-The United Nations   The United Nations today declared that the world has completely eradicated a cattle disease that has killed millions of bovines for millennia. It is the first animal disease to be officially declared eradicated – and only the second disease ever, after Smallpox. A resolution approved by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at its meeting in Rome today stated that the world was free of rinderpest, or...

The Jharkhand Government on Wednesday rushed doctors to Gumla district to verify reports from unofficial sources claiming that three persons had died of Smallpox there. According to the World Health Organisation, Smallpox was totally eradicated from the world a decade ago. However, a local newspaper recently published a report claiming that three persons had died of the contagious disease here and five are suffering from it. The Gumla Health Department has sent...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...