Geneva

$616 million awarded to fight diseases

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria on Thursday awarded $616 million to programs in more than 40 countries to pay for prevention and treatment of those three scourges of the world’s poor.

The grants, the first to be made by the nearly year-old fund, finance programs for two years, with additional support contingent on the programs’ performance. Award recipients range from a South African AIDS program with a five-year budget of $93 million to a two-year project in Panama with a budget of $570,000.

About 45 percent of the money awarded Thursday will pay for drugs; the remainder will be used to train health care workers, support public education campaigns and buy items such as insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets.

Italy

Study: Crib death could be linked to infection

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, in which apparently healthy babies die inexplicably in their cribs, may be linked to infection with a common bacterium, new research suggests.

Researchers in Milan told a conference on infectious diseases Thursday that a shock-producing byproduct of E. coli was found in the blood of all SIDS babies tested, but in none of the infants used as a comparison.

Experts not connected with the research said the toxic infection theory was plausible.

SIDS describes unexpected deaths that autopsies can’t explain. Despite decades of research, scientists remain mystified by crib death, the top killer of babies aged between 1 month and 1 year in the industrialized world.

Belgium

EU Parliament urges U.S. to follow laws

The European Union Parliament urged the United States Thursday to adhere to international laws in its treatment of Taliban and al-Qaida suspects detained at the U.S. naval base of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The European Parliament voted 439 to 10, with 59 abstentions to pass its annual world human rights report, which highlighted the threats to individual rights in the war against terrorism.

The EU assembly said “terrorism must not in itself lead to breaches of human rights.”

It criticized a decision by President Bush to set up military-run courts behind closed doors to try the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, who now number 300.