Measures attached to International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans may have contributed to a resurgence in tuberculosis in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Governments could be reducing funding for health services such as hospitals and clinics to meet strict IMF economic targets.

A study found that countries participating in IMF programs had seen tuberculosis death rates increase by at least 17 percent between 1991 and 2000, which is equivalent to more than 100,000 additional deaths. Nations that received money from institutions with less restrictive economic conditions saw a nearly 8 percent drop in tuberculosis death rates over the same period.

After a series of stinging investigations of individual doctors’
arrangements with drug makers, Senator Charles E. Grassley is demanding
that the American Psychiatric Association give an accounting of its
financing. The association is considered the voice of establishment
psychiatry.

In 2006, the drug industry accounted for about 30 percent of the
association’s $62.5 million in financing. About half of that money went
to drug advertisements in psychiatric journals and exhibits at the
annual meeting.

One of the doctors named by Mr. Grassley is Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg,
the association’s president-elect. Dr. Schatzberg’s $4.8 million stock
holdings in a drug development company raised the senator’s concern.

Three Polish doctors and six nurses face criminal prosecution after a number of homeless people died following medical trials for a vaccine to the H5N1 bird-flu virus.

The medical staff are being investigated over medical trials conducted on as many as 350 homeless and poor people last year. Authorities claim that the alleged victims received money to be tested with what they thought was a conventional flu vaccine, but was actually an anti bird-flu drug.

The director of the homeless center in the area said that 21 people from his center died this year, a figure well above the average of about eight.

The suspects said that the all those involved knew that the trial involved an anti-H5N1 drug and willingly participated.