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More than 6,000 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo in what the World Health Organization (WHO) is calling the “world’s worst measles epidemic.”

Area health officials are requesting “adequate finances” in order to “end the outbreak” and “lift the burden of this prolonged epidemic” from thousands of Congolese families. Already, $27.6 million USD has been mobilized but an additional $40 million USD is needed to reinforce on-the-ground outbreak responses and to implement a six-month plan to extend vaccinations to children between the ages of six and 14. It is reported that one-in-four reported measles cases affect children over the age of five.

“We are doing our utmost to bring this epidemic under control. Yet to be truly successful we must ensure that no child faces the unnecessary risk of death from a disease that is easily preventable by a vaccine. We urge our donor partners to urgently step up their assistance,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa, in a statement released by the agency on January 2. IFLScience contacted WHO for recent numbers but has not received a response at the time of publication.

At the beginning of last year, 310,000 suspected measles cases reported in the central African nation despite more than 18 million children under the age of five being vaccinated across the country. Health officials report that low vaccination rates in some areas are compounded by malnutrition, weak public health systems, outbreaks of other diseases, as well as instability and difficulty in accessing healthcare.

Faced with President Trump’s forceful assertion that he doesn’t know fixer Lev Parnas, Democrats admitted today were forced to use all their intellectual might to refute his robust denial.

“We had to type ‘Parnas Trump’ into Google.”

The results they found prompted new questions about the strange relationship between Parnas and Donald Trump.

“You start to wonder – are there any photographs or videos in existance that show President Trump not in the company of Lev Parnas?”

This has prompted speculation that Les Parnas might be a conjoined twin of the President.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Richmond this MLK day in support of the rights of small penis owners, who they say are being unfairly targeted with laws that curb their ability to make up for their feelings of inadequacy.

“We have an inalienable constitutional right to compensate for our diminutive phalluses.”

The protesters openly carried physical evidence of their deep-seated fears of amounting to nothing as human beings while they listened to speeches in front of the Virginia State Capitol. Psychologists warned that they are likely to respond in a hostile manner if confronted directly about the source of their shame.

“You will take my repressed anxiety over being a total failure as a man away from me over my dead body!”

First Daughter Ivanka Trump can add the Thomas Dolby Award for science promotion to her long list of accomplishments following her visit to a lab earlier this week.

The luminary prize is presented annually by the Institute for Superlative Intellectual Stability to those who advance STEM by sciencing convincingly in the public eye.

In the commendation, Ivanka is praised for the many attributes that won her the award, including letting her long blonde hair hang freely to enhance lab experiments, making sure her latex gloves are loose fitting so her fingers can breathe, and frowning convincingly at test tubes.

A sales management system specifically geared towards the cannabis industry has exposed the personal information of over 30,000 people by storing it in an unsecured database. The leak itself has been patched, but questions about the consequences of outing who uses a quasi-legal substance hang over the increasingly mainstream industry.

THSuite, which makes software for selling cannabis, stashed extensive customer information collected by at least three U.S. dispensaries in plain sight, according to the cybersecurity firm vpnMentor, which warned that many more dispensaries may have been affected. Among the exposed details were full names, dates of birth, phone numbers, emails, addresses, signatures, cannabis varieties and quantities purchased, the amount of money each customer spent, and transaction dates. Medical marijuna dispensaries also exposed patient names and medical ID numbers.

Researchers at vpnMentor discovered the leak on Christmas Eve and reported it to THSuite and Amazon in the following days. The companies sealed the information off on January 14, according to the computer scientists. They described the exposure in blunt terms in a press release: “We were able to access THSuite's S3 bucket [the database] because it was completely unsecured and unencrypted. We could access all files hosted on the database.” THSuite did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The researchers did not find any evidence that malicious actors accessed the data, but the leak and others like it pose a new set of consequences in an industry still in the early days of regulation, experts told The Daily Beast. The saga could serve to spook customers as the cannabis industry plays catch-up on long-established security norms at other businesses.