Health

Here at Goats and Soda, a feel-good goat story makes us smile like little else. So when we came across pictures of "Sweateredgoats" on Instagram, we wanted to know more.

The goat pics turn out to be about more than making people go "awwwwww."

The caprine fashionistas are featured on a calendar, the sales of which have benefited local organizations in Varanasi, India, where most of the images were taken.

About 9.4 million people are likely HIV-positive and don't know it. That's a key finding from a new report from UNAIDS — and it's why the theme of this month's World AIDS Day is "Know your HIV status."

A new report by a commission empaneled by University College London and the Lancet medical journal offers a thorough — and often surprising — look at the medical and economic impacts of immigration.

As climate negotiators from around the world meet in Poland this week and next to figure out how to keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, they are hearing some discouraging news: Emissions of the biggest pollutant, carbon dioxide, are going up.

For three years — 2014 through 2016 — the amount of atmospheric CO2 had leveled off. But it started to climb again in 2017, and is still rising.

"Last year, we thought, was a blip — but it isn't," says Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University in California.

The African Child Policy Forum (ACPF) has released its latest rankings of African countries on a "Child-Friendliness Index." Every few years since 2008, the Ethiopia-based research center scores governments on their intentions to improve children's legal protections, poverty rates, health, nutrition and education – as well as the outcomes of those intentions.

Liyana may just be the first film in which a group of orphans make up the plot.

The original intent of the filmmakers, Aaron and Amanda Kopp, was to make a documentary about children in the New Life Homes orphanage in eSwatini (formerly known as Swaziland). Aaron grew up in eSwatini and had met some of the youngsters before he started filming in 2010.

The American celebrity Blac Chyna came to Lagos, Nigeria, on Nov. 25 to promote a product she is launching: "X Blac Chyna Diamond Illuminating and Lightening Cream." It's from the cosmetics company Whitenicious, a skin care line that has been controversial since its launch in 2014.

If you take the long view, international health organizations have much to be encouraged about when it comes to the global fight against measles. From 2000 to 2017, for instance, the annual number of measles-related deaths dropped 80 percent — from a toll of over half a million to just under 110,000 last year.

Last year, 50,000 women worldwide were killed by intimate partners or family members — a figure that translates to 1.3 per every 100,000 women, according to a global study on gender-related killing of women and girls released this month by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Break the data down by continent, and the highest rate is in Africa at 3.1 victims per 100,000 females, with rates in descending order of 1.6 in the Americas, 1.3 in Oceania, 0.9 in Asia and 0.7 in Europe.

It's a question that charities often debate: How should their fund-raising ads portray the people they're trying to help?

If the ads display graphic human suffering to elicit donations, they run the risk of exploiting the subjects or making them look helpless.

If the ads are more upbeat — showing aid recipients who are smiling, for example — they may ignore the subject's strife and put the power to transform the subject's life in the hands of rich, Western donors.

A Chinese scientist's claims that he created the world's first gene-edited babies is a "deeply disturbing" and "irresponsible" violation of international scientific norms, according to a formal conclusion issued Thursday by organizers of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong.

But the summit rejected calls for a blanket moratorium on such research, saying that the work could eventually lead to new ways to prevent a long list of serious genetic diseases.

When at 19 Mehnaz became pregnant for the fifth time, she panicked. She already had four daughters, and her husband was threatening to throw her out if she had another. So she did what millions of Pakistani women do every year: She had an abortion.

Like many of those women, her abortion was partly self-administered. "I kept taking tablets — whatever I laid my hands on," she says. "I lifted heavy things" — like the furniture in her tiny living room. She drank brews of boiled dates — many Pakistanis believe the beverage triggers labor.

Updated at 6:15 a.m. ET

The scientist who stunned the world by claiming he created the first genetically modified babies defended his actions publicly for the first time on Wednesday, saying that editing the genes of the twin girls while they were embryos would protect them from contracting HIV.

He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, addressed hundreds of scientists gathered at an international gene- editing summit in Hong Kong that has been rocked by ethical questions swirling around his research.

Today is the sixth annual Giving Tuesday – when charities ask us to take a pause from holiday and direct some of our dollars to worthy causes.

But how to choose between all the groups clamoring for our donations today and as the year draws to a close?

Catherine Hollander is a research analyst with GiveWell, a non-profit that exhaustively investigates potential giving opportunities for its annual list of recommended charities. NPR spoke with Hollander to come up with tips for would-be benefactors.

There's a worrying slowdown in progress against medical conditions that disable, sicken or kill.

Deep in the grips of an Ebola outbreak, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has embarked on an "important step" toward finding an effective treatment for the deadly virus. The World Health Organization said the country has launched the first-ever multidrug clinical trial for potential Ebola treatments.

The first thing I do every morning is open my balcony door and check the air outside. If I spot the blue sky, I'm overjoyed and draw in a deep breath. But many days, the air has a dusty, burnt taste. I make a mental note not to forget my air filter mask before I leave the house.

This is life in India's capital, New Delhi.

Liliana Czegledi devoted herself to keeping her daughter, Ioana, alive.

The girl had been born with a compromised immune system, a damaged heart and muscles that wouldn't work. She wasn't expected to live past her second birthday. Czegledi gave up her bartending job to care for her.

"I made sure she never caught a cold because the doctor said a cold could kill her," recalls Czegledi, 50, at her home in the village of Sînandrei in western Romania. "I only brought her into the hospital when it was absolutely necessary."

At a farm co-op near the southern Colombia town of La Hormiga, a machine sorts black peppercorns.

The peppercorns are grown and produced by farmers who used to grow coca bushes, the leaves of which are used to make cocaine. The farmers some of a group of about 97,000 who have switched to farming other food and livestock in the past two years — thanks to government encouragement.

Editor's note: This story was originally published on November 14 and has been updated to reflect a new commentary on Yemen published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Three weeks ago, 10-year-old Sara was sitting up in her bed at a hospital in Hodeidah, Yemen. A small hole sliced into her throat was helping her breathe.

She was recovering from a rare bacterial infection, called diphtheria. The bacteria had paralyzed part of her body. And there was only one reason why Sara was so sick: Yemen's civil war.

Editor's note: This story was originally published in November 2016 and has been updated.

The sweet potato evokes surprisingly strong feelings — and not just from the pro- and anti-marshmallow lobbies.

It is a staple of the African diet. And Africans feel passionately about it. It kindles warm memories. It's a neglected food that deserves a higher profile because of its nutritional value.

And some people can't stand it!

Each autumn, farmer Amandeep Singh has just a few days to prepare his fields for the next crop. He must clear stubble left over from the rice harvest, before planting wheat, which grows over winter.

Amandeep, 42, is from a long line of farmers in India's breadbasket, in the northern state of Punjab. Like his father and grandfather before him, he'd always burned the residue known as rice straw – the dry stalks of the plant after the grain and chaff have been removed. It's the fastest, cheapest way to prepare his fields for the next planting.

"God don butta my bread!"

That's how you say "my wish has been granted" in pidgin English in Nigeria. It's one of the many pidgin phrases that Prince Charles sprinkled into his speeches in Africa's most populous nation during a nine-day trip to West Africa in November.

He also said, "If life dey show you pepper, my guy make pepper soup!" — akin to the saying "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade."

The audiences laughed.

The government of Democratic Republic of the Congo has released a new video in its fight to end the Ebola outbreak there. The message: To avoid contamination with the virus, it helps to wash your hands.

The world is in a transitional toilet state.

Bathroom innovators are working on ways to make toilets cleaner, safer and better for the environment. In the meantime, there are many types of toilets in the world — and all those options can be confusing.

There's the Western-style toilet — the white porcelain throne with a built-in flusher. In some parts of the world, people might use a squat toilet, which usually involves planting your feet on either side and hovering over a toilet bowl that's set in to the ground. Or a toilet could just be a hole in the ground.

Working in Bolivia's mines is a family business.

That's what Italian photographer Simone Francescangeli saw when he traveled to the city of Potosí of about 250,000 to document the daily lives of miners. They're part of a centuries-old enterprise to extract silver, tin, zinc and gold from the mountains. He was struck by the harsh and sometimes dangerous conditions the miners work in — and by the number of children he saw working in the mines. Some were teenagers. One youngster said he was 11 years old.