What if treating obesity could be as easy as popping an effective pill?

That's a notion that has long fueled hope for many of the more than 40% of Americans who are considered obese — and fueled criticism by those who advocate for wider weight acceptance. Soon, it may be a reality.

A year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, some of the Republican Party's most powerful evangelical Christian voices are gathering to celebrate a ruling that sent shockwaves through American politics and stripped away a constitutional protection that stood for almost a half century.

At the Faith & Freedom Coalition's annual conference in Washington, GOP presidential candidates will be urged to keep pushing for stronger abortion restrictions, even as Democrats insist the issue will buoy them ahead of the 2024 election.

European Union officials warned Thursday there is a growing risk of mosquito-borne viral diseases such as dengue and chikungunya in Europe due to climate change.

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said that because Europe is experiencing a warming trend, with heat waves and flooding becoming more frequent and severe, and summers getting longer and warmer, the conditions are more favorable for invasive mosquito species such as Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti.

The phone has been ringing nonstop for a year. Linda Prine, a New York doctor, repeats her advice on a loop: "Make sure you're drinking plenty of fluids;" "Take some ibuprofen;" "Everything's fine, you can relax."

The Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline, which Prine co-founded, is now staffed by around 70 health care professionals on a voluntary rotational basis, providing advice and fielding questions from American women seeking to end their pregnancies.

France will bring home production of around 50 crucial medications for which it currently depends on imports, President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday, hoping to battle shortages of items like antibiotics and paracetamol.

A mammoth three-year public inquiry into the U.K. government's handling of the response to COVID-19 opened Tuesday by asking whether suffering and death could have been avoided with better planning.

Lawyer Hugo Keith, who is counsel to the inquiry, said the coronavirus pandemic had brought "death and illness on an unprecedented scale" in modern Britain. He said that COVID-19 has been recorded as a cause of death for 226,977 people in the U.K.

Canada will soon become the first country in the world where warning labels must appear on individual cigarettes.

The move was first announced last year by Health Canada and is aimed at helping people quit the habit. The regulations take effect Aug. 1 and will be phased in. King-size cigarettes will be the first to feature the warnings and will be sold in stores by the end of July 2024, followed by regular-size cigarettes, and little cigars with tipping paper and tubes by the end of April 2025.

Summer is in the air, cigarette smoke is not, in Sweden's outdoor bars and restaurants.

As the World Health Organization marks "World No Tobacco Day" on Wednesday, Sweden, which has the lowest rate of smoking in the Europe Union, is close to declaring itself "smoke free" — defined as having fewer than 5% daily smokers in the population.

About 10% of people appear to suffer long COVID after an omicron infection, a lower estimate than earlier in the pandemic, according to a study of nearly 10,000 Americans that aims to help unravel the mysterious condition.

Early findings from the National Institutes of Health's study highlight a dozen symptoms that most distinguish long COVID, the catchall term for the sometimes debilitating health problems that can last for months or years after even a mild case of COVID-19.

Nearly 337 million life years were lost in the two first years of the Covid-19 pandemic, as millions of people died prematurely, the World Health Organization said on Friday.