Insecticides, mosquito nets, and disrupting breeding grounds all reduce mosquito populations and slow the spread of malaria. Now, researchers want to take away the insect’s food to fight the disease that kills a child every two minutes. Mosquitoes mostly feed …
A cholera outbreak in Yemen “continues to spiral out of control,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which says there are now over 300,000 suspected cases of the water-borne disease. The country is also struggling to battle …
Sealed behind the steel doors of two bunkers in a Beijing suburb, university students are trying to find out how it feels to live in a space station on another planet, recycling everything from plant cuttings to urine. They are …
Invasive species are wreaking havoc in waters around the world — from Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades, to Asian carp in the Mississippi River, to turtles native to the US on every continent except Antarctica. Faith Lapidus reports on …
Microplastics are pieces of plastic less than 5 millimeters in size. They make up part of the estimated tens of millions of tons of plastic that gets washed into the ocean every year. That could be hurting fish that eat …
Georgia’s health commissioner was named Friday to lead the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal government’s top public health agency. Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald is an OB-GYN and has been head of the Georgia Department of Public Health …
The state of Minnesota is battling the biggest outbreak of measles since 1990, and state health officials are hoping it is tapering off. Seventy-eight people caught the disease, mostly Somali-Americans, and nearly a third were hospitalized. The Somali-American community in …
Measles was officially wiped out in the United States 17 years ago. But outbreaks still happen when someone carries the virus back from a country where measles exists. The state of Minnesota is battling the biggest outbreak of measles since …
After a mild winter, the northeastern United States is in for a banner year when it comes to ticks. That would be little more than a nuisance if it were not for the fact that the tiny bloodsuckers carry some …
Not every police officer patrols on two legs. Some have four legs, and fur. Faith Lapidus reports on some new recruits and some veterans leaving police work behind. …
At least three people worldwide are infected with totally untreatable “superbug” strains of gonorrhea, which they are likely to be spreading to others through sex, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday. Giving details of studies showing a “very serious …
Scientists have found an extra charming new subatomic particle that they hope will help further explain a key force that binds matter together. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced Thursday the fleeting discovery of a long theorized …
Canada is attacking its expanding opioid crisis with an unusual measure: It’s giving addicts a safe place to shoot up. The government has allowed seven “safe injection sites” to open and a score of others are being considered across …
Using only baker’s yeast, researchers at Columbia University have designed an inexpensive, on-the-spot test to detect major fungal pathogens. Faith Lapidus has details of the new biosensor, described in the journal Science Advances. …
One of Africa’s driest regions — the Sahel — could turn greener if the planet warms more than 2 degrees Celsius and triggers more frequent heavy rainfall, scientists said on Wednesday. The Sahel stretches coast to coast from Mauritania and …
A novel class of personalized cancer vaccines, tailored to the tumors of individual patients, kept disease in check in two early-stage clinical trials, pointing to a new way to help the immune system fight back. Although so-called immunotherapy drugs from …
Stem cell tourism involving patients who travel to developing countries for treatment with unproven and potentially risky therapies should be more tightly regulated, international health experts said Wednesday. With hundreds of medical centers around the world claiming to be able …
The Trump administration will soon begin a review that will question the veracity of the climate change science used by President Barack Obama’s administration as the basis for environmental regulations. The move by the Environmental Protection Agency to launch public …
A team of teenage Gambian students are upset and mystified at being denied visas to attend a major global robotics contest in Washington later this month. This comes days after an Afghan girls team was also turned down by the …
Hundreds of environmentalists protested in Kraków Tuesday against widespread logging in Europe’s last primeval forest as a conference of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee got underway in the historic city in southern Poland. The environmentalists demanded that the Polish government …
Lawyers from around Africa gathered in Cameroon this week to call for tougher legislation against counterfeit medicine. Sixty tons of counterfeit medicine was burned after being seized by customs officials in Cameroon, who say the stockpile had an estimated …
The U.N. children’s fund warns tens of thousands of malnourished children are at great risk in Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan, which are on the brink of famine. UNICEF reports an estimated 4.7 million children in the three cholera-stricken countries …
Dairy farmers want U.S. regulators to banish the term “soy milk,” but documents show even government agencies haven’t always agreed on what to call such drinks. The U.S. Department of Agriculture “fervently” wanted to use the term “soy milk” in …
A robot wheels across a rocky, windswept landscape that looks like the surface of some distant planet from a science fiction film. But it is not in outer space, it’s on the slopes of Europe’s most active volcano. Mount Etna, …