North Korea’s Red Cross Society is working double duty responding to both coronavirus concerns and to recent rains and flooding that have submerged whole rice fields, threatening crops and food supplies in the isolated nation.
August 6, 2020
75 years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan—killing tens of thousands of people, leveling the city, and unleashing a nuclear arms race that still threatens humanity.
July 21, 2020
COVID-19 is a precedent-shattering monster of a pandemic. There’s never been anything quite like it. Historians of public health have struggled mightily to find apt comparisons to our current pandemic. They’ve landed most often on the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918. On…
July 14, 2020
Too many governments are “headed in the wrong direction” in their response to the pandemic, the WHO warned yesterday as the world’s cases hit a record daily high of 230,000. Nearly 80% of the latest cases are in 10 countries; half of those cases are in the US and…
June 9, 2020
Storms don’t care that there’s a pandemic. Between hurricanes lashing the coastal south and eastern seaboard and wildfires blazing uncontrollably in the west, natural disaster season is coming for the US. Experts are trying to figure out how to keep people safe in the midst…
May 14, 2020
The novel coronavirus could become endemic like HIV, the WHO warned yesterday. It will take a “massive effort” to counter it even with a vaccine—a prospect WHO emergencies expert Mike Ryan called a “massive moonshot”, according to Reuters.
February 27, 2020
Venezuela’s ongoing economic and humanitarian crisis is increasingly dangerous for the country’s over-65 population. The country has never had strong policies for elder care because it traditionally fell to younger generations. But since 2012, 15% of Venezuelans have fled…
February 18, 2020
Big data is taking center stage at the Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety in Stockholm this week. Attendees will seek ways to reduce road fatalities and injuries—now the top killer of 5-29-year-olds—by half by 2030, WHO reported.
February 17, 2020
As Syrian government-led forces close their grip on Idlib—the last rebel-held enclave—they are pushing hundreds of thousands of Syrians into cold, overcrowded camps, Al Jazeera reports
February 14, 2020
South Sudan buried years of reports detailing the dire health problems that coincide with the oil operations that prop up the young nation’s economy. Birth deformities have spiraled since oil production began. People die of “unknown diseases”; babies are born with six…