The Indian Patent Office is set to issue a landmark ruling over the petition of a local drug manufacturer to allow cheaper generic drugs especially for cancer patients for export to poor countries under the "compulsory license" rule.

The case is attracting interest of giant drug manufacturers across the globe because it could open the floodgates for drug manufacturers to make copies of patented drugs

More than 2.3 billion people, or about 35 percent of the world's population, are at risk for contracting a deadly form of malaria, according to a study released by the Public Library of Science (PLoS) medical journal.

Malaria is a parasitic disease that occurs in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. About 500 million cases of malaria occur every year, and one million people, mostly children living in sub-Saharan Africa, die as a result. The parasite mainly responsible for these deaths-Plasmodium falciparum, is transmitted to people through the bites of infected Anopheles mosquitoes

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