House lawmakers on Wednesday voted to spend three times more on global HIV/AIDS programs over the next five years. Members of House Foreign Affairs Committee reached a compromise following a long-night discussion Tuesday, finally ironing out some disagreements in certain provisions of the AIDS bill.

"Many of us in this room concluded that a collapse of the political consensus on this issue would do irreparable damage to what is arguably the most successful U.S. foreign assistance program of the last half century," Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) said

Rates of multiple-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB) continue to rise, reaching record levels in parts of the former Soviet Union and could soar even higher, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report released Tuesday. It is the first estimate of the scope of drug-resistant TB issued by the WHO since 2004.

Other parts of the world, mainly China and parts of Africa are also becoming the breeding grounds for the spread of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and extensively drug resistant TB, said the report. WHO experts are worried that if multi-drug resistant TB penetrates Africa and coincides with AIDS, it will be a "disaster situation

A dozen samples of bird flu virus were sent to the World Health Organization laboratory this week by Indonesia after being guaranteed of recognition and its rights to any vaccines produced from them, a health minister official said.

Indonesia had stopped sending samples to WHO since December 2006 because it wanted guarantees that vaccines developed from the virus will be made affordable to poor and developing countries

For the first time ever, scientists have released a detailed map highlighting the world's hotspots for emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). Using data from past 65 years, the map pinpoints the locations where majority of these new diseases come from wildlife.

EID's such as HIV, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), West Nile virus and Ebola are indeed on the rise. The study has determined that zoonoses, diseases that originate in animals, are the current and most important threat in causing new diseases to emerge. The study analysed 335 incidents of previous disease emergence beginning in 1940 and concluded that most of these EID's originated in wildlife

Abu Dhabi's Department of Economics has stopped issuing licenses to new shisha cafes in an effort to curb smoking in the region. The ban on shisha smoking covers coffee shops.

Shisha smoking is extremely popular in the Middle East. Abu Dhabi has around 300 shisha cafes