Health

When Muhammad Zaman came to the United States in 1996, he asked around for pharmacy recommendations. Friends kept telling him the same thing: filling a prescription at Walgreens was as good as filling it at CVS. Duane Reade was as safe as the Main Street drug store in any small town. The medicines sold in all of them would contain the chemicals and active ingredients that their labels claimed.

He was shocked. That wasn't the case in his native Pakistan, he says.

What's the worse-case Ebola outbreak?

Public health officials would say it's when the virus is spreading in a crowded urban environment that's a major transportation hub and has dilapidated, ill-equipped health care facilities.

Unfortunately, that's what's happening right now in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It's a frigid spring day in the outskirts of Catania, Sicily, in Italy. On a narrow highway winding through a landscape of light industry and slumbering vineyards, trucks and Lycra-bound cyclists whiz past a dozen or so sex workers waiting for clients on the side of the road.

Many of the women are from Nigeria. One pair, dressed in matching short, curly wigs, red turtlenecks and fishnets, sit on plastic chairs, listening to a tinny rendition of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" on a cell phone. Another woman stands alone, hovering close to a fire she's made to keep warm.

The Ebola vaccine has been two decades in the making, but it's only now being put to use in the face of a looming crisis.

The virus has been spreading through a northern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since at least April there have been 2 confirmed cases and 39 more suspected ones. Nineteen people have died.

Kanye West, who can never resist a Twitter controversy, sent out a seemingly bland tweet to his 28 million followers on Monday.

His tweet about the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals — a set of 17 goals to end extreme poverty, abolish inequality and improve the environment, among other things, by 2030 — has left the global development community scratching their heads.

People who spend time with young children know firsthand the power of music.

It's easy entertainment.

And any teacher who works in early childhood will tell you that singing can yield amazing results. "If we didn't sing the cleanup song, I don't think anything would have gotten cleaned up," says Laura Cirelli, who worked as an assistant at a day care center in the late 2000s.

But there may be other ways — surprising ways — in which music plays a role in raising a human.

A short man with a ponytail peeks through a crack in a sheet-metal fence, calling out to see if anybody's home. His name is Dario Garcia and he is checking on some people with HIV to make sure they're taking their meds.

Garcia walks through the muddy yard, past chickens and scrawny dogs, to the cinder block house.

There's no other way to put it: Maria de los Angeles Tun Burgos is a supermom.

She's raising five children, does housework and chores — we're talking about fresh tortillas every day made from stone-ground corn — and she helps with the family's business in their small village about 2 1/2 hours west of Cancún on the Yucatán Peninsula.

What's the one thing you wish someone had told you before you became a parent?

It's a question we're asking our audience as part of How To Raise A Human, a new series from NPR's Science desk. Over the next month, we'll be looking at some of the tough issues that every parent faces — from baby sleep to getting kids to do chores — and visiting families around the world to see what they do.

Editor's note: This post contains some strong language.

Stella Nyanzi walks into court with a broad smile. She is familiar with this place, so she is the first in the door and casually takes a seat on a wooden bench right in front of the judge.

What's the best way to protect girls and women from being bullied, beaten and sexually assaulted?

The truth is, we don't really have a lot of evidence.

Although gender-based violence affects 35 percent of women worldwide, it's a "substantially neglected" area of research, according to the Sexual Violence Research Initiative, a South Africa-based group. That's why, together with the World Bank, they are investing in new ideas and solutions to find the best ways to fight it.

Mbakumua Hengari grew up in the 1970s on a farm in southern Africa, in what is today the nation of Namibia. The arid soil around his family's homestead was sandy and grassy, a poor fit for staple crops, so he and seven siblings subsisted on a modest herd of cattle, sheep and goats.

Hengari blames systematic racism for his family's poverty — and he and his people, the Herero, are still fighting for justice.

The first crisis came in 1904. German colonists waged a brutal war of extermination — now considered a precursor to the Holocaust.

On May 2, two girls, ages 10 and 12, appeared in court to testify against a man they said had raped them repeatedly at an orphanage in the Indian city of Hyderabad.

They had been rescued by the police and were sent to live in a shelter run by Prajwala, an organization that has supported rape victims in India since 1996, giving them a place to live on its campus and the skills to help them rebuild their lives.

Something happened at the funeral. Something was making people incredibly sick. And local health workers had no idea what it was.

Chapter 1: The Outbreak

In April 2017 about 150 people had gathered for the funeral of a Christian minister in the small port city of Greenville, Liberia, in West Africa. The memorial spanned April 21 and 22 and included a wake that extended late into the night of the first day.

Earlier this spring, Saudi Arabia was put on high alert as the media reported an outbreak of Alkhurma hemorrhagic fever.

Goats and Soda jumped to cover the story. Hemorrhagic fevers, which include Ebola, are a frightening group of illnesses, and rightly so, for their ability to sometimes cause bleeding — from the eyes, nose, ears and other body parts.

New research suggests that global warming could cause temperature swings to get unusually extreme. And the regions where the biggest swings will occur are among the poorest in the world — and the least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Climate scientists already know that as the planet warms, there's a bigger chance of extreme weather: bigger hurricanes, for example, or heavier rainfall.

On Jan. 23, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order that bans U.S. aid to any health organization in another country that provides, advocates or makes referrals for abortions.

While Americans are busy dissecting the Michelle Wolf monologue at the White House Correspondents' dinner, Nigerians (and experts on Nigeria) are busy expressing themselves about Monday's meeting with President Trump and their president Muhammadu Buhari. It's the first time Trump has met with a sub-Saharan African leader.

Here's a roundup of responses, from interviews with Nigerians and other commenters and from Twitter.

Say you're at your local coffee shop.

You order a cappuccino or a caramel macchiato and look for a cozy spot where you can settle in for an hour or two. But there's one problem: A bunch of chairs are blocking the aisle.

At this critical moment, do you: a) Contort and squeeze your body around the misplaced chairs, just in case someone had a good reason for putting them there? Or b) Move the chairs, so you can quickly sit down and start drinking your beverage before it gets cold?

A hundred years ago, the world was struck by a nightmare scenario.

World War I was still raging. And then a suspicious disease appeared.

On the face of it, it was just another hair removal ad aimed at women in both Pakistan and India But this ad, like the others, would have slipped by unnoticed were it not for a social media uproar led by none other than Sana Mir, the former captain of the Pakistan women's cricket team.

Every day, 15,000 children five years old or younger die of preventable conditions diarrhea and pneumonia. In 2016, that number added up to 5.6 million children, most of them in the developing world, according to the World Health Organization.

What if a simple intervention could save tens of thousands of those children? Seems like a no-brainer — unless the method used to save them puts tens of thousands of others at risk in the future.

"Cellal alaa cogu — health has no price," sighs Haja Bah, looking out on a dusty street in the sprawling eastern suburbs of Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital. "But they have forgotten us ... and many are still really suffering."

Members of the nomadic Bajau people often spend up to five hours a day underwater. They're hunting for fish, octopus and other seafood.

And they don't even use diving gear.

So what's their secret?

New research suggests this extraordinary diving ability is due to a special trait the Bajau have developed: larger spleens.

How many attacks are there on health care facilities in Syria?

Editor's note: This post was updated on April 30.

Barkatullah is 13. He lost his right arm and leg in a mine explosion on May 2017. But that does not deter him from dreaming of a brighter future. "The policemen were among the people who rescued me and saved my life," he says on a chilly evening in the children's playground at the Emergency War and Trauma Hospital in Kabul. "That is what I want to do when I grow up."

Behind pea-green curtains in a steamy office in the Central African Republic's capital of Bangui, comic book artist Didier Kassai carefully dips his paintbrush into a nut brown pigment on his palette, wipes it on a scratch sheet then slowly puts it to paper. His brush strokes bring a watercolor to life – itself a scene of death. The brown is used to color the butt of a rebel's gun in a strip chronicling his country's spiraling conflict.