European Union-wide legislation is stretching farther in its scope. First there was the Schengen visa, which facilitated travel among European nations. By 2008, the blue card system will facilitate intra-continent transfer of migrant workers. Soon, it will be healthcare that will be EU-wide as well.

The European Commission is set to publish in January a proposal that will create a single healthcare market for members of the 27-member bloc. Under the proposal, patients can seek medical care in any member-state by 2010. If they have to undergo surgery in another country, the sick European must initially pay for the procedure, but he will be reimbursed the cost when he returns home

The failure of the U.K. Department of Health to issue guidelines how neonatal units in 23 regional health networks must be staffed may be the cause of a relatively high death rate among premature Briton infants. The National Audit Office traced the high infant mortality rate to lack of specialist services for premature and low birth weight babies, despite the availability of a $146 million budget.

The lack of staffing guidelines resulted in overworked specialist nursing workers. Other major findings of the NAO audit include lack of cots to respond to emergencies and shortage of specialized 24-hour ambulances to transport babies and mothers to other hospitals

The fight against tuberculosis, a contagious disease spread through the air, which infects one third of the world's people, kills 2 million every year and is increasingly drug resistant, is getting a boost with $2.4 million in grants for research from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Weill Cornell Medical College in New York was given the grants to support research to find drugs that are better at combating TB than the drugs now available.

Before there were drugs to fight TB, it was once the leading cause of death in America, and is still a problem in the United States with more than 14,000 new cases reported in 2005, although it now it kills most often in the poorest nations where people have trouble paying for drugs to fight it. Caused by bacteria, it usually infects the lungs but it can infect any part of the body, including the kidneys, spine and brain, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Concern over the death of a Chinese man in Jiangsu Province of avian flu prompted the Hong Kong government to put in place measures that will avert a health crisis brought about by disease outbreaks. On Thursday, the state's legislature will grant broad powers to the Health Minister to address health emergencies. Under the bill, the Health Minister is granted authority to seize any object suspected to be an infectious agent and to detain anyone believed to be disease carriers for isolation, quarantine or examination. He may also arrest people who flee from medical detention.

A 24-year-old man in the mainland died on Sunday from bird flu, although he has no known contact with dead or infected poultry. Hong Kong is initiating broad measures to prevent a repeat of the 2004 pandemic spread of the SARS ailment in the Special Administrative Region

More Japanese medical institutions are using the English language in an effort to connect to the rest of the global healthcare community. Taking the lead on the language shift was the Japanese Cancer Association, which opened its three-day convention on Tuesday using English presentations.

Takashi Tsuruo, chairman of the convention and head of the Cancer Chemotherapy Center of the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research explained, "We would like to turn our association into one in which researchers from Asia and Oceania can easily participate and to make it the core of research in this region