member states as authorities brace for the worldwide spread [...]

When a patient tests HIV-positive, a doctor has to navigate state law and medical ethics. It can be a rocky path. My patient, a 26-year-old native of the Dominican Republic, had been seeing me for only a few months when I determined that he had been infected with HIV. He didn’t seem surprised but was [...]

How will the world look in the year 2058? Sixty thinkers from around the world rise to that challenge in “The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today,” a collection of essays edited by longtime journalist Mike Wallace.

The consensus view is that we’ll muddle through many of the issues that vex us today – [...]

As doctors struggle to eradicate polio worldwide, one of their biggest problems is persuading parents to vaccinate their children. In Belgium, authorities are resorting to an extreme measure: prison sentences.Two sets of parents in Belgium were recently handed five month prison terms for failing to vaccinate their children against polio. Each parent was also fined [...]

A woman dying of Alzheimer’s has a fever. Should she be given antibiotics? Many people would say yes. But a provocative new study suggests that antibiotics are overused in people dying of dementia diseases and should be considered more carefully because of the growing problem of drug-resistant superbugs.
The study raises ethical questions about when it’s [...]

Months before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made Atlanta lawyer Andrew Speaker the unwitting poster boy for drug-resistant tuberculosis, the agency and its advisers discussed a strategy to get more funding by publicizing the deadly strain of the disease, records show.
Frustrated that money for combating TB had dwindled as Congress favored newer threats [...]

In the face of terrorism and catastrophic natural disasters, modern regional trauma systems that improve survival for critically injured patients are more vital than ever.
Yet many fundamental assumptions underlying these systems — such as the notion that it is imperative to send the sickest patients to the hospital first — have rarely been subjected to [...]