Interviews

Basic rules such as “keeping your hands clean and cooking food thoroughly” contribute to food safety, but when someone is living in a place with poor sanitation or where food insecurity is a reality, “it’s hard to make good choices”.

That’s according to David Massey, Communications Specialist at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Every year worldwide 420,000 people die, and 600 million people fall ill as a result of food contaminated with bacteria, viruses, parasites, toxins or chemicals.

Women continue to be extremely under-represented in science but, with the right mentoring, networks and support, they can “punch through the glass ceiling” and do “incredible work.”

This is the message from astronomer Lisa Harvey Smith, Professor of Practice in Science Communication, and the Australian Government’s Women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) Ambassador.

Attacks by non-State armed groups in parts of north-east Nigeria have left relief workers unsure about the extent of needs among some communities, the UN migration agency’s top official in the country said on Tuesday.

Chief of Mission of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Frantz Celestin, told UN News’s Daniel Johnson about the extremists’ use of “hit-and-run” tactics, and explained what the priorities are now for the aid teams coping with mass displacement and overcrowded protection camps.

As a UN report reveals a “quantum leap” in the number of AI patents being filed around the world, it isn’t the tech that we should be worried about, but the way that we choose to use it.

That’s the view of Kriti Sharma, one of the UN’s Young Leaders For Sustainable Development Goals, who set up the AI For Good organization in the UK, which aims to ensure that AI helps to create a better, fairer world.

The pain that cancer patients experience as a result of the disease, or the treatment they are receiving, is too often ignored, UN health experts said on Monday, at the launch of new guidelines aiming to prevent “needless suffering”.

For World Cancer Day, on 4 February, Dr Etienne Krug from the World Health Organization (WHO), talks to Sarah Mbengue from UN News about the progress so far, and global challenges that remain in tackling the disease.

Nigerian refugees are “too traumatized to return” anytime soon, according to a senior official from the UN humanitarian affairs office (OCHA), talking to UN News on the border with Cameroon.

Around 35,000 have fled from extremist violence in the northeast Nigerian town of Rann, in just the past two weeks, with dozens killed during a largescale Boko Haram assault two days ago, although Nigerian forces have reportedly taken back control, said OCHA’s Jean-Sébastien Munié.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says it’s extremely concerned about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Al-Hol camp in Syria’s Al-Hasakeh Governorate, where 11 infants are reported to have died due to cold, in the past two days alone.

Over the last two months, approximately 23,000 people, mainly women and children fleeing hostilities in rural areas of neighbouring Deir Ezzour, have arrived in the camp. 

The first ever Arab woman director to be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, has told UN News that she had ‘a duty’ to record the reality of the refugee crisis playing out on the streets of her native Lebanon.

Nadine Labaki is the director of Capernaum, a harrowing drama seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy who decides to sue his own parents after years of abuse and neglect.

“A child sees things so much more clearly”, says Ms. Labaki, who spent three years researching her film, which also won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year.

Yumbi in the western Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, resembles a “ghost city” in the aftermath of a days-long massacre last month which left at least 535 victims, discovered by UN investigators in communal burial sites.

That’s according to Florence Marchal, spokesperson for the UN Mission in the country, MONUSCO.