A report by leading United Nations agencies says global progress in reducing maternal and newborn deaths has stalled for nearly a decade largely due to underinvestment in providing the health care. The report shows more than 4.5 million women and babies die every year in pregnancy, childbirth or the first …

Providing simple and cheap healthcare measures to pregnant women — such as offering aspirin — could prevent more than a million babies from being stillborn or dying as newborns in developing countries every year, new research said on Tuesday.    An international team of researchers also estimated that one quarter of the world’s babies …

Mexican officials and the conservation group Sea Shepherd said Monday that experts would set out in two ships in a bid to locate the few remaining vaquita marina, the world’s most endangered marine mammal.  Mexico’s environment secretary said experts from the United States, Canada and Mexico will use binoculars, sighting …

Funding for a global initiative aimed at creating more environmentally friendly and climate-resilient farming has grown to $13 billion, co-leaders the United States and the United Arab Emirates said Monday. That money means the Agriculture Innovation Mission (AIM) for Climate, launched in 2021, now exceeds its $10 billion target for …

For the first time, the U.S. government will pay for a large study measuring whether overdoses can be prevented by so-called safe injection sites, places where people can use heroin and other illegal drugs and be revived if they take too much. The grant provides more than $5 million over …

Immigrants in the western U.S. state of Colorado have a unique place to go when they are not feeling well: a health care clinic that serves newcomers from many countries. For VOA, Svitlana Prystynska has more about the facility, which was founded by a Ukrainian immigrant. Camera: Olena Andrushenko  …

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says America’s leading cause of overdose deaths is synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin. U.S. law enforcement says illicit fentanyl is cheaply made from chemicals mostly coming from China, trafficked through Mexico, and then …

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says America’s leading cause of overdose deaths is synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin. U.S. law enforcement says illicit fentanyl is cheaply made from chemicals mostly coming from China, trafficked through Mexico, and then …

“Being in hospitals during the early days of COVID-19 was terrifying, like I was going to war. But as far as I’m concerned, those days are done, Danielle King, a nurse working in Luling, Louisiana, told VOA. “I think it’s pretty obvious that the pandemic was over a year ago,” …

Mohammed Azhar holds his baby niece next to a storm drain full of plastic and stinking black sludge, testament to India’s failure to treat nearly two-thirds of its urban sewage. “We stay inside our homes. We fall sick if we go out,” the 21-year-old told AFP in the Delhi neighborhood …

China has approved the safety of a gene-edited soybean, its first approval of the technology in a crop, as the country increasingly looks to science to boost food production. The soybean, developed by privately owned Shandong Shunfeng Biotechnology Co. Ltd., has two modified genes, significantly raising the level of healthy …