Perhaps it takes falling behind to know that you have to get ahead: shortly after The Lancet released a report today saying the World Health Organization had failed to meet its 2010 goal for global measles reduction, the WHO announced that it has a new, more ambitious target of eliminating measles and rubella—also known as German measles—in at least five of six global regions by 2020. The expanded goals come as Europe, despite its historically strong public health systems, is struggling to recover from more than 26,000 measles cases in 2011, a number on-par with developing countries such as Nigeria and Somalia.

As Europe redoubles its own immunization efforts at home, the WHO now must vaccinate an estimated 19 million children in India and sub-Saharan Africa if it hopes to meet the new 2020 target. “We have already seen India scaling up its efforts,” Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele, director of immunization at the WHO in Geneva, said at a teleconference this morning announcing the new goal. “The new [WHO] plan provides a good roadmap to eliminate measles by 2020.”

Measles is a highly contagious virus that can become airborne, making it crucial that virtually everyone in a region undergo vaccination if the disease is to be eliminated. It can spread rapidly to anyone who is not immune, often leading to death in children under five. The first vaccine against measles came in 1971, and it now costs as little as two cents per dose in developing countries. But as the European outbreak highlights, vaccine cost and availability are not the only barriers to getting people immunized. “Cultural and religious beliefs play a huge role in whether children receive the vaccine, both in Europe and elsewhere,” says Rebecca Martin, director of the global immunization division at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. She says one reason so many young Europeans are now susceptible to measles was false perception over the past fifteen years that the vaccine raised the risk of autism.

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Since it first arose more than 50 years ago, the methicillin-resistant staph infection known as MRSA has ravaged hospital wards around the globe, causing untreatable, often lethal, infections in people already weakened by disease. As with most cases of antibiotic resistance, the rise of the first MRSA bacteria was the fault of humans. The Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, which causes everything from respiratory infections to meningitis, mutated to become resistant to all the first-line drugs used to treat it—first penicillin, and later methicillin and other drugs known as beta-lactams.

But the story doesn’t end there. Since 1959, the drug-resistant superbugs have taken on many guises, evolving into five major lineages worldwide, each with slightly different genes that make the pathogens particularly deadly. Yet, how each strain’s killing power arose largely remains a mystery. Now, a paper published today in Nature Medicine takes a step toward explaining the killing mechanism of one particular strain from China. By sorting through a decade’s worth of superbugs isolated from Chinese hospitals, the authors have identified a resistance gene encoded by a mobile genetic element that helps S. aureus multiply in the noses, throats and lungs of susceptible patients.

“This is very exciting,” says study author Michael Otto, chief of the Pathogen Molecular Genetics Section at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. “This gene is a critical determinant how dangerous MRSA is to patients.”

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Drought and war have come together in Somalia, culminating in the worst famine to hit the region in decades. An estimated 800,000 children in the Horn of Africa are acutely malnourished, and over 80% of them are cut off from relief by warlords in the area. Today the UN World Food Programme intended to drop food supplies to the Somali capital to feed the 40,000 refugees gathered there, the first airlift in the two weeks since the UN declared the crisis an official famine.

Aid workers are rightfully focused on the immediate needs of the starving Somalis. But their plight may not be over once the famine ends, whenever that may be. Studies of past famines hint that children who endure severe malnutrition at a young age or while in the womb might be at a higher risk for certain diseases.

Scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing have used data from their country’s National Health and Nutrition Survey, taken by the government every ten years, to follow up on those citizens affected by the Great Chinese Famine that lasted from 1958 to 1961. The widespread famine officially resulted in 15 million deaths, but scholars estimate that the actual number is closer to 40 million.

One paper published last month from the Chinese analysis found that those born during the famine were more likely to suffer from high systolic blood pressure — a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Additionally, those under the most severe famine conditions were more susceptible to hypertension later on. Famine survivors who ate a western diet high in fat, refined carbohydrates, and low in fruits in vegetables later in life had a more pronounced risk of blood pressure woes than their counterparts who ate the same foods but had never been exposed to famine. A study from the same group published in February came to similar conclusions regarding famine and metabolic syndrome.

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Today, in the historic New York City residence of former US president and polio survivor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Bill Gates took to the podium. As he spoke before a group of journalists, the Microsoft founder detailed the goal of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help stamp out polio. His words come on the heels of an announcement last Thursday when Gates, together with the Crown Prince of Abu-Dabhi of the United Arab Emirates, pledged to donate a total of $100 million toward many vaccines, including that against polio.

But it’s clear that money alone won’t solve the polio problem. In the subsequent roundtable discussion, Governer Owais Ahmad Ghani of the Khyber Pakhtunkwa province and neighboring tribal areas described his own nation’s struggles to eradicate the disease. While vaccination efforts reduced polio cases in Pakistan from 1,155 cases in 1997 to a mere 28 in 2005, a recent resurgence — reaching 118 cases in 2008 — has alarmed officials.

According to Ghani, establishing vaccination programs in the remote tribal areas of Pakistan presents a tricky challenge. One possible approach he suggested for war-torn regions was enlisting the army in vaccination campaigns. And he hopes that the financial support of the Gates Foundation will help create permanent community centers in these regions in which workers are held accountable for new cases.

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More than a year after a catastrophic earthquake struck Port-au-Prince and killed an estimated 230,000 Haitians, public health officials are still grappling with the fallout from a cholera outbreak that has so far killed more than 3,000 people and infected nearly 150,000 others. To strengthen the response on the ground, the World Bank yesterday awarded $15 million to aid efforts in identifying and responding to future cases of the disease.

But global efforts are not stopping there. To prevent future cholera outbreaks, the World Health Organization is gearing up to implement a pilot cholera vaccination program to prevent the bacterial infection before it happens. However, as Nature reports, the effort is being hampered by vaccine supplies that are limited and that have never before been tested in disease outbreaks as large as the current epidemic.

With cases of cholera continuing to rise, methods are urgently needed to quickly identify contaminated water sources to prevent the spread of the disease. Reporting yesterday in the journal Bioconjugate Chemistry, a team from the University of Central Florida developed a method that could potentially do just that. The method, which uses the sugar dextran to detect the cholera toxin, the substance responsible for the disease, is comparable in sensitivity to existing methods but is much less expensive. What’s more, the authors report, the test could easily be adapted under field conditions such as those found in Haiti.

Death rates of cholera victims continue to drop to less than 1% in Port-au-Prince. But a news story out today from Nature cautions that many more people continue to be afflicted in rural areas of the country. Meanwhile, a team of scientists from the United Nations continues to search for the source of the cholera outbreak, Reuters reports.

Image of Vibrio cholerae from CDC