The United States joined the government of Tanzania, the World Bank and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria by funding the distribution of 5.2 million mosquito nets to Tanzanians. The financial assistance was announced by U.S. President George Bush after he visited on Monday a bed net factory and a hospital with malaria patients.

Funding for the mosquito net project will come from a five-year $1.2 billion program initiated in 2005 to reduce by 50 percent malaria deaths in 15 African nations. Bush said vouchers were distributed for 5.2 million mosquito nets to be sold with hefty discounts, aimed at providing protection to pregnant Tanzanian women and their infants and young children

India and the World Bank group have joined forces to fight fraud and corruption and systemic deficiencies in India's health sector, announcing immediate steps to investigate indicators of wrongdoing and implement further safeguards.

The government of India has announced its intention to reexamine ongoing and future projects to ensure that they incorporate the lessons from a Detailed Implementation Review (DIR), a press statement said

An alternative means of stopping tuberculosis, leprosy and other bacterial illness may be forthcoming.

Researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City say exciting new molecular targets - so-called "virulence factors" that bacteria use to thrive once they are in the host - present a potent means of stopping TB, leprosy and other bacterial illness

A California woman with a multi-drug resistant form of tuberculosis flew home from India earlier in December on a commercial passenger plane and is in isolation now. Authorities say they don't know how the woman was able to board an international flight because she had been diagnosed in India with the dangerous form of TB that she had been told was highly contagious when physicians began treatment there.

The woman's name has not been released. But Santa Clara County Health Department officials said she knew she was sick when she took a plane home on Dec. 13. Authorities say that was lucky because the woman was too sick to go out Christmas shopping where she would have exposed even more people to the disease

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