Skin-to-skin Contact Helps Child Development The human touch, in this case skin-to-skin contact, sometimes called “kangaroo care”, is essential for healthy physical and psychological development. Holding a newborn, and even more so a premature baby, against skin on the chest of an adult, usually a parent, increases the probability that the baby will grow healthier across the board.  Many studies […]

Few have heard of Dr Jack Preger. That’s probably because he is an inconspicuous, modest person. Yet since leaving farming to become a medical doctor relatively late in life, at the age of 42, he has offered medical treatment free of charge to hundreds of thousands of poor people in Kolkata, India. It all started […]

Have you tried it? Aquagym is excellent exercise, accessible to all. Its benefits are many and varied. Doing gym in water works not only the body but also the spirit. Whether the workout constitutes a gentle “aquasenior” class, a more strenuous “aquafitness” lesson, or intensive “aquadynamic” or “aquarobics” sessions, its variety of movements at each intensity […]

Every AA battery contains enough zinc to save the lives of six children. A company called Teck launched the Zinc and Health program in 2014 to fight zinc deficiency. The lack of zinc can cause serious problems, such as growth retardation, loss of appetite, impaired immune function and slow wound healing. In severe cases, it can cause hair loss, […]

InSitu Foundation is a tax-exempt non-profit organization dedicated to training dogs to detect cancer in humans. According to the Foundation, “Dogs’ accuracy levels have been proven to be 88% specific, and 99% sensitive in the early detection of lung and breast cancer.” So just as dogs have been trained to find narcotics, explosives, insects (lice or […]

What is Pacer Center? It’s a place that provides assistance to children with disabilities and to their parents. Concretely, Pacer Center offers workshops on mental health and emotional or behavioral needs, for instance, and assistance through such programs as the American Indian Project, geared to parents of Native Americans with children at risk of developing disorders. […]

“Yes,” Revolution Foods’s founders answer: the front line of education is the lunch line. The company says good nutrition makes “more productive, more attentive, better motivated and better performing students.” The Revolution Foods company is dramatically transforming the school lunch by providing healthy food for millions of low-income children in America. Most of the meals it serves are for children enrolled in the […]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has placed its big bet for the future. The annual letter written by Bill and Melinda Gates details the bet they are making in 2015, which doubles down on the bet they made 15 years ago, in 2000, when they founded their foundation. The bet is this: “The lives of […]

We all have heard that laughter is the best medicine, but studies are increasingly bearing out that conclusion. “Dr. Lee Berk, an associate professor at Loma Linda University in California, has spent nearly three decades studying the ways the aftershocks of a good laugh ripple through your brain and body,” says a 19 November article on […]

Recently we received good news from the World Health Organization: on March 27th the world region that counts one-fourth of the population, South-East Asia, was certified as free of polio. This progress now means that 80% of people now live in certified polio-free regions. Polio (or poliomyelitis) is a viral disease that can affect a person’s nerves, leading […]