Emily Sohn

It took more than two hours for the team of health workers to reach Antonio, a 6-month-old suffering from severe malnutrition in rural Guatemala.

The journey started on a Friday morning in May in the mountain town of Tecpán, with a harrowing hour-long drive over the hairpin turns of the ...

The moringa tree is a scrappy plant that grows like a weed in dry, tropical climates and produces bitter leaves that taste like horseradish. Moringa is also contending for a spot as the next hot "superfood," with an emerging focus on its potential to make life better for people in ...

Note: This post contains a photo of a monkey carcass, on sale at a bush meat market, that may be disturbing to some readers.

What's for dinner?

Porcupines, giant squirrels, dwarf crocodiles and a variety of primates, including golden-bellied crowned monkeys and Bioko black colobus monkeys.

Those are some of ...

British ophthalmologist Andrew Bastawrous moved his family from London to Kenya in 2013 with $150,000 of equipment, a team of 15 people and an ambitious goal: to understand the causes of blindness in rural Africa. It didn't take long before he encountered all sorts of obstacles, including unpredictable power supplies ...

How do you help a country struggling to provide quality health care, particularly to its rural citizens?

More doctors would be great. New and better clinics would help. But in some places, community health workers are an important part of the solution.

Community health workers live where they work. They're ...

The global battle against malaria, tuberculosis and other deadly diseases faces plenty of obstacles. Among them: a pandemic of fake and poor-quality medicines.

The extent of the bad drug problem is laid out in 17 papers in a special supplement of the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. ...

The crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 into the French Alps earlier this week appears to have been a deliberate act carried out by a co-pilot.

It is too soon to put the label "suicide" on the co-pilot's actions. Not enough is known yet about his state of mind or what ...

Clean hands go a long way toward preventing the spread of many illnesses, including Ebola. But finding the right hand-wash to impede deadly germs is tricky.

A squirt of alcohol-based sanitizer like Purell kills or denatures many microbes on contact. In the case of bacteria, essentially poking holes in their ...