Alice Ndlovu has tuberculosis but, relatively speaking, she is one of the lucky ones. Hers is a strain that responds to the best medicines available, which also happen to be the cheapest. At 28, this single mom knows that without treatment she would likely die, leaving her child to face...

Background

About a third of the world’s population, concentrated in poorer regions of the world, may be infected with TB, which generally lies dormant until the carrier’s immunity is impaired by another disease (often HIV infection). Without treatment, about half of the patients with active TB will die. According to WHO...

Ineffective drugs take lives, waste money and make precious cures useless. Drugs have been recycled after their expiry date; they have been contaminated with fatal toxins; they have been made too weak or with no active ingredient at all.

The only way to stay ahead of bacterial evolution is to escalate the arms race.

President Obama seems to believes that experts have all the answers and therefore automatically assumes that his preferred policies are so obviously right that there is no need to debate them, but there is always going to be a downside to even the best policies because the experts do not know as much as they think they do.

The number of food-borne illness outbreaks has not been increasing. Food-safety agencies have been getting worse at identifying the causes of outbreaks.

Methane is a Jekyll-and-Hyde chemical. When combusted in the form of natural gas it releases energy, accounting for one-fifth of worldwide consumption. But it's controversial.

The Canadian Government may think it is helping poor Africans when it allows drugs to be copied.