Dr Margaret Chan, who has steered the World Health Organization through crises over bird flu and the respiratory SARS bug, has won a second five-year term as its director-general.

Foreign travellers coming to the UK from countries with a high incidence of tuberculosis will have to be screened for the potentially fatal infection before being granted a visa under new rules, the Immigration Minister said today.

The global mortality rate for women giving birth has fallen by half over the past two decades, a UN report released today said.

Cases of dementia - and the heavy social and financial burdens associated with them - will soar in the coming decades as life expectancy and medical care improve in poorer countries, the World Health Organisation says.

The millions of tourists coming to London for the Olympics will place Britain at extreme risk of a deadly flu pandemic, according to research being released today.

I arrived back in Blighty this morning to find the wires full of the news that my boss at Dartmouth College, Dr Jim Yong Kim, whom I know pretty well, had been nominated by President Obama to replace Robert Zoellick as president of the World Bank.

Jim Yong Kim nominated by White House in bid to address concerns about US monopoly on post

The world is entering an era where injuries as common as a child's scratched knee could kill, where patients entering hospital gamble with their lives, and where routine operations such as a hip replacement become too dangerous to carry out, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned.

Antibiotic crisis will make routine operations impossible and a scratched knee could be fatal

For decades women have been cajoled to breastfeed their babies with slogans such as "breast is best." Now researchers have criticised the approach, saying it is "idealistic" and "sets parents up to fail", and that greater recognition of the multiple demands new parents face would reap greater dividends.

Peter Ustinov once called Toronto "New York run by the Swiss", meaning that Canada's largest city has everything the Big Apple does, but is just a bit cleaner, friendlier, more efficient and – well, Swiss. It might be an overstatement but, as a big metropolis, it does feel safe. But not safe enough for former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who yesterday pulled out of a talk in the city due to fears about his safety. Is he right to be scared? What are Toronto's potential dangers?

The number of people dying as a result of fuel poverty is three times higher than government estimates suggest, according to new academic research.

That drug-resistant blood-poisoning cases in Britain have risen by 30 per cent in less than five years is concerning enough. That the official analysis judges the soaring cases of untreatable E.coli to be just the "tip of the iceberg" of antibiotic resistance should be a spur to more concerted efforts to address the problem.

New cases of cancer could rise by 30 per cent in the UK by 2030, experts warned, with poor diet, heavy alcohol consumption and an ageing population likely to play a major role.