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The article reports on a program in Kenya under the aegis of Dr. Arata Kochi, director of the World Health Organization's malaria program, which delivers mosquito netting to poor families for free. The pesticide impregnated nets have lowered children's deaths from malaria by 44 percent in areas that have received them.

Focuses on public health scientists who are the recipients of grant money from the William and Melinda Gates Foundation. Selection of 43 projects as winners of a competition to find new ways to attack the greatest health challenges facing people in poor countries; Role of the foundation in promoting global health; Goals that the foundation wanted scientists to pursue; Comments of Dr. Timothy Evans, assistant director general for policy at the World Health Organization; Overview of the various technologies; Observation that many winning teams combine researchers from universities, biotechnology companies and government agencies; Comments of recipients, including Dr. David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology; Baltimore's idea on making vaccines obsolete.

Reports that a case of polio has been detected in Indonesia, according to World Health Organization (WHO) officials, indicating that an outbreak spreading from northern Nigeria since 2003 has reached the world's fourth most populous country. How the virus was found in a village on the island of Java; Speculation on how the virus got there; Recommendation by officials that Indonesia immediately vaccinate five million children on the western end of Java; Observation that polio is now found almost exclusively in Muslim countries or regions; Outlook for the WHO's goal of eradicating polio by the end of 2005; Evidence of widespread circulation of the virus.

There is enough approved cholera vaccine stockpiled in the world to vaccinate only 50,000 people, a panel of cholera experts convened by the Pan American Health Organization said Friday. Given the shortage, the panel recommended starting a pilot program in Haiti to test vaccination strategies and waiting for more vaccine to be made. A second manufacturer may be approved by the World Health Organization within six months, making it eventually possible to produce one million doses a year. About 110,000 Haitians are known to have had cholera since the outbreak began in October; 2,405 have died. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malaria is an ancient and persistent disease. It wasn't eradicated in the United States until the 1950s, and it is still devastating in developing countries around the world. The latest estimate from the World Health Organization is that in 2008 the disease killed more than a million people and afflicted 247 million others. Scientists have long speculated about just how ancient the disease is, and when the human malaria parasite originated, with wildly varying estimates from 10,000 years to several million years ago. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drug-resistant tuberculosis killed about 150,000 people in 2008, and half of all the world's cases are thought in be in China and India, the World Health Organizationsaid in a report last week. No one knows the exact number of cases of the two types of drug-resistant TB, called MDR and XDR for multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In its first study of women's health around the globe, the World Health Organizationsaid Monday that H.I.V. is the leading cause of death and disease among women between the ages of 15 and 44. Unprotected sex is the leading risk factor in developing countries for these women of childbearing age; others include iron deficiency and lack of access to contraceptives, said the W.H.O., a United Nations agency. Throughout the world, one in five deaths among women in this age group is linked to unprotected sex, the agency said. The data was included in a report intended to highlight the unequal health treatment a woman faces from birth to death. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

President Obama said the United States will share 10 percent of its swine flu vaccine with other nations. The White House said the vaccine to counter the virus known as H1N1 would be available through the World Health Organization to nations that otherwise would not have direct access to the vaccine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a move that caught many public health experts by surprise, the World Health Organization quietly announced Thursday that it would stop tracking swine flu cases and deaths around the world. The announcement, made in a ''briefing note'' posted on the organization's Web site late in the day, perplexed some experts, and even baffled a W.H.O. spokesman, Gregory Hartl, who said in an e-mail message, ''I don't have reliable info'' about what his agency would track instead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The World Health Organization recommended last week that the vaccine against rotavirus, a diarrheal disease that kills 500,000 children a year, be given to every child in the world. More than 85 percent of those deaths are of poor children in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the W.H.O. endorsement allows donor money to be used for the vaccine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

EPIDEMIOLOGISTS didn't expect a swine flu outbreak, but did fashion designers see it coming? Judging from all the masks, veils, balaclavas and assorted headgear that came down the runway recently, it's hard not to wonder. The World Health Organization gives fairly loose mask guidelines (you can even fashion one yourself out of ''readily available materials''), but we still wouldn't chance it with a Comme des Garcons shroud or even a Margiela face stocking (above). JONATHAN S. PAUL [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Edgar Hernandez, the Mexican kindergartner who is the first person known to have contracted the swine flu now circling the globe, may soon have a statue erected in his honor in the mountain village where he lives. Gov. Fidel Herrera of the coastal state of Veracruz said the statue of Edgar, 5, could help attract tourists to La Gloria, a poor village where hundreds of residents came down with mysterious flulike symptoms beginning in late winter, in what experts say may have been the beginning of the spread of the new influenza strain. As of Monday, the World Health Organization had tabulated 12,515 confirmed cases of swine flu, with 91 deaths. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the first known case of what may be transmission of the Ebola virus from a pig to a human, a pig handler in the Philippines has tested positive for a strain of the virus, world health officials and the Philippine government announced Friday. But the strain -- Ebola Reston -- is not known to be dangerous to humans, and the worker, who was infected at least six months ago, is healthy, officials said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If you return from a trip abroad to find you have projectile vomiting, roaring flatulence, sulfurous belching and explosive diarrhea, the bad news is that you won't die; you just have an attack of giardiasis, a form of purgatory devised by the single-celled parasite known as giardia. Giardia infections can linger for months because the parasite plays a cunning defense against the body's immune system. In its genomic wardrobe, it has 190 coats to choose from. As soon as the immune system has generated antibodies against one coat, giardia switches to another. Because of the parasite's persistence and infectivity, some 280 million cases of giardiasis occur in the world each year, the World Health Organization estimates, though most of these are in developing countries where people are more inured to the disease. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reports on how geographic variations can have an impact on medical expenses and quality. According to the research group, Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, geography is destiny because one's chances of undergoing surgical procedures, doctor visits, and even dying in a hospital are related to the place he or she lives. For example, Medicare patients of Rhode Island have knee replacements at a rate of 5 in 1,000 people while the rate is 10 for the people of Nebraska.

Examines America's global fight against AIDS. Pledge of money from the President George W. Bush administration; Disagreement between the U.S. and Mozambique over strategy in combatting HIV infection; Overview of the program; Problems in Zambia; Criticism of Bush's program; Questions over where to channel the anti-AIDS money; Implications of the U.S. administration's refusal to buy generic drugs; Background on the international AIDS fund; How the U.S. focus on treatment is profoundly changing the emphasis on HIV prevention as the American strategy abroad; Emphasis on abstinence; Questions over the efficacy of condoms; Outlook.

Reports that China's research program into SARS has yielded important clues, but little of that information has been widely shared. Concerns of World Health Organization officials; Background on the government investigation; Comments of Dr. Klaus Stöhr, who reviewed the research in China; View that the lack of information appears to stem from inexperience in coping with an international public health emergency; Focus on identifying the animal source of SARS in order to prevent transmission of the virus; Significance of the findings; Puzzling aspects of the epidemic.

Reports on an announcement by Asian health officials that severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) will be hard to bring under control. World Health Organization which is confident the disease can be managed; Disease which is little understood; Researchers who are studying the virus.