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

Pharmaceuticals are ignoring lucrative markets in poor countries at a cost of $1 trillion to shareholders, the international aid agency Oxfam said in a new report.

As a result, it is failing to capture the full potential of emerging markets touted as the "new frontier" for its business success, said the report "Investing for Life".

"More than 85 percent of world consumers are underserved or have no access to its medicines," said Jeremy Hobbs, Oxfam International Executive Director

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Sunday called on health professionals to "put back the heart back into medical practice" and treat patients will more care and consideration.

Shigeru Omi, the United Nations' health body's Western Pacific regional director, said there must be a "concerted effort" to consider cultural, environmental and other factors in treating patient rather than concentrate on the symptoms manifested

$1.1 billion of new grants will be handed out over the next two years to fund the fight against three diseases that collectively claim more than 6 million lives every year.

Programs backed by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are estimated to have averted the deaths of 2 million people by providing AIDS treatment for 1.1 million people, tuberculosis treatment for 2.8 million people and distributing some 30 million insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria