The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a Canadian NGO on Friday announced $32 million to fund research for the discovery and development of affordable tools for rapidly diagnosing diseases in developing nations.

LONDON (Reuters) - Deaths from malaria have fallen dramatically in the past decade thanks to increased aid giving more people access to nets and medicines, but the economic slowdown could curb future progress, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday.

Malaria caused the death of an estimated 655,000 people last year, with 86 percent of victims children aged under five, World Health Organisation figures showed on Tuesday.

LONDON (Reuters) - Malaria deaths have fallen dramatically in the past decade thanks to increased aid allowing more people access to nets and medicines, but the economic slowdown threatens to curb future progress, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday.

Fake or poor quality malaria drugs are boosting resistance in parts of southeast Asia, a problem that is likely to worsen unless tighter regulations are adopted, US experts said Monday.

LONDON (Reuters) - Progress is being made in the fight against the most common form of malaria in Africa, but a long-lasting type of the mosquito-borne parasitic disease has a tight grip on swathes of South Asia and parts of Latin America, scientists said Monday.

European scientists on Tuesday said they had identified a new way by which the malaria parasite survives in human blood, a finding that marks the latest laboratory advance against the disease.

LONDON (Reuters) - Sub-Saharan African countries that invest in training doctors have ended up losing $2 billion as the expert clinicians leave home to find work in more prosperous developed nations, researchers said on Friday.

LONDON (Reuters) - Sub-Saharan African countries that invest in training doctors have ended up losing $2 billion as the expert clinicians leave home to find work in more prosperous developed nations, researchers said on Friday.

``Mefloquine is a zombie drug. It's dangerous, and it should have been killed off years ago,'' said Dr. Remington Nevin, an epidemiologist and Army major who has published research that he said showed the drug can be potentially toxic to the brain. He believes the drop in prescriptions is a tacit acknowledgement of the drug's serious problems.

LONDON (Reuters) - The world's largest backer of the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria said on Wednesday it was cutting new grants for countries battling the diseases and bringing in a new manager to ensure better administration.

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Researchers said Wednesday they had discovered a unique microscopic channel through which malaria parasites must pass to infect red blood cells, a finding that opens up a highly promising target for a vaccine.

LONDON (Reuters) - A vaccine or new drugs against malaria could be developed, British scientists said, after they made a critical discovery about the way the most deadly species of malaria parasite invades human red blood cells.

Sleeping sickness could threaten tens of millions more people as the tsetse fly which transmits the disease spreads to southern Africa as a result of global warming, a study published on Wednesday says.

GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Intellectual Property Organization launched a consortium on Wednesday that would allow the public and private sector to share intellectual property to promote the development of new drugs to treat diseases such as malaria.

SEATTLE (Reuters) - He keeps them in warm, comfortable bug dorms, feeds them on meals of human blood with the occasional sugar water snack and lives in awe of their killing power.

The search for the world's first malaria vaccine received a boost with the release of early results from a major clinical trial showing it cut risk by about half in African children.

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Eradicating malaria is not a vague, unrealistic aspiration but a tough, ambitious goal that can be reached within the next few decades, the billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said on Tuesday.