The World Health Organization says measles has killed 35 children in Europe in the last 12 months, calling it an “unacceptable tragedy” that deaths are being caused by a vaccine-preventable disease. The figure is nearly a threefold increase since 2016, when measles killed 13 children. In 2015, it killed three. …

Average households use a lot of water that cannot be re-used and it goes to waste. A new project in Sweden is testing a water treatment system that would put to use the nutrients and other useful elements from used water while eliminating the toxic parts. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has …

Insecticides, mosquito nets, and disrupting breeding grounds all reduce mosquito populations and slow the spread of malaria. Now, researchers want to take away the insect’s food to fight the disease that kills a child every two minutes. Mosquitoes mostly feed on plant sugars that can be hard to find during …

A cholera outbreak in Yemen “continues to spiral out of control,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which says there are now over 300,000 suspected cases of the water-borne disease. The country is also struggling to battle famine in the midst of a two-year war between a …

Sealed behind the steel doors of two bunkers in a Beijing suburb, university students are trying to find out how it feels to live in a space station on another planet, recycling everything from plant cuttings to urine. They are part of a project aimed at creating a self-sustaining ecosystem …

Invasive species are wreaking havoc in waters around the world — from Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades, to Asian carp in the Mississippi River, to turtles native to the US on every continent except Antarctica. Faith Lapidus reports on efforts to control the reptile in Poland. …

Microplastics are pieces of plastic less than 5 millimeters in size. They make up part of the estimated tens of millions of tons of plastic that gets washed into the ocean every year. That could be hurting fish that eat plastic, and humans, when we eat fish. But help may …

Georgia’s health commissioner was named Friday to lead the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal government’s top public health agency. Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald is an OB-GYN and has been head of the Georgia Department of Public Health since 2011. She succeeds Dr. Tom Frieden, who resigned as …

The state of Minnesota is battling the biggest outbreak of measles since 1990, and state health officials are hoping it is tapering off. Seventy-eight people caught the disease, mostly Somali-Americans, and nearly a third were hospitalized. The Somali-American community in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is tight-knit. At one time, they had the …

Measles was officially wiped out in the United States 17 years ago. But outbreaks still happen when someone carries the virus back from a country where measles exists. The state of Minnesota is battling the biggest outbreak of measles since 1990, and state health officials are hoping it is now …

After a mild winter, the northeastern United States is in for a banner year when it comes to ticks. That would be little more than a nuisance if it were not for the fact that the tiny bloodsuckers carry some potentially deadly diseases. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …

After a mild winter, the northeastern United States is in for a banner year when it comes to ticks. That would be little more than a nuisance if it were not for the fact that the tiny bloodsuckers carry some potentially deadly diseases. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …

Not every police officer patrols on two legs. Some have four legs, and fur. Faith Lapidus reports on some new recruits and some veterans leaving police work behind. …

At least three people worldwide are infected with totally untreatable “superbug” strains of gonorrhea, which they are likely to be spreading to others through sex, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday. Giving details of studies showing a “very serious situation” with regard to highly drug-resistant forms of the sexually …

The world’s top medical technology companies are turning to robots to help with complex knee surgery, promising quicker procedures and better results in operations that often leave patients dissatisfied. Demand for artificial replacement joints is growing fast, as baby boomers’ knees and hips wear out, but for the past 15 …

Several states are seeking to join a legal challenge to a Trump administration decision to keep a widely used pesticide on the market despite studies showing it can harm children’s brains. Led by New York, the coalition filed a motion Wednesday to intervene in a legal fight over the continued …

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence pledged to usher in a “new era” of American leadership in space during a tour of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida Thursday. “Our nation will return to the Moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars,” Pence told the cheering …

California Governor Jerry Brown has announced that a Global Climate Action summit will be held in San Francisco in September 2018, in a challenge to President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. Nearly 200 nations have signed the 2015 agreement to reduce greenhouse …

Scientists have found an extra charming new subatomic particle that they hope will help further explain a key force that binds matter together. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced Thursday the fleeting discovery of a long theorized but never-before-seen type of baryon. Baryons are subatomic particles made …

Canada is attacking its expanding opioid crisis with an unusual measure: It’s giving addicts a safe place to shoot up.   The government has allowed seven “safe injection sites” to open and a score of others are being considered across the country.   The storefront sites give addicts clean syringes, …

Using only baker’s yeast, researchers at Columbia University have designed an inexpensive, on-the-spot test to detect major fungal pathogens. Faith Lapidus has details of the new biosensor, described in the journal Science Advances. …

One of Africa’s driest regions — the Sahel — could turn greener if the planet warms more than 2 degrees Celsius and triggers more frequent heavy rainfall, scientists said on Wednesday. The Sahel stretches coast to coast from Mauritania and Mali in the west to Sudan and Eritrea in the …

A novel class of personalized cancer vaccines, tailored to the tumors of individual patients, kept disease in check in two early-stage clinical trials, pointing to a new way to help the immune system fight back. Although so-called immunotherapy drugs from the likes of Merck & Co, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Roche are …

Stem cell tourism involving patients who travel to developing countries for treatment with unproven and potentially risky therapies should be more tightly regulated, international health experts said Wednesday. With hundreds of medical centers around the world claiming to be able to repair damaged tissue in conditions such as multiple sclerosis …

The Trump administration will soon begin a review that will question the veracity of the climate change science used by President Barack Obama’s administration as the basis for environmental regulations. The move by the Environmental Protection Agency to launch public debates between scientists on climate research, known as red-team, blue-team …