A Manitoba woman has been in jail since April 2011, as part of her treatment plan to treat her infectious TB, and now has been ordered to spend another three months behind bars. The 30-year-old woman -- who has been described as "belligerent" to staff on the Health Unit of the jail -- was first diagnosed with TB in December of 2010 and put on a treatment plan that health officials claim she has repeatedly refused to follow. Normal TB treatment takes between six and nine months to complete when there are no interruptions in the treatment regime.

The ongoing fight to get this country to ban the export of the world's deadliest industrial material has finally reached the Comedy Network and Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. The sheer absurdity of pretending that chrysotile asbestos can be used safely caught the eye of the popular show and they recently did a five-minute segment, ridiculing the industry, the mining company, and the town of Asbestos. It is a must see and reveals a jaw-dropping level of ignorance and denial on the part of the people promoting asbestos.

The Virginia federal judge who ruled against a key component of health care reform on Monday has ties to a Republican consulting firm. Judge Henry Hudson is a co-owner of Campaign Solutions, as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reports.

Hudson, a President George W. Bush appointee, has earned as much as $108,000 in royalties from Campaign Solutions since 2003. A cached version of the firm’s client roster lists such vocal opponents of health reform as Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Jim DeMint (R-SC), and Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS), the Republican National Committee and the American Medical Association.

Strict laws on the criminalization of drug use and drug users are fuelling the spread of HIV and other serious harms associated with the criminal market and should be reviewed, say experts. In this video, epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani and other leading commentators describe which countries are leading the way in tackling HIV infection among injecting drug users.

My last post asked the question: If gay guys use condoms more than straight people, why do they get infected with HIV at much higher rates?

I argued that health systems depend too heavily on individual, bio-medical explanations without also accounting for the role of community-level and structural factors in health outcomes. I'm amazed, for example, how rarely the public health system addresses homophobia as a reason why gay guys account for the highest number of new infections in countries like the US, the UK and Canada.