World Health Organization

As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

About 151,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the three years after the U.S.-led invasion of their country, according to World Health Organization research published Wednesday. The study, the most comprehensive since the war started in March 2003, drew on an Iraqi Health Ministry survey of nearly 10,000 households, five times the number of those interviewed in a disputed 2006 Johns Hopkins University study that estimated more than 600,000 Iraqis had died over the period.

A dangerous form of drug-resistant tuberculosis has reached its highest levels ever, accounting for at least 5% of all new TB cases worldwide and 15% to 22% of new cases in parts of the former Soviet Union and China, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. The WHO report, the first new survey of TB incidence in four years, estimates that there are nearly 500,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant TB, commonly known as MDR TB -- about 5% of the 9 million total new cases of TB each year.

President Bush is going partway toward atoning for his sins in the Middle East by rebuilding Africa. His leadership in fighting disease and poverty on the continent culminated Wednesday with a breathtaking gesture from the House of Representatives, which took the president's generous proposal to spend $30 billion over five years fighting AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis around the world and upped it by $20 billion.

For the first time in modern history, the rate of infections in the global tuberculosis epidemic has leveled off and may be on the "threshold of decline," the World Health Organization announced today. The percentage of the world's population struck by TB peaked in 2004 and then held steady or even declined in 2005, according to the report, but the actual number of new cases increased to 8.8 million because of the growing world population. Dr.

The World Health Organization recommended Wednesday that circumcision immediately become part of the frontline strategy to combat AIDS -- a move that the group said could save millions of lives. The benefit would be greatest in countries with widespread epidemics and low rates of circumcision, such as those in southern and eastern Africa, the WHO said. "The recommendations represent a significant step forward in HIV prevention," said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the WHO's HIV/AIDS Department.

Of the thousands of entrepreneurs, protesters, do-gooders and policymakers here for the World Water Forum, few can match the passion of Suresh Baral. Infants and young children were dying in Baral's village in Nepal of intestinal diseases spread by bad hygiene, primitive sanitation and lack of clean water, as they do by the hundreds of thousands each year throughout the Third World. So 13-year-old Suresh and his friends started going door-to-door to save some of them.

The World Health Organization has fallen well short of its goal of getting 3 million AIDS patients in treatment by the end of 2005, with fewer than half that number now receiving life-sustaining antiretroviral therapy, according to a report issued Tuesday. The program tripled the number of people in low- and moderate-income countries receiving drugs between 2003 and 2005, but overall, only one in every five people requiring treatment now receives it -- a total of 1.

Most of the world's millions of malaria sufferers are not getting life-saving drugs nearly five years after the World Health Organization urged their widespread use, health experts said. Malaria kills more than a million people each year, mainly in Africa, where a child dies from the disease every 30 seconds. Only four of the 34 countries that have agreed to switch to more effective but costly artemisin-based drug combinations, known as ACTs, are widely distributing the medication.