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June 14, 2013 Looking for clues to to modern-day leprosy, scientists dig up a 500-year-old mass grave and scan for ancient strains of bacteria in human remains. They find that the bacteria that cause leprosy haven't changed, humans have.

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June 13, 2013 Despite the daunting health challenges Haiti faces, the country has achieved a major step toward eliminating the parasitic infection, which causes severe swelling of the legs. Haiti is on track to wipe out the disease within four years, scientists say.

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June 11, 2013 Gonorrhea cases resistant to one of the last effective drugs increased by nearly six times from 2004 to 2011 in Great Britain. Hard-to-treat gonorrhea is a growing trend worldwide, as the bacterium begins to thwart our last defenses.

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June 10, 2013 Is the world on the verge of a pandemic? There are three reasons to think so. Two flu viruses are active, and a virus that bears a resemblance to SARS has cropped up in the Middle East. Each has devastating potential, but many early warnings of past pandemics have failed to materialize.

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June 6, 2013 China's rapid economic expansion has led to dramatic improvement in the country's health, an analysis finds. But as China beats back the plagues of poverty, like pneumonia and measles, many chronic health problems found in the developed world are cropping up.

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June 6, 2013 A type of bird flu that appeared in China a few months ago has infected more than a hundred people. Some scientists are worried that this virus has the potential spread globally. But a look at the virus's genes suggests the pathogen doesn't have the typical features of pandemic.

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June 4, 2013 New types of tuberculosis are emerging around the world that take years and thousands of dollars to cure. Patients fighting this disease are often isolated from their communities and suffer devastating drug side effects, such as permanent hearing loss and dizziness.

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June 3, 2013 Tuberculosis is much less of a health threat in the United States than it is in other countries. But a family in Boston discovered that even here, no one is immune from this ancient foe. More than a dozen family members were infected with TB, and matriarch Judy Williams died at age 59.

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May 29, 2013 All told, the fatality rate for confirmed infections with the virus has been more than 50 percent. But the true fatality rate won't be clear until the fuller extent of cases, some probably much milder, becomes known.

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May 23, 2013 The virus's ability to move between these mammals might not bode well for humans. So far, it appears that H7N9 doesn't pass easily between people, but it could mutate over time and pose more of a threat.

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May 22, 2013 A handful of polio infections in Kenya and Somalia could set back efforts to wipe out the virus worldwide, health workers warned Wednesday. The last time there was polio in this region, the virus spread throughout the Horn of Africa into the Middle East and eventually into Indonesia.

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May 18, 2013 The world's top health problems are more common in men than women. But recent global funding has been skewed toward women's issues. Some health economists say more effort should go toward stopping men's risky behaviors, like smoking and drinking.

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May 16, 2013 Scientists used a Dutch woman's dirty stocking to learn that mosquitoes infected with malaria find humans hard to resist. Like a fungus that turns ants into zombies, the parasite seems to change the behavior of the mosquitoes for its own benefit.

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May 13, 2013 SARS burst on the scene in 2003 after one man infected travelers staying on the same floor of a Hong Kong hotel. Now that a new virus with similarities to SARS has spread from person to person, public health officials are urging hospitals to be on guard.

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May 9, 2013 Infecting mosquitoes with a specific type of bacteria makes the insects resistant to malaria. Now scientists have figured out how to get the mosquitoes to pass the infections on to their offspring. If it can done reliably, it might help interrupt transmission of malaria to humans.

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