The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) announced that it is scaling up operations in the drought-hit West African country of Niger in the light of a shocking new government survey showing malnutrition rates among young children at emergency levels. "We're doubling the size of our operations and ramping up already significant interventions, to take even swifter action to protect these children," said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran, adding that there had been a steep deterioration of the situation in recent weeks...

The evidence underlying the current widely-held view that foreign aid for health in a recipient country leads to a displacement or diversion of government funds from that country's health sector is unreliable and should not be used to guide policy, according to experts writing in this week's PLoS Medicine...

After the discovery of Khalil Rasjed Dale's beheaded and bullet-strewn body in Pakistan, the World Medical Association (WMA) denounced his appalling treatment. Dale worked in Pakistan as a health-program manager for the International Committee of the Red Cross. Chair of the WMA, Dr. Mukesh Haikerwal, commented: "On behalf of our ...

Although adolescents have benefitted from progress in education and public health over the past two decades, a UNICEF report entitled "Progress for Children" reveals that tens of millions of adolescents are still without education and over 1 million are dying each year. According to the report, the most challenging place ...

A review published in The Lancet, reveals that careful earthquake preparation helped to lower mortality rates and the burden of injury during the February 22nd earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2011. According to the analysis, the emergency health-system response was extremely effective, even though power outages made delivering medical ...

A new evaluation by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine of the physical rehabilitation response after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, finds that many hands didn't always make light work. Thousands of people became disabled during and after the 2010 earthquake, and physical rehabilitation interventions were crucial to the emergency ...

In the developing world, allocating limited health care resources as effectively and equitably as possible is a top priority. To address that need, systems engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are using computer models to help resource-poor nations improve supply chain decisions related to the distribution of breast milk ...

Adam Levine, M.D., an emergency medicine physician with Rhode Island Hospital and a volunteer physician with International Medical Corps, was deployed to a field hospital near Misurata, Libya, during the conflict there. He and his colleagues cared for over 1,300 patients from both sides of the conflict between June and ...