Family Health

It's worrisome that a Nigerian woman who died recently has tested positive for infection with H5N1 or the bird flu virus. But I'm still waiting to hear confirmation from the World Health Organization. We won't learn anything that's really significant--such...

Just how basic are the basic health care needs of men, women and children in the poorest parts of the world? It's not enough simply to have access to medicine. You have to have the doctors and nurses who can...

Perhaps it's books and movies like the Hot Zone, which showed hemorrhagic fever spreading from central Africa to the West, but there's long been a perception that bio threats begin in the developing world and mostly threaten the rich parts...

Florence Nightingale could have predicted this. A growing number of antibiotic-resistant germs are turning up in the war wounds of U.S. combat troops in Iraq. Along with the usual drug-resistant staph and strep varieties, there is now a major hospital-bred...

Syphilis cases have risen 28-fold in China from 1993 to 2005. That extraordinarily fast increase is likely to fuel the burgeoning AIDS epidemic as well, according to a study in this week's Lancet. An aggressive public health campaign nearly wiped...