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December 19, 2012 Scientists recently sparked controversy when they made dangerous new forms of bird flu. The National Institutes of Health is about to put in place a new system for reviewing this kind of work in the future.

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December 19, 2012 Myanmar and other parts of Southeast Asia are awash with shoddy and phony malaria drugs. Some fakes are almost indistinguishable from authentic drugs. The counterfeits can be deadly for patients, but they also threaten to undermine major weapons against the disease.

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On Morning EditionPlaylist

December 18, 2012 Global deaths from malaria have dropped sharply in the past decade, thanks in part to powerful drugs called artemisinins. But on the border between Thailand and Myanmar, doctors are starting to see cracks in artemisinin's armor. The medicine is working more slowly, and sometimes not at all.

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On All Things ConsideredPlaylist

December 18, 2012 In South Africa, drug users are crushing HIV medications and mixing them with marijuana, heroin and other illicit drugs. Public health workers worry that people who smoke so-called whoonga are helping to fuel the rise of drug-resistant HIV.

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December 17, 2012 Gin, Jesuit priests, communist bravado — the history of malaria is littered with strange bedfellows, as our video shows. The parasite has proved to be a wily foe, frustrating human efforts to control it time and time again.

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December 13, 2012 A fresh look at what makes people sick around the world finds that life expectancy has ticked up in the past 20 years. But people aren't necessarily in the best of health during those extra years. Chronic problems, like depression and pain, are on the rise.

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December 12, 2012 In many parts of the world, there aren't enough doctors around to do post-mortems. Answers to a few questions can help a computer deduce what killed someone when an autopsy can't be done. The results can help guide decisions about public health.

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December 10, 2012 About 10 years ago, some nasty bacteria became impervious to some common classes of antibiotics. Scientists have sequenced genome samples of this superbug from all over the world. The results helped them figured out how it emerged in the U.S. and then moved to Europe, Australia and Asia.

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December 6, 2012 Last spring, the Nigerian government pledged millions of dollars to decontaminate a region where hundreds of kids have died from severe lead poisoning. So far, none of the money has been released. The delay in the cleanup puts thousands of kids at risk of getting sick, public health advocates say.

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December 4, 2012 The appearance of an unusual type of poliovirus in Pakistan exposed gaps in vaccination campaigns. When a community isn't well immunized against polio, the weakened virus used in the oral vaccine can mutate and then infect unvaccinated people.

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November 30, 2012 The latest cases represent the oldest known so far. They push the SARS-like virus's timeline back three months from the first reported case involving a 60-year-old man who died in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, last June.

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November 29, 2012 HIV has been declining in many parts of the world over the past decade. Today the U.S. unveiled an ambitious plan to stop most new HIV infections around the world. But some health leaders question whether their goals are realistic, especially with impending budget cuts.

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On All Things ConsideredPlaylist

November 28, 2012 A few months ago health workers discovered a new variety of coronavirus that killed one man and hospitalized another. Now the virus has infected four more people in the Middle East. How they got sick is a question scientists would like to answer.

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November 21, 2012 Although new HIV infections have dropped by as much as 50 percent in many African countries, the fight against AIDS seems to be losing its footing in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. New infections nearly quadrupled in China between 2007 and 2011.

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November 16, 2012 After months of debate, the Global Fund announced plans to wind down a controversial pilot project that subsidizes malaria drugs in Africa. Some health workers in the U.S. fault the decision, saying it doesn't address the major challenges of treating malaria in poor countries.

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