South-East Asia

A staggering 93% of the world’s children under 15—1.8 billion—breathe air so polluted that their health and development are jeopardized.  

Systemic challenges to conducting research continue to continue to hold back science in low- and middle-income countries, write Senjuti Saha, PhD, and colleagues in a recent commentary for eLife. They warn that without immediate and sustained interventions, the gap in…

Tackling neonatal and maternal mortality means taking proper measurements, but data gaps have hampered the cause in high-burden countries. To fill the gap, research published this week aimed to quantify the burden, timing, and causes of maternal deaths, stillbirths, and…

72 babies born with microcephaly—plus 2 WHO-confirmed cases—indicate “strong evidence” of a Zika cluster in Angola. But a lack of capacity for advanced testing coupled with a meager national health system mean tracking a potential outbreak will be difficult.

An Epi-Pen for snakebites may be in our midst, but it will take awhile to get here. Snakebites are deadly everyday threat in rural, tropical regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America, killing around 100,000 a year and disabling some 400,000.

For scores of girls in Laos’ Hmong ethnic minority community, the beginning of marriage means being abducted from school, or ripped from their beds by groups of young men. An embedded tradition, many girls expect it, and often know their captors, who avoid marriage payments…

With scant resources and a tight timeframe—just over a decade—to reach 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets, a “nexus approach” could unlock solutions to multiple challenges simultaneously.

The WHO will offer paid internships by 2020 at the latest, in a bid to lift barriers to access for applicants from developing countries. Led by a former WHO intern, the push for paid positions will put an end to 50 years of unpaid internships, which have involved interns…

The attention on tuberculosis at tomorrow’s first UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting focused on ending the scourge is welcome. But it must be matched by resources, argue Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and Aaron Motsoaledi, South Africa’s…

As the obesity crisis expands worldwide, palm oil—which contains 50% saturated fat—is leading the charge of unhealthy, cheap calories in developing countries.   Palm oil production grew more than 12X globally from 1980-2015. The same way corn overproduction gave way to…