Gaza has recorded its first polio case in 25 years, the Palestinian health ministry said, after U.N. chief Antonio Guterres called for pauses in the Israel-Hamas war to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children.

U.N. agencies on Friday called for two seven-day breaks in the fighting in Gaza to vaccinate more than 640,000 children against polio, which has been detected in the wastewater.

Swimming has been off-limits in the long-polluted Seine River in Paris for more than a century. So with Olympic swimming events on tap for the river, the city poured in $1.5 billion (1.4 billion euros) to try to clean it up.

With the Paris Games underway, officials are keeping a close eye on water quality. Athletes could feel health effects from swimming in a river with higher-than-accepted levels of E. coli or other bacteria.

A steady stream of miserable children and worried parents flowed into the dermatology office at Nasser Hospital in central Gaza.

A toddler with a blue hair bow sobbed as her mother showed how the red and white spots covering her face have spread to her neck and chest. Another woman lifted her little boy's clothes to reveal the rashes on his back, butt, thighs and stomach. On his wrists, he had open sores from scratching. A father stood his daughter on the desk so the doctor could examine the lesions on her calves.

Wildfire smoke may be worse for brain health than other types of air pollution, according to new research linking it to an increased risk of dementia.

The findings, reported Monday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Philadelphia, come as millions spent the weekend under air quality warnings from wildfires spewing smoke across the western U.S.

Lawmakers in the West African nation of The Gambia have rejected a highly controversial push to try overturn a ban on female genital mutilation.

Gambia in 2015 banned the ritual forced on millions of girls in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, but it remains widespread.

U.S. officials have reported four new human cases of bird flu, bringing the total to eight.

The four infected people are farm workers, all working on the same poultry facility, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The European Union has approved Sanofi's blockbuster drug Dupixent for the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the French pharmaceutical giant said on Wednesday.

The debilitating disease, sometimes called "smoker's lungs", is the third-leading cause of death worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

A new deadlier strain of mpox that transmits more easily between people is killing children and causing miscarriages in the Democratic Republic of Congo and may have already spread to neighboring countries, researchers have warned.

World leaders, health groups and pharmaceutical firms announced $1.2 billion in funding at a summit Thursday to produce vaccines in Africa, which is facing numerous health crises including rising cholera outbreaks.