April 24 – April 30, is World Immunization Week. The theme of this year’s observance is “The Big Catch-Up.” The idea is for everyone, especially children, to catch up on the vaccinations they might have missed during the COVID outbreak. The ultimate goal of World Immunization Week, according the World Health Organization, is for more children, adults and their communities to be protected from vaccine-preventable diseases, like polio and measles.   …

Air pollution still causes more than 1,200 premature deaths a year in under 18’s across Europe and increases the risk of chronic disease later in life, the EU environmental agency said Monday.    Despite recent improvements, “the level of key air pollutants in many European countries remain stubbornly above World Health Organization” (WHO) guidelines, particularly in central-eastern Europe and Italy, said the EEA after a study in over 30 countries, including the 27 members of the European Union.    The report did not cover the major industrial nations of Russia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom, suggesting the overall death tolls for the continent could be higher.    The EEA announced last November that 238,000 people died prematurely because of air pollution in 2020 in the EU, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey.    “Air pollution causes over 1,200 premature deaths per year in people under the age of 18 in Europe and significantly …

At age 93, struggling with the effects of a stroke, heart failure and recurrent cancer, Teri Sheridan was ready to end her life using New Jersey’s law that allows medically assisted suicide — but she was bedbound, too sick to travel. So last Nov. 17, surrounded by three of her children, Sheridan drank a lethal dose of drugs prescribed by a doctor she had never met in person, only online. She died within minutes. Soon, others who seek Sheridan’s final option may find it out of reach, the unintended result of a federal move to roll back online prescribing of potentially addictive drugs allowed during the COVID-19 pandemic. “How much should one person suffer?” said Sheridan’s daughter, Georgene White, 68. “She wanted to just go to sleep and not wake up.” Online prescribing rules for controlled drugs were relaxed three years ago under emergency waivers to ensure critical medications remained …

An organ transplant surgeon from New York is planning a third trip to Ukraine, where he has been working with doctors to help patients caught up in Russia’s war on Ukraine. The surgeon, Dr. Robert Montgomery, is also working to raise money to buy medical equipment for a hospital in Lviv. Iryna Solomko has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. VOA footage by Pavlo Terekhov. …

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday preserved access to the abortion drug mifepristone while a lawsuit challenging the use of the drug plays out in lower courts. The high court issued a brief on Friday evening granting emergency requests from the Biden administration and the drug’s manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, to continue to allow women to access the drug. The ruling puts on hold a preliminary injunction from a federal judge in Texas, who earlier this month ordered restrictions on the abortion drug. Two justices on the nine-member court — conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — dissented from the decision. The court had set a deadline for itself of midnight Friday to either approve the Biden administration’s request — to keep the drug available while the administration challenges a lower court ruling — or allow limited access to the drug to take effect. The lower court ruling in question was …

The Supreme Court is facing a self-imposed Friday night deadline to decide whether women’s access to a widely used abortion pill will stay unchanged or be restricted while a legal challenge to its Food and Drug Administration approval goes on. The justices are weighing arguments that allowing restrictions contained in lower-court rulings to take effect would severely disrupt the availability of the drug, mifepristone, which is used in the most common abortion method in the United States. It has repeatedly been found to be safe and effective, and has been used by more than 5 million women in the U.S. since the FDA approved it in 2000. The Supreme Court had initially said it would decide by Wednesday whether the restrictions could take effect while the case continues. A one-sentence order signed by Justice Samuel Alito on Wednesday gave the justices two additional days, without explanation. The justices are scheduled …

Looking back at 2022’s weather with months of analysis, the World Meteorological Organization said last year really was as bad as it seemed when people were muddling through it. And about as bad as it gets — until more warming kicks in. Killer floods, droughts and heat waves hit around the world, costing many billions of dollars. Global ocean heat and acidity levels hit record highs and Antarctic sea ice and European Alps glaciers reached record low amounts, according to the United Nations’ climate agency’s State of Global Climate 2022 report released Friday. While levels have been higher before human civilization, global sea height and the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane in the air reached highest modern recorded amounts. The key glaciers that scientists use as a health check for the world shrank by more than 1.3 meters (51 inches) in just one year and for the first …

President Joe Biden announced plans Thursday to increase U.S. funding to help developing countries fight climate change and curb deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. During a virtual meeting of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, Biden urged his counterparts to be ambitious in setting goals to reduce emissions and meet a target of limiting overall global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “We’re at a moment of great peril but also great possibilities, serious possibilities. With the right commitment and follow-through from every nation … on this call, the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees can stay within reach,” Biden said. The countries that take part in the forum account for about 80% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and global gross domestic product, according to the White House. Thursday’s meeting was the group’s fourth under Biden’s presidency. Biden announced a U.S. contribution of $1 billion to the …

SpaceX’s giant week meets a fiery end. But company officials still say the launch of Starship was a success. Plus, the European Space Agency sets sail for Jupiter’s icy moons. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

The U.S. government and state legislators are ramping up efforts to limit the use of toxic chemicals known as PFAS (pronounced pee-fas) in everyday products and to regulate levels in drinking water. But as VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias found out, scientists are going a step further by exploring ways to fully eliminate the so-called “forever chemicals.” …

NY-AALESUND, NORWAY — At the world’s northernmost year-round research station, scientists are racing to understand how the fastest-warming place on Earth is changing – and what those changes may mean for the planet’s future. But around the tiny town of Ny-Aalesund, high above the Arctic circle on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, scientific data is getting harder to access. And sometimes it’s vanishing before scientists can collect it. Scientists hoping to harvest ice cores are finding glaciers inundated by water. Research sites are getting harder to reach, as earlier springtime melt leaves the ground too barren for snowmobile travel. Researchers have been studying the polar region for decades — with Ny-Aalesund’s weather records going back more than 40 years. But their work has become vitally important as climate change ramps up. That’s because what happens in the Arctic can impact global sea levels, storms in North America and Europe, and other factors …

The U.N. children’s fund, UNICEF, warns many children are likely to die from vaccine preventable diseases because of a decline in routine immunization during the COVID-19 pandemic. New data in UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 2023 report show a significant drop in confidence in the importance of vaccines for children in 52 out of 55 countries studied, noting that vaccination rates have declined by more than a third in South Korea, Papua New Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, and Japan. Only in three countries — China, India, and Mexico — did the data show people remained positive about the health benefits of vaccination. In most countries, the study said, “people under 35 and women were more likely to report less confidence about vaccines for children after the start of the pandemic.” This is particularly worrisome as the report finds 67 million children, nearly half of them on the African continent, have missed …

By day, Jessica Wade spends her time in a laboratory at Imperial College London surrounded by spectrometers, oscilloscopes — and men. At night, she writes biographies on Wikipedia about women researchers like her who don’t have an online presence. “We can’t just do the shouting about how we need more women in science. We have to do the point of honoring and celebrating the women scientists that we have,” she told AFP. “And I think writing their stories, making sure the world recognizes what they’ve done is a really important way to do that.” Wade, 34, has worked at Imperial’s imposing campus in west London since 2016. As a physicist, she is involved in developing new generations of carbon-based semi-conductors to make optical and electronic devices such as televisions and solar panels more energy efficient. She leads a team of five people in a wider team of about 15. Of …

At least 67 million children partially or fully missed routine vaccines globally between 2019 and 2021 because of lockdowns and health care disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations said Wednesday. “More than a decade of hard-earned gains in routine childhood immunization have been eroded,” read a new report from the U.N.’s children’s agency, UNICEF, adding that getting back on track “will be challenging.” Of the 67 million children whose vaccinations were “severely disrupted,” 48 million missed routine vaccines entirely, UNICEF said, flagging concerns about potential polio and measles outbreaks. Vaccine coverage among children declined in 112 countries and the percent of children vaccinated worldwide slipped 5 percentage points to 81%, a low not seen since 2008. Africa and South Asia were particularly hard-hit. “Worryingly, the backsliding during the pandemic came at the end of a decade when, in broad terms, growth in childhood immunization had stagnated,” the …