A new virus similar to the one that triggered a deadly SARS outbreak in 2003 is beginning to spread throughout the Middle East and Europe, killing at least 18 people so far. Although the World Health Organization (WHO) hasn’t yet found evidence to suggest that the new SARS-like virus could spark a pandemic, WHO officials are now warning that it can likely be spread from prolonged human contact — a sign that public health officials across the globe need to be on alert.

The new strain of coronavirus — a family of pathogens that can cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more serious respiratory infections like SARS — originated in Saudi Arabia, and has since been detected in British and French citizens who recently traveled to the Middle East. In France, the virus spread between two patients who shared a hospital room. “The different clusters seen in multiple countries increasingly support the hypothesis that, when there is close contact, this novel coronavirus can transmit from person-to-person,” WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl explained in a statement.

The public health community typically defines “close contact” as spending a prolonged period of time in the same small, enclosed space with a person who is already infected. Fortunately, that means this type of coronavirus appears to be less contagious than the SARS virus that killed nearly 800 people around the world a decade ago.

Still, WHO officials are taking this situation seriously. “The emergence of this new coronavirus is globally recognized as an important and major challenge for all of the countries which have been affected as well as the rest of the world,” Hartl said in the recent WHO statement, going on to explain that “several urgent actions are needed” to help contain the virus’ spread. Hartl noted that the WHO is encouraging countries to increase public awareness about the new coronavirus, particularly among health care staff, and increase their levels of surveillance to monitor new cases of infection.

World health experts are particularly concerned because they haven’t been able to determine several important aspects of the virus’ spread. Medical professionals still don’t know the source of the virus, exactly how it’s being transmitted, and how easily it could spread from human-to-human contact. Saudi Arabia has invited scientists from the United States, Canada, and WHO to study the coronavirus strain further to help answer some of those questions.

And the new SARS-like pathogen isn’t the only outbreak that’s currently puzzling scientists. A new strain of the bird flu that has emerged in China has been called “one of the most lethal viruses of its kind” by WHO officials. Scientists haven’t yet been able to determine the origin of that virus, either. “Until we know how and where humans are contracting these two diseases, we cannot control them,” Hartl pointed out.

More than 800 man-made chemicals found in everyday products — in your household cleaners, makeup, electronics, canned food, and clothing — are becoming “a global threat that needs to be resolved,” according to a new report from the World Health Organization and United Nations Environment Program. Research links these hormone-disrupting chemicals to a host of medical problems, including certain cancers, birth defects, and other diseases.

These chemicals include phthalates and BPA, which are both used in plastics. The U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe have banned them in some products for children, but Endocrine Distrupting Chemicals (called EDCs) still lurk in the hundreds of thousands around the world. “The vast majority of chemicals” in common use have not even been tested for safety, report authors wrote.

The report takes a more urgent tone on EDCs than a 2002 WHO report that found evidence of man-made chemicals’ harm to be “weak.”

Since then, the link between everyday chemical exposure and health problems has become clearer. A separate study last year showed that exposure can be harmful to humans even in small doses. The Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency continue to study BPA’s dangers in low doses.

“Frankly, for BPA, the science is done. Flame retardants, phthalates … the science is done,” WHO report co-author Thomas Zoeller told Environmental Health News. “We have more than enough information on these chemicals to make the reasonable decision to ban, or at least take steps to limit exposure.”

But one major hurdle to addressing and regulating toxic chemicals in the U.S. involves battling industry groups like the American Chemistry Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which have waged campaigns against Environmental Protection Agency oversight of toxic chemicals.

Diseases that kill 2.6 million poor people per year receive a miniscule fraction of pharmaceutical research money, according to a new report from Doctors Without Borders. The report surveyed all drugs approved for global use between 2001 and 2011, finding that only 3.8 percent of approved drugs were designed to treat so-called “neglected diseases,” defined as diseases where “treatment options are inadequate or don’t exist, and when their drug-market potential is insufficient to readily attract a private sector response.”

The reason that treating these illnesses isn’t a moneymaker for the pharmaceutical industry is that they disproportionately kill poor people, as the wealthy have access to basic sanitation and other preventative measures that make it very unlikely to contract neglected diseases. Moreover, even when treatment for these diseases get developed, they’re often designed in a fashion that makes them too expensive for the very poorest to afford:

[E]ven when there is enough of a profit incentive to drive innovation – for example when diseases affect both developed and developing countries alike – the resulting products are too often priced out of reach. Developing countries are not the only ones to be hit, as ever higher prices for new medical tools strain the healthcare budgets of developed countries as well, posing access barriers to increasing numbers of people. New drugs to treat HIV or cancer can cost hundreds of times more than a person’s average annual income, and the battle for access increasingly has to be waged drug by drug, country by country, company by company.

Government and philanthropic investment is not picking up the slack: though governments provide twice as much money for neglected disease research as private institutions, the total amount of funding is still half of what the World Health Organization expects would be necessary to address these diseases. Cutbacks as a consequence of the global financial crisis are shrinking this already-inadequate funding pool. In May, the United States opposed the creation of a dedicated international fund for combating neglected diseases.

The problem of unequal access to medical treatment extends beyond neglected diseases. African-Americans and the poor are significantly less likely than other Americans to get access to treatment for HIV/AIDS. Likewise, the inability of developing countries to afford and distribute HIV/AIDS drugs costs millions of lives worldwide.