Susan Brink

On the surface, Flint, Mich., and Kabwe, Zambia, don't seem to have a lot in common.

They're half a world away from each other. One is a city of 99,000 in one of the richest countries in the world. The other is a city of 203,000 in a lower-middle-income country.

What is it like to starve to death?

It's an awful question, but it's the question of the moment. In what United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called a "war crime," thousands of people in Syria have been starving because both government and rebel blockades have kept food from ...

President Obama took a moment in his final State of the Union Address Tuesday to voice optimism that people have the power to bring an end to the worldwide menace of malaria.

"Right now, we are on track to end the scourge of HIV/AIDS, and we have the capacity to ...

No one predicted the Ebola epidemic before it burst forth in 2014 and continued to claim lives throughout 2015. And so, as 2016 begins, readers might well wonder what biological culprits — parasites, bacteria and viruses — are lurking out there, ready to unleash another outbreak of something terrible on ...

Climate change may be bad for people but it's good for bugs.

Germs of all kinds, as well as mosquitoes and other disease carriers, will live longer in warmer weather because cold kills them. They'll find more areas with the hot, humid conditions they need to thrive. Disease-carrying insects have ...

To deworm or not to deworm, that is the question.

Actually, it's a surprising question. You'd think that it'd be a good idea to treat all children with deworming drugs in parts of the world where intestinal worms are a problem.

More than 2 billion people in ...

A newly developed vaccine is on track to conquer a disease that, in recent years, has killed, deafened or caused brain damage in tens of thousands of people in sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2010, 220 million people have been vaccinated against meningitis A in what's called the "meningitis ...

Who's the scariest animal of them all?

That's a good question to ponder as Halloween looms. Because everybody loves a good scary animal costume.

Lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my, they're scary. Every year, lions kill 200 people; tigers kill 15, and bears fatally maul 10 people.

Sharks get ...

The developing world can take a lesson from Peru.

In 1995, 43 out of every 1,000 Peruvian babies died before they reached their first birthday. In 2015, the number of infant deaths in Peru is expected to drop to 13 per 1,000 births. And in 1995, 220 ...

About 2 a.m. on Oct. 3, Afghanistan time, medical staff and patients at the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz heard the sounds of bombing, louder and closer than they'd heard before. By the time it was over, at least 12 medical workers and seven patients were dead and the ...

There has been a profound — and positive — change since 1990 in how people die around the world, a new study shows. "We've made great progress in reducing the risks of maternal and child health, diarrhea, pneumonia, though there's still more work to be done," says Dr. Alan Lopez, ...

It's our own fault.

In the U.S., Japan, Korea and elsewhere, we use antibiotics too much. We use them to treat coughs and colds — for which they're ineffective. We've used them in animal feed in an attempt to prevent disease and to fatten cows and chickens. And the more ...

More people die prematurely because of the air they breathe than the 2.8 million who die each year of HIV/AIDS and malaria combined.

That's the startling statistic from a new study in this week's journal Nature. The annual global death toll from outdoor air pollution is 3.3 million. (Premature death ...

It's one of those good news/bad news stories. A study in the medical journal The Lancet found that people around the world — in countries rich, poor and in the middle — are living longer. But here's the rub. You can't count on living those extra years ...

Polio is almost gone from the face of the earth. The virus is actively circulating in only two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan. But now there's a worrisome new development in the polio end-game.

In Thursday's edition of the journal PLoS Pathogens, scientists report on a man in the United ...

In animal husbandry, the word "cull" means to remove undesirable animals from the herd — the scrawny and the sickly. To hear the word applied to human beings is harsh, but that's just how Valerie Hudson, professor in the Department of International Affairs at Texas A&M University, means it ...

It looks like a regular hardcover book, though in an eye-catching shade of orange with an even catchier title: The Drinkable Book.

But it's definitely not your typical book. There are messages on each page about water safety, printed in nontoxic ink, but it doesn't matter whether ...

When Donald Trump said that Fox News host Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her wherever," he showed that cultural taboos and biological misconceptions about female menstruation die hard. Trump later denied implying that Kelly asked him unfair questions in the first Republican presidential debate because she ...

Female genital mutilation seems like something that happens over there. Not in the United States. But in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia.

That's not the case.

More than half a million girls now living in the U.S. are considered at risk for female genital mutilation. The procedure ...

A woman has HIV. She becomes pregnant. What are the chances that she can deliver a baby who is not infected?

In some countries, like Yemen, for example, only 11 percent of pregnant women with HIV receive treatment to prevent their babies from being infected. For women who aren't ...