By Scott Johnson

After almost two months of bloodshed, Kenya's dueling leaders have finally agreed to a power-sharing arrangement intended to end the violence that has crippled the country since its disputed December presidential poll. It's the most positive development Kenya has seen in a long time. In a ceremony staged to calm tempers former U.N Secretary General Kofi Annan brought president Mwai Kibaki and his rival, opposition leader Raila Odinga, together and encouraged them to shake hands for the cameras.

But now the tricky part begins. The agreement creates a powerful prime ministerial post for Odinga while Kibaki stays on as president. It also splits cabinet posts between the governemnt and the opposition. For Odinga, the first order of business will be to figure out a way to peacefully repatriate over 300,000 Kenyans displced by the violence without further inflaming  ethnic hatreds.  Like Kibaki, the vast majority of those uprooted are ethnic Kikuyus, and resettling them is going to be a colossal task that could take several years, according to those involved in the negotiations.  "It's a huge problem, a huge problem," says Sammy Nyongesa, an opposition mobilizer who was in a celebratory mood earlier today, "It's not going to be solved immediately because politics in Kenya has been ethnicized now."

It's still not clear what form the new arrangement will take. Odinga could well be appointed as prime minister within the next week if the proper constitutional changes are made. Either way, the deal shifts the balance of power in Kenya significantly--away from the ruling elite that have governed the country since independence, opening it up to an entirely new coalition of interests from across the country. Odinga's ODM party now controls a majority of parliament, as well as the powerful house speaker position, and is running high on the momentum that Odinga brought to bear. "Everything is working on our side," Nyongesa said.

But who knows how long that will be the case. Odinga's hardline position started to breed resentment recently when people began to pin the violence on his unwillingness to accept anything less than the presidency. Eventually he did, but not without costs. "It was not good for Raila to continue to have such a hard line stance because of what we had gone through as a country," said one opposition source who asked not to be named, "That was what made him change his mind."  

Hopefully, that spirit of reconciliation will last long enough for Kenya to get back on its feet.

Call It the cough heard round the world. The World Health Organization's Feb. 26 report on how super strains of tuberculosis are on the loose has shaken physicians and policy makers everywhere to the marrow. And rightly so. The study, based on a massive survey of 90,000 patients worldwide, is eloquent testimony to the ravages of a modern killer: multi drug resistant tuberculosis, known as MDR TB in the chilly shorthand of public health, and its even deadlier next of kin, extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, or XTR-TB, which is practically untreatable.  

It's no surprise that poor countries, rife with malnutrition, claustrophobic slums, and especially AIDS are super TB's closest ally. Precisely because HIV strafes the human immune system, patients are sitting ducks for infection. That's why almost everywhere that AIDS is prevalent,  tuberculosis is soaring. Worst hit are the fragments of the old Soviet Union (led by Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where one in four new tb patients have the super variety) and Africa, with the highest rate of TB in the world and the worst public health statistics (only six nations on the continent managed to report to Geneva).  At this rate the Economic Forum at Davos might have to be scrapped in favor of the sanatorium that once crowned that Magic Mountain.

There is one bright spot in the developing world's deathlock with TB: Brazil. That may sound odd. Nearly a quarter of the 185 million Brazilians live below the poverty line, where contagions rage, and some 620,000 have AIDS, a third of all cases in Latin America. But unlike almost every other developing nation, Brazil has not seen the overall TB infection rate spike - much less a runaway outbreak of MDR-TB - among the most vulnerable population. The reason is as simple as it is controversial: free meds for HIV and AIDS patients. In 1996, the Brazilian congress passed a law requiring the government to hand out antiretrovirals to anyone with HIV free of charge. Drug companies were disgruntled, not least because Brazil browbeat them into slashing prices for the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals, the state of the art medicine used to combat the virus. The same policy encouraged nearly two dozen other developing countries to take on the biggest pharmaceutical corporations as well.

No one ever claimed Brazil was a health spa, of course. After a brief lull, mosquito-borne dengue fever has come raging back, including the killer hemorrhagic variety. An outbreak of micobacteriosis, which causes a nasty hospital infection, leaves lasting surgery scars and can withstand all but the most drastic disinfectants, is on the loose. And while in theory anyone may be treated at the country's public hospitals, chronic underfunding has apparently forced brain surgeons in Rio de Janeiro to resort to common power tools, like home drills, in the operating rooms.

Still, it's hard to argue with success. A team of international scientists recently crunched the numbers and found that Brazilians living with AIDS who reguarly took the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals had 80 percent lower TB infection rates than did patients who were not treated. (The study reviewed data from 1995 to 2001, but researchers say that the trend holds to this day.) The bottom line is that systematic use of  cutting edge HIV/AIDS medicine may be one of the best ways to keep this millennial scourge at bay. That may not be the best news for Big Pharma's shareholders. But it ought to give public health authorites a shot in the arm.