Peanut crop growing hope in Haiti

Maurice Dubois (CBS News) takes a look at how Haiti's peanut crop is saving lives and creating new economic opportunities with help from Abbott Laboratories and Partners in Health.

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For Intrigue, Malaria Drug Gets the Prize

Artemisinin’s discovery is being talked about as a candidate for a Nobel Prize in Medicine. Millions of American taxpayer dollars are spent on it for Africa every year. But few people realize that in one of the paradoxes of history, the drug was discovered thanks to Mao Zedong, who was acting to help the North Vietnamese in their jungle war against the Americans. Or that it languished for 30 years thanks to China’s isolation and the indifference of Western donors, health agencies and drug companies.

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A Victory, Not A Conspiracy: Bill Gates And Ending Polio

This morning brought a victory in humanity’s battle against the germs that surround us, infect us, and define our history: polio virus appears to have been eliminated from India, one of only four nations in which the disease that paralyzed Franklin Delano Roosevelt is still endemic.

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India Reports Completely Drug-Resistant TB

Over the past 48 hours, news has broken in India of the existence of at least 12 patients infected with tuberculosis that has become resistant to all the drugs used against the disease. Physicians in Mumbai are calling the strain TDR, for Totally Drug-Resistant. In other words, it is untreatable as far as they know.

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The Economics of Access to Medicines: Meeting the Challenges of Pharmaceutical Patents, Innovation, and Access for Global Health

Each year more than eighteen million human lives end in death from poverty-related causes, fully one-third of all human deaths globally. Many of these are from treatable, if not curable, conditions.
This paper describes the context of the problems surrounding access to medicines, highlighting the tremendously complicated web of issues that prevent medicines from reaching the world’s poorest.

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Pfizer, Glaxo expand discount vaccine agreements

Drugmakers Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline announced Friday they have agreed to supply hundreds of millions of additional doses of pneumonia vaccine to an international partnership that provides immunization to children in developing countries. The drugmakers' agreements, announced separately, build on an existing 10-year pact with the Geneva-based GAVI Alliance, which is funded by a handful of developed nations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.