Health | WPN World People News

A teacher is preparing a bucket with water to use for hand washing. After being kept closed for three months due to the Ebola outbreak, schools across Guinea reopened on 19 January 2015.

The world’s older population continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. Today, 8.5 percent of people worldwide (617 million) are aged 65 and over. According to a new report, “An Aging World: 2015 (link is external),” this percentage is projected to jump to

On World Tuberculosis (TB) Day 2016, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, reaffirms its commitment to researching ways to better understand, prevent, diagnose and treat TB. March 24 marks the day in 1882 when German microbiologist Robert Koch announced he had discovered Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the bacterium that causes TB — an airborne disease that most often attacks the lungs.

Tracing the effects of a specific gene deletion in mice revealed how it disrupts a brain circuit that filters out superfluous sensory input, such as background noise, so that the brain can focus on important information. The findings suggest that defects in this circuit could underlie attention-related symptoms across different human behavioral disorders, and how treatment might be designed to correct it.