U.S. health officials report that the number of measles cases through the first three months of this year have surpassed the count for all of 2018. There have been 387 cases through March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday. There were 372 last year. It’s the most …

Several Republican-led state legislatures are advocating for women to gain over-the-counter access to birth control in what they say is an effort to reduce unplanned pregnancies and abortions. State legislatures in Arkansas and Iowa, for example, are working on legislation that would allow women older than 18 the ability to …

The environment in a neonatal intensive care unit can be overwhelming, as staff care for infants who are ill or were born premature. Many exhausted parents and loved ones can’t be with their newborns around the clock, but at one Long Beach, Calif., hospital, trained volunteers are stepping in to …

An Ebola treatment center located at the epicenter of the current outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo has resumed operations after it was attacked last month, the country’s health ministry said Saturday. The center run by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in the district of Katwa was set on fire Feb. 24 by unknown attackers, forcing staff to evacuate …

Once stigmatized and banned across the United States, marijuana is now legalized in many parts of the country, primarily for medicinal use, but increasingly also for recreation. As cannabis becomes mainstream, Americans in their 70s and 80s who used to get high on marijuana in their youth, are now using …

For the first time, a person living with HIV has donated a kidney to a transplant recipient also living with HIV. A team from Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore performed the surgery March 25. “A disease that was a death sentence in the 1980s has become one so well-controlled that …

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned Thursday that climate change was moving faster than international efforts to mitigate it. “It is important that we tackle climate change with much greater ambition,” Guterres told reporters at the launch of a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) annual report on the subject. The report warns that …

So far this year, more than 300 people have contracted measles in 15 states in the U.S. Almost half of those cases occurred in Rockland County, just north of New York City.  Because of the outbreak, which has lasted nearly six months, county officials have declared a state of emergency …

So far this year, more than 300 people have had measles in 15 states in the U.S. Almost half have occurred in Rockland County just north of New York City. County officials are now banning anyone who is unvaccinated from frequenting public places. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more. …

Health care has re-emerged as a major focus of U.S. political parties with the Trump administration advocating striking down the entire Affordable Care Act and Democrats introducing legislation to strengthen the law that has been in place since 2010. The Justice Department on Monday backed a federal court ruling declaring …

The Republican-led Senate Tuesday night voted against consideration of the Democratically-supported New Green Deal — the outline of an ambitious plan to get the U.S. off climate-changing fossil fuels. The vote was 57 to zero against the green proposal. Forty-three Democrats only said “present” when their names were called, refusing …

The maker of OxyContin and the company’s controlling family agreed Tuesday to pay a groundbreaking $270 million to Oklahoma to settle allegations they helped create the nation’s deadly opioid crisis with their aggressive marketing of the powerful painkiller. It is the first settlement to come out of the recent coast-to-coast …

What should have been a giant leap for womankind has turned into a stumble on the path to equality after U.S. space agency NASA canceled the first all-female spacewalk due to a lack of a spacesuit in the right size. Anne McClain and Christina Koch had been due to step …

The number of people needing humanitarian aid in Congo has increased dramatically in the past year to 13 million and “hunger and malnutrition have reached the highest level on record,” the head of the U.N. children’s agency said Monday. UNICEF’s Executive Director Henrietta Fore told a news conference that 7.5 …

A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds. The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-en) glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) and thinning nearly 130 feet (almost 40 meters) annually. But it started …

Congo’s Ebola epidemic has now exceeded 1,000 cases, the country’s health ministry said Monday, with a death toll of about 629 in the world’s second-worst outbreak. The International Rescue Committee (IRC), an aid group, cautioned that case numbers were on the rise and the outbreak could last another six to …

Millions of people live with the constant pain of fibromyalgia. It’s a disorder that’s often misdiagnosed. And while lab tests can help identify a lot of diseases, until recently there was no test for fibromyalgia. Now, a simple blood test could finally give these patients scientific proof of their condition. …

At the 27th annual Environmental Film Festival in the nation’s capital, over 100 hundred films were showcased in 25 locations around the city. Many of them focused on the human impact on Climate Change worldwide, pointing to severe weather phenomena already underway, such as rising sea levels, and disappearing biodiversity. …

Efforts to control the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola outbreak are hitting a roadblock, says Doctors Without Borders (MSF). The medical charity group says security forces and a climate of community mistrust are hampering efforts to combat the outbreak. Meanwhile the country of Madagascar is struggling to curb a measles …

Parts of our oceans routinely go through temperature swings. The El Nino and La Nina effects in the Pacific are perhaps the best known. But new research in Britain suggests that those heat waves are becoming more common and more extreme. And that spells trouble for the world’s waters. VOA’s …

The World Health Organization says that on March 27, India’s 1.3 billion people and the entire WHO Southeast Asia region will celebrate five years of being polio-free. Twelve years ago, the WHO said, India alone was responsible for almost 70 percent of all polio cases around the world. It called …

A group of experts meeting for the first time to examine the pros and cons of human genome editing say it would be “irresponsible” to engage in this procedure at this time.   Late last year, a Chinese scientist triggered an international storm when he announced he had created the …

Twenty-six-year-old Precious, as she has asked us to call her to protect her identity, is 16 weeks pregnant. And so is her best friend, also by Precious’ boyfriend. That event turned her life upside down and brought her to the difficult decision to seek an abortion. She lives in South Africa, …

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley found herself in a Twitter feud with the people of Finland on Thursday, after she commented unfavorably on their health care system. Haley, a savvy politician who as President Donald Trump’s United Nations ambassador from 2017 until December 2018, regularly topped opinion polls as the …

The European Parliament faced calls Thursday to strip ExxonMobil lobbyists of their access badges after the US oil giant missed the assembly’s first hearing into claims it knowingly misled the public on climate change. Greens deputy Molly Scott Cato told the hearing in Brussels she would formally make the request …