California officials have declared a state of emergency over the spread of bird flu, which is tearing through dairy cows in that state and causing sporadic illnesses in people in the U.S.

That raises new questions about the virus, which has spread for years in wild birds, commercial poultry and many mammal species.

The World Health Organization said Friday it was deeply concerned about Israeli attacks hitting healthcare workers and facilities in Lebanon, in its war against Hezbollah.

Vice President Kamala Harris will team up with Beyoncé on Friday for a rally in solidly Republican Texas aimed at highlighting the perilous medical fallout from the state's strict abortion ban and putting the blame squarely on Donald Trump.

It's a message intended to register far beyond Texas in the political battleground states, where Harris is hoping that the aftereffects from the fall of Roe v. Wade will spur voters to turn out to support her quest for the presidency.

The risk of cholera spreading in Lebanon is "very high", the World Health Organization warned Wednesday, after a case of the acute and potentially deadly diarrheal infection was detected in the conflict-hit country.

The WHO highlighted the risk of cholera spreading among hundreds of thousands of people displaced since Israel escalated an air campaign against Hezbollah and launched a ground offensive intended to push the group back from its northern border with Lebanon.

The head of the World Health Organization says it is working with Lebanon’s Health Ministry as it deals with those wounded by exploding communications devices.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanon Ghebreyesus said the strikes have “severely disrupted Lebanon’s already-fragile health system.”

The World Health Organization says medical teams in Gaza are wrapping up the final day of an emergency polio vaccination campaign following the discovery of the territory’s first-known case of the illness in more than 25 years.

Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, the U.N. health agency’s representative, told reporters in a news conference from Gaza that the health workers had reached more than an estimated 552,000 children under the age of 5. They used a new oral polio vaccine targeting the specific type of polio seen in Gaza, which is a mutated strain that originated in an older oral vaccine.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of an mpox outbreak, on Thursday received its first vaccines -- almost half of 200,000 doses donated by the European Union and due to arrive by the end of the week to fight its spread.

"The vaccines have arrived in the DRC. They are now on their way to storage areas and the vaccination campaign should begin at the end of the month," Laurent Muschel head of the EU's Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA) told AFP.

The World Health Organization said a “wildly complex” polio vaccination campaign in Gaza has already reached more than one-quarter of all children targeted across the strip in the first two days of its rollout.

Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO representative in the occupied Palestinian territories, said more than 161,000 children have been vaccinated out of the 640,000 targeted under a humanitarian pause that is “area specific” – with the first phase now underway in central Gaza.

Palestinian health authorities and United Nations agencies on Sunday began a large-scale campaign of vaccinations against polio in the Gaza Strip, hoping to prevent an outbreak in the territory that has been ravaged by the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

Authorities plan to vaccinate children in central Gaza until Wednesday before moving on to the more devastated northern and southern parts of the strip. The campaign began with a small number of vaccinations on Saturday and aims to reach about 640,000 children.

Polio was eliminated from most parts of the world as part of a decadeslong effort by the World Health Organization and partners to wipe out the disease. But polio is one of the world's most infectious diseases and is still spreading in a small number of countries. The WHO and its partners want to eradicate polio in the next few years.

Until it is gone from the planet, the virus will continue to trigger outbreaks anywhere children are not fully vaccinated. The recent polio infection in an unvaccinated baby in Gaza is the first time the disease has been reported in the territory in more than 25 years.