health

Aid groups and public health experts warn that a series of devastating earthquakes could exacerbate a cholera outbreak in Syria first detected last year.

Cinnamon, the well-known aromatic spice that many of us use to bake cakes and cook savory dishes, is derived from the inner bark of Cinnamomum trees. These are evergreen trees found in the Himalayas and other mountain areas, as well as in rainforests and other forests in southern China, India and Southeast Asia.

A toxic smog engulfs India's capital every winter, as particles from bonfires of crop stubble and vehicle exhausts hang in the air, but New Delhi is enforcing a ban on coal burning from this month that is forcing the industry to shift to biomass.

For patients with cancer, lengthy delays in treatment can decrease their chances of survival. In an analysis of 2004–2017 information on patients with breast cancer in North Carolina, Black patients were more likely to experience such treatment delays than non-Black patients. Also, patients living in certain geographic regions of the state, regardless of race/ethnicity, tended to experience delays. The research is published online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.

Anaïs Saint-André Loughran remembers every cheese she’s ever tasted. The owner of Chantal’s Cheese Shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, recalls that when she decided she wanted to be a cheesemonger—at age 4—“all the doors of my memories were tied to cheese, and where and how I tasted it.” So when Loughran lost her sense of smell after she contracted COVID in March 2020, she was devastated. On the second day, she says, “I woke up, I tried to eat something, and it felt like I was eating nothing.” Since then, her career has been irrevocably changed.

Although electricity is critical to healthcare provision, nearly a billion people in poorer countries - one-eighth of the global population - are served by health facilities that lack reliable supply, a UN-backed report launched on Saturday has revealed.

The hardship being felt across the Horn of Africa by the worst drought in 40 years has left many women weak and malnourished. The UN agency dedicated to women’s sexual and reproductive health, UNPA, is helping save mothers’ lives in Kenya, through the donation of a simple but effective way of accessing hard-to-reach areas - a motorbike, to enable safe emergency deliveries in the hospital.

Although virus sequencing is vital to detect and track new variants in the COVID-19 pandemic, sharing this information must be stepped up globally, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday in Geneva. 

The world is awash in data. Data abundance and tools to extract meaning from data let us better understand, control and improve our world. From the outer reaches of space to atoms and quarks, we are learning more at ever-finer levels of detail about the universe. Perhaps nowhere is this exploration more important than learning about the functioning of our own bodies.

A child or young person died every 4.4 seconds in 2021, and millions more could lose their lives by 2030 unless all women and children have access to adequate healthcare, two UN reports published on Thursday have revealed.