Health & Education

Surgeons at Houston Methodist Hospital are using 'Plato's CAVE' to create virtual patients using 3, 4 and even 5-D imaging. The images can be downloaded on iPads or smartphones and are being used in the operating room during surgery. * [...]

An ambitious study is testing if an experimental drug might help healthy but at-risk people stave off Alzheimer's. In addition to brain scans checking for amyloid build up, researchers are looking for tangles of a protein named tau. * Filmed [...]

The family that hosted Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan could be confined for three weeks. Health officials are reaching out to as many as 100 people who may have had contact with Duncan or someone who knows him. * Filmed [...]

Passengers aboard a Carnival Cruise Lines ship were let off in Galveston, Texas after a healthcare worker who was being monitored for Ebola quarantined herself in her room. Read more here. * Filmed by Jill Craig; edited and produced by [...]

Fear of the Zika virus is gripping the world, and particularly Latin America, as Brazil deals with an outbreak while preparing to host the Summer Olympics.  But Zika was actually discovered decades ago by Ugandan scientists in a small forest [...]

Doctors from the U.S.-based organization Clitoraid are in Nairobi performing restorative surgery on women who have undergone female genital mutilation, known as FGM. It's the first time this procedure has been done in Kenya. * Filmed, scripted and produced by [...]

Sprawling over 12 hectares and home to scavengers who both live and work on the site, the Dandora waste disposal dump on the outskirts of Nairobi is Kenya's largest and one of the biggest in Africa. It was officially declared [...]

On the outskirts of Hargeisa, Somaliland, is the Abaarso School of Science and Technology. High achievers from around Somaliland, and some from the diaspora, come here to study, live, and attempt to get into prestigious schools around the world. And [...]

Founded in 2009, the Kibera School for Girls offers free tuition, uniforms, books, and meals to qualifying girls in the Nairobi slum of Kibera, where a good education is difficult to find.  The school is the first to offer free [...]

The Nairobi slum of Mathare is home to more than half a million people, but it has only three government schools.  Low-cost community schools attempt to fill the gap.  But most of these educators are inadequately trained – so one organization is [...]

As the world gets ready to recognize the achievements of women on International Women’s Day, March 8th, VOA shines a spotlight on a U.S.-based organization that is helping empower young Maasai girls and women in Kenya through education, one life [...]