Agriculture & Nutrition

The stark difference between what poor babies and rich babies eat: Poor children often are fed foods that help establish long-lasting, unhealthful eat...
The difference between what the rich and poor eat in America begins long before a baby can walk, or even crawl. A team of researchers at the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences found considerable differences in the solid foods babies from different socioeconomic classes...
Understanding hunger
“The images we use to [illustrate] hunger — the emaciated, starving child who hasn’t eaten for days or weeks — no longer capture the whole picture,” Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center told Devex last month on the sidelines of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrit...
Out of control: How the world’s health organizations failed to stop the Ebola disaster
Tom Frieden remembers the young woman with the beautiful hair, dyed a rusty gold and braided meticulously, elaborately, perhaps by someone who loved her very much. She was lying facedown, half off the mattress. She had been dead for hours, and flies had found the bare flesh of her legs....
Ebola cases could reach 1.4 million within 4 months, CDC estimates
Yet another set of ominous projections about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa was released Tuesday, in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that gave worst- and best-case estimates for Liberia and Sierra Leone based on computer modeling....
Biography of WHES board member Margie Ferris Morris
Margie Ferris-Morris, a native of Ithaca, New York, holds a B.S. and an M.S. in Nutrition Sciences. She has her own firm (Ferris-Morris Associates, LLC.) and is a free-lance consultant in the areas of conflict mitigation, food security, maternal and child health, and hunger and nutrition with over...
With Ebola crippling the health system, Liberians die of routine medical problems
MONROVIA, Liberia — While the terrifying spread of Ebola has captured the world’s attention, it also has produced a lesser-known crisis: the near-collapse of the already fragile health-care system here, a development that may be as dangerous — for now — as the virus for the average Liberian....
The “unfinished business” of lowering child mortality
In 1990, an estimated 12 million children around the world died under age five; by 2011, that figure had dropped to 6.9 million. The message, from a new report by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), is that with greater commitment to child survival from governments and their partners, these figures can...
Ebola is taking a second toll, on economies
DAKAR, Senegal — Airlines have canceled their flights to the countries most affected. Prices of staple goods are going up, and food supplies are dwindling. Border posts are being closed, foreign workers are going home and national growth rates are projected to plummet....
CIA: No more vaccination campaigns in spy operations
Three years after the CIA used an immunization survey as a cover in its hunt for Osama bin Laden, the White House has promised that the agency will never again use a vaccination campaign in its operations, an official said Monday....
Disease of Pakistan’s poor now worries the affluent
KARACHI, Pakistan — Until recently, polio was considered a poor man’s problem in Pakistan — a crippling virus that festered in the mountainous tribal belt, traversed the country on interprovincial buses, and spread via infected children who played in the open sewers of sprawling slums....