Marc Silver

The heat came early to India, and everyone is suffering. Here's a report from our village correspondent.

And it didn't drink any coffee but it LOVED the cardboard! Until a police officer took the goat into custody.

She was orphaned at 10, then diagnosed with HIV and TB. She was abused. She tried to kill herself. This is the epic story of 24-year-old Loyce Maturu.

An April Fools' Day spoof in the Washington Post is a reminder that AFRICA. IS. NOT. A. COUNTRY!!!!!!!!

Issued two years after the first case was confirmed in West Africa, an International Rescue Committee report on lessons from the epidemic stresses the critical role of politics.

What Washington, D.C., did — closing its Metrorail for 29 hours — sets it apart. Meanwhile, the developing world turns out to be developing some attractive transit options.

The annual letter from the Gates Foundation calls for an "energy miracle" — the creation of a cheap and clean source of energy to get power to the 1.2 billion people on the planet without electricity.

"We need to try lots of crazy-seeming ideas so we can find ...

Tonight, Garmai Sumo will be holding an Oscar-watching party in her home in Monrovia, Liberia. The 29-year-old nurse is featured in Body Team 12, which is up for Best Short Documentary (and considered a likely winner by some critics).

The 13-minute film, by David Darg and Bryn Mooser, follows ...

When you edit a blog called "Goats and Soda," and you read a story about a goat locked in a car in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Oxford, Mass., and you learn that the goat turned on the hazard lights and wipers, pooped on the driver's seat ...

Don't get pregnant.

That's the advice given to women by the governments of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and El Salvador in light of a possible link between the Zika virus, which is spreading in those countries, and a birth defect called microcephaly, which results in an abnormally small head and possible ...

Do you know any global health stories that should be getting coverage — but are overlooked by the media?

That's the question behind the Global Health Untold Stories contest, which was first held last year, sponsored by Global Health Now and the Consortium of Universities for ...

The Zika virus has gone from an obscure disease to an international public health emergency.

Researchers have been able to trace the gradual spread of Zika — slowly for decades and then, in the words of World Health Organization head Dr. Margaret Chan, "explosively" since 2015, when it was first ...

Editor's note: The original version of this post contained a map illustration intended to represent the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, which poll respondents identified as the region presenting the greatest risk to travelers and expatriates in 2016. The map had a number of errors. The countries ...

When the Nobel for Medicine goes to two scientists who discovered a drug used to fight a variety of neglected diseases, how do you tell the story?

NPR's Jason Beaubien decided the best way was to go to one country where the drug – ivermectin — has made ...

Is it real or is it satire?

In Thailand, a dark-skinned actress laments, "If I was white, I would win."

In India, a movie director says, "I can't have any dark people on my set" and hands a skin-lightening product to two dusky actors.

The Thai scene comes from a ...

He's the cop who gets shot by Jennifer Lopez.

In the new NBC police drama, Shades of Blue, actor Dayo Okeniyi plays an officer who takes a bullet to his bulletproof vest as part of an elaborate cover-up for shooting a guy.

And he's part of a mini-trend: Actors ...

Namala Mkopi always wanted to be a pediatrician. He doesn't know exactly who or what inspired him. He just wanted "to treat kids."

And nothing would stand in his way, not even biology. "It wasn't my thing," he admits. "I never really liked biology."

Today, at age 38, he is ...

One thing we've learned here at Goats and Soda is that the world of global health and development is swimming in acronyms. We try not to use them in the blog because let's face it, dear readers, if you saw a story about NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) trying to improve BHS ...

A headline for a chart caught our eye this week: "US Holiday Lights Use More Electricity than El Salvador Does In a Year."

According to the chart, America burns 6.63 billion kilowatt-hours to shine its end-of-year holiday lights. By comparison, annual kilowatt-hours in the developing world are paltry. In ...

Who's that man bending his body like a pretzel in today's Google doodle?

Yogis might know. It's Bellur Krishnamachar Sundaraja (B.K.S.) Iyengar.

Iyengar, who died in 2014, would have been 97 years old today. That's why he's getting the #GoogleDoodle treatment.

He began doing yoga after childhood bouts of malaria, ...