Hannah Bloch

Checking into a hospital can boost your chances of infection. That's a disturbing paradox of modern medical care.

And it doesn't matter where in the world you're hospitalized. From the finest to the most rudimentary medical facilities, patients are vulnerable to new infections that have nothing to do with their ...

Even as encouraging reports come out of Liberia that Ebola cases appear to be leveling off or declining, it's not the full story. In recent weeks, there was a major outbreak of Ebola in scattered villages of Rivercess County, in the remote, southeastern part of the country where Lorenzo Dorr, ...

Here's a gift idea that's hard to top: a $195,000 watch, made partly from recycled components of assault rifles seized in Africa. Not only is it an attention-getting item, but it's also a chance to do good. Each purchase funds the destruction of 1,000 weapons in central Africa.

The man ...

North Korea has a number of serious public health woes: malnutrition, tuberculosis and cardiovascular disease, just to name a few. Ebola isn't one of them. The disease hasn't hit anywhere in Asia, much less this isolated and rarely visited Northeast Asian nation.

And yet state television has been broadcasting daily ...

"Now we're in it."

That's what Liberian health worker Lorenzo Dorr tells me. The first two cases of Ebola have been confirmed in Grand Gedeh County, in Liberia's southeast, where Dorr is based.

Dorr first spoke with Goats and Soda a few weeks ago about his work with Last ...

No country grows as many opium poppies or produces as much illicit opium as Afghanistan. In 2013, opium production soared to a record high of 5,500 tons, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

A study published last week adds to a growing body of ...

It was not a disease. It was a curse.

That's what the family of one Liberian Ebola patient told Dr. Kent Brantly after their relative died in the treatment center where he worked in July.

The logical next step, the family believed, was to seek revenge and kill the person ...

Lorenzo Dorr is facing one of the most important challenges of his career as a Liberian health outreach worker: trying to keep Ebola from taking hold in the southeastern part of the country.

In the weeks ahead, Dorr will be talking with our blog, Goats and Soda, about his mission.

Most of us overlook the ground beneath our feet. But when Gayatri Datar, 28, looks at the floor, she sees an opportunity to improve public health.

A research trip to Rwanda last year, when she was a Stanford University M.B.A. student, transformed Datar's perspective. "I kept seeing dirt floors," she ...

Madagascar-grown orchids produce most of the world's vanilla beans, but vanilla extract isn't manufactured in country. Former Peace Corps volunteers-turned-entrepreneurs Tim McCollum and Brett Beach, co-founders of the Brooklyn-based Madécasse brand, aim to change that. They want to produce the world's first "bean to bottle" extract, made entirely in ...

When it comes to deadly, contagious disease outbreaks like Ebola, the terms "quarantine" and "isolation" take on fresh relevance and urgency. Each has a distinct meaning in the public health context, though the words are often used interchangeably and both refer to protecting the public from communicable illnesses.

Relying on ...