Bird Flu H5N1

MacKenzie, D. 31 Aug 2011. Bird flu flies back into the news. NewScientist.

Cholera

18 Aug 2011. Famine-struck Somalia faces cholera outbreak. New Scientist.
9 Feb 2011 Detecting Cholera Rampaging in 40 countries. ScienceDaily.

Tick borne Illnesses

Lyme disease, rocky mountain spotted fever, Malaria-like disease (babesiosis), encephalitis (Powassan virus), HGA (ehrlichiosis)

12 Nov 2012. List of Diseases Spread by Deer Tick Grows, Including Malaria-Like Problems and Potentially Fatal Encephalitis. Sciencedaily.

Tuberculosis

Kelland, Kate.  13 Sep 2011. Dangerous TB spreading at alarming rate in Europe: WHO. Reuters.com
Multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis (TB) are spreading at an alarming rate in Europe and will kill thousands unless health authorities halt the pandemic. TB is currently a worldwide pandemic that kills around 1.7 million people a year. Cases of multidrug-resistant (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) — where the infections are resistant to first-line and then second-line antibiotic treatments — are spreading fast, with about 440,000 new patients every year around the world.  Treating even normal TB is a long and unpleasant process, with patients needing to take a combination of powerful antibiotics for 6 months. Many patients fail to correctly complete the course of medicines, a factor which has fueled a rise in drug-resistant forms of the disease.

Coghlan, A. 18 Jan 2012. Untreatable Tuberculosis is spreading in India. Newscientist.
A DOOMSDAY strain of tuberculosis that resists all known drugs is spreading in Mumbai, India – one of the world’s most densely populated cities. So far, 12 cases have been confirmed. Three of the 12 have died, and all may have infected others.
Totally drug-resistant TB has been seen only twice before: there were two cases in Italy in 2007 and 15 in Iran in 2009. Its emergence in India is particularly worrying because it could spread so easily in the heavily populated country.
Treatment failures have led to progressively greater drug resistance, ultimately creating totally drug-resistant TB (Clinical Infectious Diseases, DOI: 10.1093/cid/cir889).
The latest data from the WHO is not encouraging. Just 11 per cent of the 280,000 cases recorded by the WHO in 2009 were being treated, and only 11 of 27 countries with “high burdens” of resistant TB had national plans in place to tackle the problem.