For those not in the know, there is an outbreak of Bundibugyo Ebola which has affected three African countries so far.

One of them, Uganda, has announced next stage of clinical trials for two vaccine candidates. Separately, CEPI is also advancing trials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The newest country affected by the outbreak, Kenya, has already seen case counts double in one week, after a close contact of the first patient also tested positive. Testing of nearly 300 other contacts has thankfully returned negative results. Kenya has nevertheless introduced new legal measures to improve surveillance, prevent transmission and regulate infection management, in a move that social sentiment doesn’t seem to be very welcoming of just yet.

In Congo meanwhile, cases have reached 9,277 with 4,478 deaths and the outbreak has reportedly spread to a new province as well, this one bordering the Central African Republic. The sad corollary to what is Congo’s largest Ebola outbreak ever is how mothers are now too scared to take their kids for basic preventive care, even as cholera cases continue to spiral upwards.

If Congo has been longest-running humanitarian crisis of all time, Sudan is possibly the most under-reported one, thanks to all the dirhams buying up favourable media, we guess. Conflict, displacement, drought and a lack of funding are all combining to drive up famine in Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan. And okay, maybe drought is not something we can do much about (Editor: we can) but funding is needed only because of displacement brought about by the “conflict.” And the conflict is not internal. The whole world knows who it is funded by, and why. And as if one external player wasn’t enough, other Sudanese neighbours want their gold too.

Speaking of cholera and “conflict,” Yemen continues to see a rise in both, thanks to the other wannabe imperialist in the region.

In a year of massive natural disasters, we had one more when a 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck Panama late last week, with more than 100 aftershocks.

Oh and the Russian plague? The WHO doesn’t think it is plague... there are no more plague reports anywhere anymore. Maybe it was just pneumonia after all.

The UN finally adopted a pandemic preparedness declaration. It wasn’t unanimous though. There were three holdouts: Argentina, Israel, and the US.

In somewhat of a departure for The Kable, we have excellent news. Mauritius has become the first country in the world to reduce its number of people with type 2 diabetes - by 11% for men and 16% for women from 2009 to 2021.

Every so often, the most slappable face in pharma keeps surfacing to remind us of his existence. Usually when he does, it is because of something unsavoury. And that is the case this week too with authorities in the US saying Martin Shkreli has violated a lifetime pharma ban.

Wellcome released its latest study on people’s perception of science and health - The Wellcome Global Monitor 2026. And global trust in science has fallen below pre-pandemic levels, especially among the poor, with Africa and West Asia showing the steepest declines.

And finally, no more leap second. We have a leap hour instead. And it will be something future generations will have to deal with. Well into the future.

Stories Of The Week

Please, sir, may I have some more? Another week, another SDG looking like it’s gonna get skipped. This week it is SDG 2: Zero Hunger on the chopping block. Because hunger has actually worsened in 32 countries since 2018, according to the 2026 Global Hunger Index. The global score reached 18.1, compared with 17.6 in 2018, interrupting the improvement recorded since 2000. Oh, higher scores mean more severe hunger.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest regional score, at 27.5, classified as serious. Seven of the eight countries assessed as having alarming hunger levels are African. And it might be even worse because the assessments for Burundi, Sudan and South Sudan are only provisional since there isn’t enough to calculate complete scores.

Somalia has the highest calculated country score, at 47.0. Nigeria recorded the largest score increase worldwide, reaching 34.3 compared with 28.2 in 2018, close to the alarming threshold of 35. However, there were substantial improvements elsewhere on the continent. Uganda’s score fell to 20.7 compared with 28.7 in 2018, although it remains in the serious category. Togo’s score reached 17.6 compared with 24.3, placing it in the moderate category.

In South America, Venezuela’s score improved massively to 8.9 compared with 16.7 in 2018, placing it in the low-hunger category. Bolivia’s worsened to 14.2 compared with 12.2. In the Caribbean, Haiti’s score of 34.4 is fast approaching the alarming threshold. Across the wider Latin America and Caribbean region though, the regional hunger score has been classified as low but child stunting has increased since 2018, including in Argentina and Brazil.

West Asia and North Africa’s regional score worsened to 12.5 compared with 11.9 in 2018. Syria’s score reached 31.5, keeping it in the serious category. Yemen is provisionally classified as alarming: 47.4% of children under five are stunted, while 16.8% are wasted. Provisional classification because there isn’t data available to calculate a national score. But considering that there hasn’t been food (or medicine or other supplies) available in Yemen for years now, we guess the kids aren’t too chuffed about missing data.

South Asia’s score of 23.5 remains serious. Its child wasting rate has worsened since 2018 and stands at 15.8%, the world’s highest. India’s score is 24.1, also serious, but hey, no eggs for kids in school. Nepal has made greater recent progress, with its score reaching 14.5 compared with 18.4 in 2018.

In Southeast Asia, Timor-Leste’s score worsened by 5.2 points since 2018 to reach 32.5, well above the combined East and Southeast Asian score of 8.1. Indonesia and Viet Nam remain in the moderate category, at 14.4 and 11.2 respectively.

On current trajectory, 57 countries will fail to reach low hunger levels by 2030.
(Global Hunger Index)

Call it (in) a day. The WHO says countries will be able to detect and understand emerging health threats within 24 hours. Just wait five years. Because the strategy that the WHO has launched to do this immediate detection thing will take five years to materialise. The agency launched this plan at the World Health Summit this week, hoping that faster detection will help countries contain outbreaks before they develop into larger epidemics.

And the strategy (that word once again) uses an open-source intelligence system which uses artificial intelligence (oooh) to scan public sources for potential threats. That doesn’t sound dystopian at all. But the plan also involves pathogen sequencing through the International Pathogen Surveillance Network, a collaborative surveillance initiative, connecting surveillance across human, animal and environmental health. There will also be a new digital programme to develop secure systems for countries to exchange and analyse data. Hehe.
(WHO)

Bottom line

Turn, turn, turn. Okay but for how much longer? Well, not too much more. Because The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health says we could all be extinct by the turn of the century. And it has identified 17 reasons why that might be so. Nuclear conflict and malicious use of AI feature in there too. As do antimicrobial resistance, childhood malnutrition, and declining international health aid.

But the biggest threat to continued human existence? Obesity. No pun intended. The Commission said obesity alone could account for 23 billion disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) by 2100, way clear of low education with 16 billion DALYs at number 2. Pandemics only featured in at number 12. And funnily enough, climate change comes in only at number 14, followed by air pollution at 15.
(The Lancet)

Silver linings? This one may have a glimmer of good news but seeing as we won’t be around for much longer, does it even matter? The 2026 State of the Climate report, published in BioScience, finds that low-carbon sources supplied roughly 43% of global electricity in 2025. Solar and wind energy consumption grew by approximately 18%. Renewable sources collectively overtook coal in electricity generation for the first time in more than a century.

But here comes the dark cloud to the silver lining that went before. Seven of the 16 climate indicators tracked are nevertheless at record extremes. Fossil fuel consumption actually rose by 0.9% in 2025, and annual energy-related carbon dioxide emissions exceeded 41 billion tonnes for the first time. As much as renewable sources grew, energy demand grew even more.
(BioScience)

Long reads

The meek won’t inherit Earth. Enough has been written about the two-way link between climate change and poverty. And a similar link between drug use and poverty. But research from Nigeria, documented in The Conversation Africa, points that this is actually a trifecta.
(The Conversation)

If your day is gone, and you wanna ride on. Not that we want to link to The Guardian but this is a fascinating investigation into how a cocaine trafficker from the Netherlands became the son-in-law of the president of Sierra Leone. And the drug trade he controls.
(The Guardian)

Get an ad blocker. And finally, if you were wondering how we managed to get through an entire issue of The Kable without once mentioning the scourge of our times, here, an investigation from Citizen Lab on how online ads have been weaponised by Israel.
(Citizen Lab)

Official numbers in Congo now stand at 8,728 cases and 4,205 deaths, and it might seem like case growth is finally slowing down. But the Africa CDC says it is more likely because the security situation is preventing a proper tallying of cases. Earlier in the week, Kenya reported its first case of Bundibugyo Ebola, a citizen who contracted the illness in the DRC before travelling by road to Uganda and then flying in to Nairobi, where he also became Kenya’s first casualty in the outbreak. The Africa CDC media briefing referenced above has a detailed itinerary for this person, which included extensive travel in the DRC, and Uganda. Kenya’s contact tracing is in full swing, with 57 contacts already identified. Considering that in the early days of this outbreak, Kenyan officials were the best with on-point messaging about the disease and means to control it, we would be very surprised if they didn’t get a handle on things fast. Another person with the exact same travel history was also initially believed to have contracted Ebola but later tests have ruled that out thankfully.

So, the plague in Russia... well, first up, Western media have fed us so much disinformation about Russia through the ages, it is difficult to believe anything they publish. What we do know is that a researcher at an institute working on plague research in Irkutsk, Siberia, has died of pneumonia, according to official sources, as reported by the WHO. Russia has told the WHO the death was not due to plague and they’ve not detected any plague pathogens, contrary to media reports blaming pneumonic plague. “Media” reports also said there was another death due to plague and the WHO has sought more information on that as well. In the meantime, if you read things like the researcher dropped a glass vial and her PPE failed and biocontainment procedures failed and she was an unsupervised student and that this was a genetically altered plague version, remember to take all of this with a hearty pinch of salt. And don’t forget, there may be up to 40 bioweapons labs in that general region. In Ukraine. Run by the US government.

Back to Africa, where Zambia and the US have finally signed their bilateral health deal, with the clause for sharing pathogen data removed.

In Sudan, UAE-sponsored conflict has already taken a heavy toll on people and places, with hunger and malnutrition rampant everywhere. A new assessment says, with El Niño truly bedding in, Sudan’s harvest is likely to fail, sending millions more into the grip of famine.

Last week, Botswana opened voluntary notification for Class A and specified medical devices, with fees reduced by up to 50% for fully-local manufacture. The voluntary window closes on 31 March 2027, so if you’re a medical devices manufacturer looking to enter a new market with strong regulatory support, here is your opportunity.

The Africa CDC released a roadmap to improve Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health across the continent over the next five years. Now, for budgets and will to match.

The WHO released its Q3 health intelligence report for the Africa region. Mostly good news: decentralised mpox testing, genomic sequencing capacity in 46 of 47 member states, and an 89.4% detection success rate in laboratory external quality assessment.

The WHO too is making maternal and reproductive health a priority this week, with the launch of a global roadmap to tackle hypertension in pregnancy.

And in the US, New York has declared a state of emergency because of measles. The state says it plans to seek federal help. Pity the federal head honcho is someone who’s majorly responsible for the resurgence of measles in the US. Who, as of this week, is still casting doubt on vaccines.

And finally, and maybe unsurprisingly, the US is in the middle of a rash of sexually transmitted diarrhoea. And it is becoming drug-resistant. ‘MURICA!!!

Stories Of The Week

Covid is well and truly over. So, the WHO has released its latest Global Health Estimates and Covid has dropped out of the top 10 causes of death for the first time since 2021. Our theory says this is because we no longer track Covid and all the deaths caused by Covid are not actually attributed to Covid. But anyhoo. Noncommunicable diseases accounted for 74% of global deaths in 2023, up from 58% in 2000. Eight of the ten leading causes of death were noncommunicable diseases, led by ischaemic heart disease, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which killed 9.5 million, 6.8 million and 3.6 million people respectively. Covid fell to fourteenth place, causing an estimated 900,000 deaths. Global life expectancy recovered to 73.3 years, close to its 2019 level, but healthy life expectancy remained 0.4 years below its pre-pandemic level, at 62.8 years.

The shift is uneven across regions and income groups. Individual risk from ischaemic heart disease increased in WHO’s South-East Asia and Western Pacific regions, while the risk of dying from diabetes rose particularly sharply in South-East Asia. In lower-middle-income countries, deaths from heart disease, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease roughly doubled between 2000 and 2023, while diabetes deaths more than tripled. Yet low-income countries continue to face a substantial infectious disease burden: malaria, tuberculosis and HIV remained among their ten leading causes of death, and lower respiratory infections killed more than 350,000 people annually throughout the period, with little progress in reducing that toll.

Dementia and mental health conditions are also reshaping health needs. Deaths from Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias tripled between 2000 and 2023, making them the fifth leading cause of death globally. Between 2019 and 2023, age-standardised rates of healthy life lost to depression and anxiety increased by approximately 20% and 45% respectively. Drug use disorders showed contrasting regional trends, with the Americas recording the largest increases in mortality and disability risk since 2000, while the Western Pacific saw substantial declines.
(WHO)

From the world to Africa. Noncommunicable diseases caused an estimated 4.70 million deaths across Africa in 2023, according to a Lancet Global Health study highlighted by the Africa CDC. The analysis, published using Global Burden of Disease 2023 data, estimated that these conditions cost the continent 263 million years of healthy life. Although deaths increased between 1990 and 2023, the age-standardised mortality rate fell by 9%, indicating that population growth and demographic changes outweighed improvements in underlying mortality risk. The findings describe a long-term rise in the burden using modelled historical estimates.

Ischaemic heart disease and stroke were the leading causes of NCD deaths, killing an estimated 801,000 and 700,000 people respectively. Chronic kidney disease accounted for 293,000 deaths, hypertensive heart disease for 246,000 and diabetes for 245,000. High systolic blood pressure was the largest attributable risk factor, linked to 26.2% of NCD deaths, followed by dietary risks at 14.7% and air pollution at 14.2%. Across all 88 risk factors assessed, 57.4% of NCD deaths were attributable to potentially modifiable exposures.

The findings strengthen the case for planning around sustained demand for chronic disease medicines and diagnostics, alongside prevention. A key question is whether countries translate that burden into reliable access to long-term care, and whether stronger national surveillance helps direct resources towards the populations and conditions with the greatest unmet needs.
(Africa CDC)

When your day is done. Authorities seized 251 tonnes of medical products across Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, Gabon, the Central African Republic and Chad between 2020 and 2025, according to a new UNODC report. Seizures included antibiotics, antimalarials, painkillers, tramadol and pregabalin, including falsified medicines, diverted genuine products and unapproved drugs. Recorded seizures climbed from about five tonnes in 2020 to nearly 116 tonnes in 2024; Cameroon alone accounted for 96 tonnes in 2025. These figures reflect enforcement activity as well as trafficking. Networks use ports including Douala and Nigeria’s Apapa, alongside river, air and road routes; armed groups profit through looting medicines and taxing convoys.

The market feeds on treatment and access gaps. In Chad, a prefilled insulin syringe cost nearly 16 days’ wages for the lowest-paid government employee, while informal sellers in the Central African Republic made medicines affordable by selling individual tablets. In the same countries, more than half the population lived at least two hours from a public hospital providing emergency care. And yes, the safety risks extend into authorised outlets too: a third of incidents reported to WHO’s surveillance system in the Central African economic bloc were detected in regulated supply chains. Falsified amoxicillin identified in Cameroon and the Central African Republic in 2025 contained no stated active ingredient. So there is an access problem because patients are struggling to afford treatment. But thankfully, there is also a trust problem because people are unsure about whether the medicines they buy will work.
(UNODC)

Play ball. Were you considering bariatric surgery for your under-10s? Or weight-loss devices? Or obesity medicines? First, what in tarnation is wrong with you? And second, the WHO has released its first global guidelines on childhood and adolescent obesity. And it says structured nutrition, physical activity and behavioural support are more important than medicines and surgery. The guidance explicitly advises against obesity medicines, bariatric surgery and weight-loss devices for children under ten. It also says that for adolescents aged 10–19, approved medicines may be considered but only when a supervised programme combining lifestyle interventions has not achieved the desired results. As for surgery, that is an absolute last option for severe obesity.

Childhood and adolescent obesity is a real enough problem. The prevalence among 5–19-year-olds has quadrupled since 1990, reaching 8%, with 170 million affected in 2024. Childhood obesity is accelerating across parts of sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Pacific, bringing greater risks of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. And while we don’t always agree with the WHO, we do agree that comprehensive childhood obesity care based on lifestyle might be a better foundation for later years.
(WHO)

Bottom line

The guest who isn’t. Do you think El Niño has gone on far too long already? No? Excellent because the UN says it will pick up some more and will go on till at least February next year. The WMO update puts the likelihood of El Niño persisting through February 2027 at nearly 100%, with a December peak potentially making it one of the strongest events since at least 1950. Temperatures in the key central-eastern Pacific monitoring region are forecast to average 3.7°C above normal during October–December, surpassing the previous seasonal record of 2.6°C.

The regional forecast is equally committed to being a pain in the nether regions: wetter-than-normal conditions are more likely across the Greater Horn of Africa and southeastern South America, while the Indian subcontinent, southern Central America, parts of the Caribbean and northwestern South America face a drier outlook. Much of the globe is also likely to experience above-average temperatures, raising the risk of heat extremes.
(WMO)

Growing up hungry. While El Niño happily extends its stay, UNICEF is counting the children living in its path: more than 347 million across nearly 100 countries and territories could experience unusually wet or dry conditions between October and December. The largest exposed population - at 190 million children - lives in Asia and the Pacific, followed by East and Southern Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, at 41 million each. These are estimates of exposure to forecast rainfall anomalies, rather than counts of children who will suffer disasters. Even with that distinction, El Niño’s itinerary is looking alarmingly ambitious.

Drier conditions in Colombia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines could intensify water shortages, agricultural drought and acute malnutrition. In the Greater Horn of Africa, particularly Somalia, unusually heavy rainfall could bring flooding, water-borne disease and school closures. For children in conflict-affected countries such as Afghanistan and Chad, those shocks would compound existing hunger, displacement and limited access to care. The forecast arrives months ahead of the worst expected conditions. Whether that warning translates into preparation will help determine how many children experience El Niño as disrupted weather, and how many experience it as a disrupted childhood. We know the answer but one lives in hope.
(UNICEF)

The tiger is back, baby. Maybe. Some wildlife is staging a comeback. WWF’s Living Planet Report 2026 has the receipts. Global wild tiger numbers rose from about 3,200 in 2010 to 5,700 in 2025; Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna have recovered following tighter fishing controls; and some southern African elephant populations are increasing, despite declines elsewhere. Green sea turtles moved from Endangered to Least Concern on the IUCN Red List in 2025, following decades of protection across roughly 80 nesting countries. Half the wildlife populations tracked by the Living Planet Index are stable or increasing. So sustained conservation can work, and not just produce excellent photographs of increasingly rare animals.

But the bad news, and there always is bad news, is that the losses still overwhelm those gains. Across 35,803 monitored populations of 5,790 vertebrate species, the index recorded a 73% average decline in population size between 1970 and 2022. Regional declines were steepest in Latin America and the Caribbean, at 95%, followed by Africa at 80% and Asia–Pacific at 49%; North America recorded 28% and Europe and Central Asia 23%, though substantial losses there predated the 1970 baseline. Freshwater populations suffered the greatest decline, at 85%, with habitat destruction and degradation the most frequently reported threats.

Dunno. Maybe we should have led with the bad news. Because the recoveries show that decline can be reversed. But when you look at the broader picture, the successes are so obviously so distant from adding up to a global recovery. 🥲
(Living Planet Report 2026)

Long reads

Cry me a river. Just one long read again. And it is a study that will gladden the hearts of all the MRAs out there. Or maybe not. Because the study says women face higher pain levels than men, across multiple parts of the body. And it doesn’t even account for the fact that women have to deal with men every day.
(Nature Medicine)

Beginning, as we have been for well over a hundred days now, with Ebola. Cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have well exceeded the 8,000 mark, standing at 8,224 as of last count, with 3,982 deaths. But that number is poised for a dramatic jump, we’d imagine, after a transit camp in Kigonze was burned down, leaving 19,000 people scattered. This was not even the only camp to be attacked this week. 3,000 people also were forced to flee another camp in Djugu territory. The violence isn’t limited only to camps sheltering people needing treatment. A politician promoting Ebola prevention measures was beaten to death as well. Cherry on top: An MSF staff member tested positive for Ebola, and is being evacuated to The Netherlands.

There are a lot of updates from Africa this week. Beginning with a video from Ghana’s President John Mahama explaining in no uncertain terms why Ghana shot down the US bilateral health deal.

A fantastic update from Ethiopia on the upgraded lab infrastructure in the country over the past 18 months or so. And it is one heck of an upgrade.

The WHO also launched a three-year plan to modernise planning, coordination, implementation and monitoring of public health campaigns across Africa. Called the DIGIT Health Campaign Data Digitization Project (yes, a mouthful but we’ve got three years to say it), the project hopes to help countries integrate campaign data and operations through a common digital infrastructure, leading to more coordinated delivery of vaccinations and preventive health interventions.

In good news for manufacturing in Africa, Kenya’s Crown Healthcare has opened a new syringe manufacturing plant and Nigeria’s Harvestfield has begun local production of its Synera DuoForte malaria nets.

In what we think is the most consequential news of the week, DRC-based PharmaKina was confirmed for onboarding as a registered manufacturer for the African Pooled Procurement Mechanism (APPM) after completing the Africa CDC prequalification process. When it comes to malaria, Congo consistently ranks high in annual counts for both cases and deaths, and PharmaKina is trying to combat that killer in more ways than one. Hopefully, this prequalification leads to a future where they emerge victorious in that fight.

In Egypt, AstraZeneca is partnering with UNICEF to help young people fight non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

Elsewhere, Sudan continues to burn, and the US insists that only the US can broker peace, and the UAE obviously has a role to play in bringing about that peace. One thing is for certain: wherever the US has gone, we’ve seen peace flourish. Same with the UAE.

PAHO has released a new food safety strategy “to reduce the burden of foodborne diseases.” To be honest, we didn’t read it. Because the last time PAHO had a plan we read, it was to vaccinate children in vulnerable communities across the Americas in partnership with one of the leading ultra-processed sweet food makers in the world.

Oh, and that pandemic pact we were talking about? Yeah, it will be discussed again sometime in the future.

For long, there has been talk about Arctic permafrost melting and releasing thousands of ancient microbes that would spread disease that we wouldn’t know what to do with. But we may not have to worry about that ever. Because gas, heat-trapping gas, that was frozen in that same Arctic ground has been leaking and warming the planet, it seems.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, researchers in China have found a new tick-borne virus that causes a flu-like illness, and they’re calling it orthonairovirus Asian longhorned tick nairovirus (ALTNV). Because naming things is what scientific and medical researchers are really good at.

And finally, dealing with stress, depression, impulsive behaviour? Maybe even anxiety and attention/focus issues? Science has the answer. And the answer, as always, is coffee.

Stories Of The Week

New world, old problems. We’re about four years away from when we’re supposed to achieve the UN SDGs. We’ve written in The Kable several times about how close we are to achieving so many of those goals. Like SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation. One would think being so close to the goal would mean a drastic dip in cholera cases worldwide, no? Yeah. Globally, 47 countries reported 451,499 cholera cases and 7,870 deaths to the WHO, with deaths rising 30% despite fewer reported infections. It was the highest annual cholera death toll reported to WHO since 1999. The agency even said that the actual toll is substantially higher because many cases go unreported.

Africa, as always, bore the heaviest burden of this worsening global cholera crisis in 2025, with the WHO African Region recording a 34% rise in cases and a 58% increase in deaths compared with the previous year. Five African countries — Angola, DRC, Nigeria, South Sudan and Sudan — were among just seven countries that together accounted for around 90% of reported cholera cases and deaths worldwide. Bangladesh and Yemen completed the group of seven countries carrying most of the burden. In Yemen, renewed conflict has compounded the health emergency, with 7,784 suspected cholera cases reported alongside outbreaks of measles and dengue.

Africa also remains the main focus of two other epidemic-prone bacterial diseases highlighted by WHO. Across the African meningitis belt, 24 countries reported 21,526 suspected meningitis cases and 971 deaths in 2025, although cases declined 5.9% among countries with comparable data. Meanwhile, 3,847 suspected human plague cases and 423 deaths were reported globally between 2019 and 2025, with most cases occurring in the DRC and Madagascar, where the disease remains endemic in some areas.
(WHO)

Beat the heat. Heat-related deaths globally have risen by an estimated 63% since the 1990s, with an average 546,000 deaths a year between 2012 and 2021. The good news is that climate change is making extreme heat more frequent and intense across most land regions, so we may be able to get used to it faster. In the meantime, however, the WHO has issued new guidance to help governments and event organisers prevent and manage heat-related illness at major sporting, religious and cultural gatherings, because for now, extreme heat is an increasing public health and operational risk. An evidence review covering studies published between 1980 and 2025 documented nearly half a million medical encounters at mass gatherings, including more than 22,000 heat-related illnesses. The recommended measures include access to safe drinking water and toilets, cooling infrastructure, changes to event schedules, crowd-flow management, workforce protection, public communication, real-time surveillance and prepared on-site medical services.
(WHO)

Teacher, leave them kids alone. Nearly six million refugee children remained out of school in 2025, as cuts to humanitarian and development funding threaten to reverse gains in access to education, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has warned. Its latest education report estimates that 5.8 million, or 44% of the world’s 13.1 million school-aged refugee children, were not attending school last year. The sharpest drop occurs as children move into secondary education. While 65% of primary-school-age refugee children were enrolled in primary education in 2025, the rate fell to 32% at secondary level. Refugee girls face particular pressure at this stage, with poverty, protection risks and early marriage among the factors pushing adolescent girls out of school. Two in three young refugees also lack the foundational learning needed to prepare them for the classroom. Higher education has nevertheless continued to make gains: refugee tertiary enrolment reached a record 11% in 2025, up from 9% a year earlier, with more than 450,000 refugees enrolled. Access remains highly unequal, however: in low-income and conflict-affected countries, only 2% of refugees were enrolled in higher education, compared with 13% of nationals.
(UNHCR)

Watching the sun go down. UNICEF has a new report out, called An Enduring Nightmare. In the report, it says four in five households in Lebanon are struggling to afford basic necessities as renewed conflict compounds years of economic crisis, with children increasingly going hungry, missing health care and being pushed into work. 22% of surveyed households said their children had gone to bed hungry in the previous two weeks, while 31% reported children going without needed health care, mainly because families could not afford it. 14% said at least one child was working, more than double the proportion recorded in January 2025.

The conflict has also caused extensive casualties and damage to education infrastructure. Since 2 March 2026, at least 261 children have been killed and 1,056 injured — an average of seven children killed or injured each day over six months — while 436 schools have been damaged or destroyed, putting around 100,000 children at risk of being left without a classroom. 17% of surveyed households said their children had stopped attending school, while nearly half had cut education spending.

The report also estimates that 770,000 children have experienced psychological distress over the past six months, with 63% of households reporting that their children were anxious or nervous. Young people face similarly constrained prospects: an earlier UNICEF assessment found just 22% of 18- to 25-year-olds were in school or university, while 67% were unemployed at the time of the survey. What the UNICEF report does not do is name who (Israel) is behind all these strikes that are killing children and destroying hospitals and demolishing schools and turning homes and lives into rubble. An 11-page report that can’t spare a single mention for the cause of all this devastation?
(UNICEF)

Bottom line

Smoke on the water. Extreme heat and human-caused emissions combined to expose almost 40% of the world’s population to extremely high levels of ground-level ozone during the first eight months of 2026, according to the inaugural Atmosphere Watch report from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). Roughly half the global population experienced “very poor” or “extremely poor” long-term ozone levels, while just 5% experienced levels classified as good, with the cleanest conditions concentrated in Oceania and parts of South America and Africa. It doesn’t mean you’re good where you are. Because the report says air pollution from ozone, wildfire smoke and desert dust can travel thousands of kilometres, affecting populations far from where the pollution originated.

Asia recorded the heaviest ozone exposure, with around nine in ten people exposed to dangerous levels and about 60% experiencing extremely high concentrations. More than two-thirds of North America’s population and half of Europe’s experienced poor, very poor or extremely poor levels. Africa was less affected by ozone overall, with 56% of its population experiencing good or fair levels, but the continent faces significant exposure to other forms of airborne pollution, including smoke from biomass burning and Saharan dust.

Wildfires produced major cross-border pollution episodes during the year. Smoke from fires in Canada travelled across the United States and the Atlantic towards Europe, while fires in France and Spain generated exceptionally high emissions and affected air quality hundreds of kilometres away. Indonesia also recorded some of its highest fire emissions in more than two decades as hotter and drier conditions associated with El Niño intensified peat and forest fires. In Africa, seasonal biomass burning emissions have declined over the past two decades but still generate widespread and persistent smoke pollution, while Saharan dust repeatedly travelled across North Africa, Europe, the Atlantic and into the Caribbean during 2026.
(CAMS)

Long reads

Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Let nobody tell you The Kable is not a source of endless laughs. Okay, we may not have too many long reads for you this week. Heck, we don’t even have one. But we do have pictures. Lots of pictures. Of animals at their derpiest best. Enjoy.
(Comedy Wildlife Awards)

The outbreak has now affected 63 health zones with a case fatality rate of 48.1%, with 7,890 cases and 3,799 deaths, as per the latest update. The speed with which the outbreak was growing has certainly come down but worryingly it looks like Nord-Kivu is now becoming the new hot spot. In great news, on the sidelines of the UNGA, G20+ countries pledged an additional $700 million, bringing the total pledges raised for this outbreak to nearly $3 billion.

Elsewhere, Uganda and South Sudan, countries most likely to be impacted by the ongoing Ebola outbreak in DRC, have signed a deal to strengthen cross-border outbreak response.

There’s a whole lot of other disease afoot across Africa otherwise too. In Madagascar, 36 people have died in two municipalities, maybe due to measles, maybe malaria. In Ghana, a yellow fever outbreak among the Fulbe nomadic community in Sissala East has already claimed 21 lives. In South Africa, mpox is beginning to make its way back up the charts again. South Africa is also still in the middle of its largest bovine foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) epidemic ever, and authorities are now asking private companies to start making the vaccine for it.

In Sudan, a mystery illness is affecting children in North Darfur. Of course, illness is probably the least of Sudan’s concerns at the moment. The world’s largest- and longest-running internal displacement crisis is well past critical point now. WFP and IOM are both on record saying humanitarian relief is not meeting needs even now and now 5 million people are returning to homes and lands ravaged by conflict, and climate. Amid all of this, the great imperialist of our times is looking to force a peace pact on the people of Sudan. And as has been their wont, regime change is their solution because the US has always only wanted what is best for the world.

The world, minus Zimbabwe this week. Because Zimbabwe didn’t want to sign up for the Americaworld first bilateral health deal, the US is pulling all health funding.

Also, last week, yet again, people met to discuss the Pandemic Pact. We can predict the outcome of these talks already but we will know for sure a little while after you read this.

The Africa CDC can also predict the outcome of these talks. Which is why they’re becoming even more strident in their call to make vaccines locally.

Earlier this week, the Global Fund released its 2026 results report, which makes for interesting reading. In the 20+ years the fund has been active, it has brought the combined death rate from AIDS, TB and malaria down by 65% in the countries it works in.

In Palestine, a new school year has begun, and it is the fourth consecutive year that Palestinian kids will see their learning interrupted. By Israel. Because destroying olive trees before harvest and polluting the air itself isn’t evil enough. Oh, and wheelchairs are weapons. Which is why hundreds of wheelchairs, donated by charities in Australia for children in Gaza, are still stuck in Jordan. Because Israel won’t let them in. Just to make things a little more holistic, Israel also killed a few UN staffers, while continuing its reign of terror in Lebanon.

In somewhat good news, CEPI received a new $240 million commitment from Ethiopia, Norway and the UK. But the Global Education Fund’s replenishment closed with less than half of the $5 billion it was looking to raise.

But AI will save the day, right? Especially with Bill Gates at the helm? What? You think AI won’t save the day? Here, Claude is discovering gene editing mechanisms that humans couldn’t find in 10,000 years. Okay, so maybe gene editing may not be possible. Which means maybe it might be. Yay.

In better news, MPP has signed sublicense agreements with 11 manufacturers in India, China, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Uganda, Ukraine, and Vietnam to make generic versions of Roche’s antiviral flu drug, baloxavir marboxil.

And finally, in actual good news, intrepid explorers have discovered a brand new species of cats, the first such discovery in over 100 years. We can never have too many cats.

Stories Of The Week

Don’t you know that you’re toxic? The UN released a new report last week and the beginning of the headline - “Highly persistent toxic waste“ - might have made you believe it was about Israel. But it wasn’t. It was about poorly managed toxic chemicals and hazardous waste which threaten “many, if not all, human rights.” Culprit number one? Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the so-called “forever chemicals”. Used in pretty much everything everywhere all at once. PFAS can persist in the environment for centuries and have been linked to harm to hormone, liver and immune function; they have also been detected in umbilical cord blood and breast milk. And yes, the burden of this too is unevenly distributed. Workers, women, children, Indigenous Peoples and marginalised communities are often exposed most heavily, even though much PFAS production is concentrated in industrialised countries. The report was presented by the UN’s new Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights who wants an urgent ban on all non-essential uses of PFAS. And also for prevention to take precedence over attempting to clean up contamination after it has occurred. Heh.
(UN)

And then there were 451,000 less. Extreme heat associated with this year’s “super” El Niño could cause as many as 451,000 excess deaths worldwide between June 2026 and February 2027, according to University of Chicago Climate Impact Lab projections. The number of extremely hot days is expected to rise by 44% compared with normal years. Nigeria alone could record 31,400 excess heat deaths between September and February, followed by Indonesia with 19,300 and Sudan with 17,600. The Sahel, including Nigeria, Sudan, Niger and Chad, could see 66,800 additional deaths, while the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia could record 19,400 combined. Thankfully, the researchers also offered a peek beyond this 6-month forecast. And they said India and Pakistan will see an uptick in heat-related deaths as summer really kicks in.
(Climate Impact Lab)

Please sir, may I have some more? Well no. Not if you’re a child in East or Southern Africa. Because Save the Children says about eight million children in these regions could face acute hunger by early 2027, up 30%, with the same El Niño compounding existing food insecurity. Across Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Uganda and Kenya, the number of people facing crisis-level hunger or worse is projected to rise from 12.6 million to 16.4 million by March 2027. Six million children in these countries already face severe food shortages, while Somalia is also considered at risk from El Niño-related flooding.

Uganda could have 4.4 million people facing crisis-level hunger or worse, up 22%, with the increase exceeding 40% in Karamoja. Zambia faces the sharpest deterioration, up 80% to more than 1.2 million people, while Madagascar, Mozambique and Malawi are projected to see increases of 75%, 55% and 35% respectively. In Madagascar, 502,000 children under five — one in 10 — are expected to suffer acute malnutrition between May 2026 and April 2027, including 78,000 with severe acute malnutrition.
(Save the Children)

The silver lining. With heat and starvation killing people, what could the silver lining be, you ask? Well, the thing is, if people are dying of heat and hunger, they’re less likely to fall ill. Which is great because a new study says disease outbreaks are killing healthcare workers in the tens of thousands every year. The study draws on 30 years of data from 194 countries and territories. And obviously, low- and lower-middle-income countries were disproportionately affected. Niger recorded the highest estimated losses relative to the size of its health workforce, at 57 per 10,000, followed by Somalia at 44 and Ethiopia at 37. India had the largest estimated loss in absolute terms, at around 7,900 health workers a year.

Nurses and midwives accounted for the largest share of the estimated global losses, at 6,125 annually, followed by aides and emergency medical workers at 3,162 and doctors at 1,478. The study found that each additional epidemic was followed by a decline in health worker density the following year, reflecting deaths, disability, staff departures and wider disruption to health systems. The researchers said stronger disease surveillance, higher vaccination coverage and measures to protect and retain health workers could reduce the pressure, particularly in countries where staffing is already stretched.
(PLOS Medicine)

Bottom line

Who needs a Planet B? Not us, for sure. Because we’re already well on course to destroy this one. Seven of the nine planetary boundaries that regulate the stability and resilience of Earth have now been breached, according to the 2026 Planetary Health Check. Climate change, ocean acidification, biosphere integrity, freshwater change, land-system change, disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and the introduction of novel entities such as synthetic chemicals and plastics. All seven are now at their highest recorded levels, increasing the risk of large-scale and potentially irreversible environmental change. Only stratospheric ozone depletion and atmospheric aerosol loading remain within the global safe operating space. But don’t worry, aerosol pollution has already reached unsafe levels in some regions.

Human activity has sharply increased nitrogen and phosphorus flows, largely through fertiliser use, contributing to algal blooms and oxygen-depleted aquatic dead zones. PFAS, microplastics and other manufactured substances are meanwhile entering the environment faster than many can be adequately tested, monitored or regulated, while land conversion, resource exploitation and invasive species continue to erode biodiversity. The report does say reversing these worsening trends is still possible, but action within this decade is critical. But we need data centres for AI and we need mines and we need more fossil fuel. So maybe, hold on till 2040 or so?
(2026 Planetary Health Check)

What, men, dinosaurs? Why couldn’t you hide? Such mighty creatures, and you had to go and succumb to an asteroid, only to become fuel to hasten the end of human life millennia later. Yeah, talking to you, T rex. Because a study in PLOS Climate says historical emissions linked to 178 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers will continue contributing to global warming for centuries. And it’s all your fault. These companies and state-owned producers tracked by the Carbon Majors database have generated more than 1.5 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent since 1854, with half of those emissions produced after 1986.

Researchers modelled the global climate through to 2500 under different future emissions pathways, comparing scenarios with and without the Carbon Majors’ historical emissions through 2024. Their past emissions continued to raise global temperatures under every scenario and could increase the likelihood and severity of future extreme weather. Under lower-emissions pathways, historical Carbon Majors emissions account for a larger proportion of total warming; under higher-emissions pathways, future emissions make up a greater share, but the absolute warming attributable to past emissions remains broadly similar.

Even if, by some miracle, global emissions fall to near zero, reversing the current warming trend could take decades and returning temperatures towards pre-industrial levels could take centuries.
(PLOS Climate)

Long reads

What to expect when you’re expecting. El Niño has featured a few times already this week. So here it is once again. With maps as well. More rain. More heat. More snow. Pretty much more of everything you didn’t need.
(Nature, Nature)

Make in Africa? How? More than half of the continent has no reliable electric supply. And 41% either has no connection or have a connection that never works. How can you power the economic engine when you have no power?
(Afrobarometer)

Has the outbreak in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) come under control? Nope. Not even close. But reported numbers this week seem to indicate that the rate at which the outbreak was exploding may have slightly eased up. At last count, there were 6,942 cases with 3,349 deaths. However, to dampen any optimism comes this late-breaking report that the outbreak has now reached a 7th province in the country. Worryingly, this is the first case in western DRC, lending further credence to what the Africa CDC said in a media briefing about the outbreak rapidly spreading beyond its epicentre. The agency also said emergency funding alone will not be enough to end the outbreak, even as the WHO said funding and people shortages continue to remain massive challenges. Writing in The Conversation, an epidemiologist contends how Ebola could yet become a global pandemic and how we could avoid that happening. And if reports from India about Ebola having arrived there prove to be true, well, we could well be in for that pandemic. India’s health ministry has ostensibly denied this report, saying that the returnees were simply kept in isolation as per protocol. 🤞🏽

Over in Sudan, farmers are saying drought is coming for their agricultural season. As it is, conflict has taken away all the food, and now the climate will leave them unable to grow more.

Not too long after Namibia turned down the US bilateral health deal came this joint announcement about the phasing out of US support for Namibia’s HIV programme. Planned phasing out, might we add.

In Liberia, authorities have commissioned a new vaccine depot in Nimba County to improve vaccine storage, distribution and immunisation services.

Kenya is looking to up its health infra, thanks to two World Bank-supported projects worth $335 million. The projects will strengthen Level 2 and Level 3 health facilities and also support efforts to improve the responsiveness of health institutions and frontline services, while also bolstering Kenya’s ability to prevent, prepare for and respond to public health emergencies.

Another outcome from the recently concluded 76th session of the WHO Regional Committee for Africa is the unveiling of the Regional Health Data Hub (RDHUB), intended to serve as a central repository of African public health data.

The Africa CDC, without resorting to any acronyms, released a report on the leading causes of maternal and child mortality in Africa. If conflict caused by foreign actors was included in the report, we’re pretty certain it would’ve ranked very, very high.

Speaking of, in Gaza, the UN says households headed by women are having to choose between impossible choices to survive. Also, the number of households headed by women in Gaza has doubled in the last two years. No prizes for guessing correctly that it is because Israel killed the men in those households. Not that they spared women either. Or children. Just this week, they raided a kindergarten in Gaza, trapping some 200 children under gunfire, with teachers having to calm kids down saying it’s just fireworks. A few days ago, to mark World Physical Therapy Day, the Palestinian Health Ministry released a statement saying it has recorded 5,000 amputation cases in the last two years, apart from the tens of thousands of cases in need of long-term rehabilitation. Oh and the Palestinian economy? Israel is doing its best to choke that off as well. Despite all of this, and all the evidence all of us have witnessed, Germany went to the ICJ this week to say there is no need to prevent genocide because there is no genocide because Israel doesn’t agree. Not surprising. Israel might be the most obvious genocidaires today but if there is another country that knows what that mantle means, it is Germany of course. Not surprising then that Germany is funding projects to assess the impact of removing wells from Palestine and quadrupling its weapons exports to Israel.

Elsewhere, as you might be aware, Indonesia is fighting wildfires that are burning up peatlands. As a consequence, respiratory infections are on the rise, doubling over the month. In case you were wondering, yup, El Niño is responsible too.

In excellent news, the WHO has prequalified Pfizer’s maternal RSV vaccine.

In more confirmation of the fact that sometimes some things don’t change, the US FDA has issued a warning letter to an Indian API manufacturer. Ah, the relief of the familiar.

In the US, hundreds of people went to a petting zoo to pet some baby goats. And exposed themselves to rabies.

Did you think August 2026 was hot? You were spot on. It was so hot it tied with July 2023 as the hottest month ever. It was also the hottest August ever. And possibly, the most humid August ever.

All this heat will obviously affect farming. Good thing OpenAI is putting in $60 million to help farmers use AI for forecasting. Why is the UN talking about the Environmental Cost of AI’s Energy Use: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints?

And finally, coffee. Our favourite researchers are at it with a study that says coffee is responsible for healthier and slower ageing. As if we didn’t know that. Just protect your oesophagus by waiting for the coffee to cool down a bit, okay?

Stories Of The Week

I’ll huff, and I’ll puff... and I’ll blow your house down. Don’t smoke? No problem. Smoking can still kill you. A major study published in The Lancet Public Health estimates that second-hand smoke was linked to around 1.7 million deaths worldwide in 2023, with 2.71 billion non-smokers exposed at home or work. That included 767 million children.

Researchers from the University of Washington combined exposure estimates from 204 countries with established links between passive smoking and nine diseases. Heart disease led the table, accounting for roughly 537,000 deaths, followed by COPD, stroke, respiratory infections and cancers of the lung, bronchus and trachea. Exposure has fallen proportionally since 1990, but population growth has helpfully ensured the absolute number of people inhaling somebody else’s smoke has barely budged. China, India and Indonesia alone accounted for almost half of everyone exposed worldwide. And those figures may still be an undercount. The study only measured exposure at home and at work, leaving out cars, bars, restaurants and all the other places where you unwittingly get that nicotine high.
(The Lancet Public Health)

All I ever wanted was to go to school. Back in the day, really heavy rain was the odd reason for a one-day school break for this editor. Some people may remember similar holidays for snow or other once-in-a-while occurrences. Except, for the present generation and for all future ones, those are no longer fluke events. Climate change is hell-bent on cancelling school.

According to UNICEF, more than 171 million students, or about one in ten school-age children worldwide, had their education disrupted by climate hazards in 2025, as storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts and wildfires closed classrooms, shortened lessons and shoved pupils towards remote learning. Storms alone affected 109 million students, floods at least 70 million and heatwaves around 50 million.

As usual, the inconvenience was not distributed with anything resembling fairness. Three-quarters of affected students lived in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Pakistan’s monsoon floods delayed the return to school for more than 28 million students, while a single dust storm in Egypt suspended classes nationwide for another 28 million. Forty countries suffered multiple rounds of disruption.

And the damage is not temporary. UNICEF estimates that the interruptions experienced in 2025 could eventually cost affected students at least $200 billion in lifetime earnings, while girls face a particularly high risk of never returning to school at all. Recommendations? Sure UNICEF has some. Like stronger school infrastructure, better emergency learning systems and more climate-resilient education planning. Or, you know, build school systems for the climate as it is and as it will be, rather than as it once was.
(UNICEF)

The other C. If 171 million children have their schooling affected by climate change, here comes conflict to trump it, laying claim to learning interruptions for 258 million children across 87 countries. And a further 93 million who are out of school. Attacks on education hit a record high in 2024 and 2025, with at least 9,259 incidents recorded across 28 countries. More than 3,600 of these attacks were on schools. More than 10,600 students and educators were killed, injured or abducted, while the military use of schools nearly doubled. The consequences go way beyond schooling. Years outside school leave children more vulnerable to recruitment, trafficking and exploitation, while refugee children, internally displaced youngsters and children with disabilities are especially likely to be shut out of education altogether.
(UN News)

Bottom line

Everybody, pull together now. Has polluted air contributed to climate change? Heck yes. So can we work on cleaning the air and slowing climate change together? The UN certainly seems to think so. And not just that, the UN says it is only the economically prudent thing to do. There are 25 measures for tackling the two problems together. And they could generate around $15 in economic benefits for every $1 spent. Even if you remove harder-to-price gains such as longer, healthier lives, the return is still about four to one. What are the measures, you ask? Renewable power, cleaner cooking, electric vehicles, tighter emissions standards and plugging oil and gas leaks. Okay, yeah. We know.

But human-caused outdoor air pollution was linked to an estimated 6.4 million premature deaths in 2025, with household pollution associated with another two million. Fully implementing these UN recommendations could prevent 144 million premature deaths by 2050, while cutting carbon dioxide emissions in half, methane by 60 per cent and avoiding about 0.34°C of warming by mid-century. Can do?
(UN News)

Outpacing us. There is good news. And the good news is that humans are getting better at surviving extreme heat. The bad news is that extreme heat is improving considerably faster. After the deadly European heatwave of 2003, countries introduced warning systems, cooling centres, hospital preparedness and protections for vulnerable people; France, for example, has made comparable heatwaves substantially less deadly. But a new analysis suggests that if adaptation continues at roughly its recent pace, it will prevent only about one in ten heat-related deaths expected as temperatures rise.

That gap is already becoming difficult to ignore. Western Europe endured five major heatwaves this summer, with early estimates pointing to at least 35,000 excess deaths from just the first four across roughly half the continent. Warning systems themselves are being overtaken as extreme temperatures arrive outside traditional heat seasons and exceed the conditions planners designed them for. Scientists are now urging governments to “stress test” cities for previously unthinkable heat, including what happens to hospitals, power grids, transport and basic infrastructure when temperatures smash historical records.
(Grist)

Long reads

Move to Africa. An AI company has prepared a report of the world’s largest cities and how prepared they are for the climate of the future. If you stay in South Asia, you may want to move. NOW.
(Earther)

Doom? Not on our page. UNEP released a new report last week called Limiting Overshoot. This whole issue of The Kable has been fairly doomerish. Why not read the report and end on the same note?
(UNEP)

Beginning, as has been the norm for over 100 days now, with Ebola and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where, at last count, cases stand at 6,342 with 3,072 deaths. Amid this escalating outbreak, the new school year has also begun in the country, which comes with its own set of complications. Struggling as they are to ensure response keeps pace with the outbreak, health authorities now plan to use mobile phone data to track Ebola spread, based on user movement. And we have to say, while this sounds a good use of what is invasive tech, it isn’t. As history is our witness, anything that has the potential for misuse will be misused by governments, malevolent and benign.

Enough with Ebola for now. Let other diseases claim some of the limelight. Like diphtheria, for example, which is rampaging out of control in Nigeria’s Katsina State. So bad that the government has set up a multi-agency emergency task force to contain the outbreak.

In Sudan, it is cholera that is running riot, with the WHO declaring West Kordofan as the newest cholera hotspot. And in more of the same, the UN released a report saying the “war” in Sudan is being fuelled by outside elements. Well, colour us surprised.

Elsewhere, the Africa CDC has been selected to the WHO task force that will develop options and recommendations for consideration by the Eightieth World Health Assembly.

In some good news, Namibia has become the latest African nation to say no to the US’ America First bilateral health deal, again over data privacy issues. In any case, as data published by Public Citizen and Partners In Health reveals, the 18 countries that have already signed bilateral health deals with the US will see aid cuts of about 60% by 2030. Quite the price to pay to hand over public health data.

And if Africa needed more reason to be wary of American interests of any kind, news of Uber’s abrupt withdrawal from Nigeria and Uganda this week should serve. Abrupt? How abrupt? So abrupt that some passengers and drivers were mid-ride when Uber ceased operations.

Late last week, a bunch of agencies came together to launch a global stockpile of mpox vaccines. Excellent news. Hopefully now Africa can get access to some of those shots.

Quick question: what is the single biggest natural disaster of our times? If you answered Israel, you’re wrong because there’s nothing natural about Israel. And they leave no stone unturned in proving it week after week. How? Well, in Lebanon, they’ve killed or injured at least seven children every day in six months this year. In Gaza, people sheltering in tents finally had access to water, thanks to a newly built desalination plant. Israel bombed it. The World Food Programme, which otherwise boasts of all the wonderful ways in which it manages to get food everywhere, is cutting food assistance by 50% in the West Bank. Why do people who have no water even need food? Thankfully, the corporate world doesn’t shill for Israel. So Adidas, which earlier this year had launched a single-shoe service for people with leg limb differences, recently expanded that to Israel as well, making an IOF criminal the face of that program. The same “person” who along with his “most moral” peers created the largest paediatric amputee population in the world. The same IOF responsible for 4,000 children with missing limbs and over 21,000 children with permanent, life-altering disabilities. Yay Adidas.

The US isn’t too far behind Israel either. They started the war on Iran by bombing schoolgirls to death. This week, they decided to bomb a wedding celebration.

In India, authorities busted a racket that was faking expiry dates and nutrition labels on products from PepsiCo and Nestle, before repackaging them for export. Great job, authorities, but which PepsiCo product has nutrition? Or Nestle, for that matter? Nestle is simply the longest-running exploiter in the global food scene.

The UN has apparently decided to give up all pretence of optimism. You will believe it a little further down. But for now, hear this: UN officials say glacial floods of the kind that wreaked havoc in Nepal recently will become more and more prevalent in the Himalayas.

And now, a bunch of studies to close out this section.

The first one is about the heliosphere, the protective layer around the solar system created by the Sun. A new study says the heliosphere stopped protecting Earth like millions of years ago.

Another study says if you’re in your 30s or above, your heart health is not entirely in your control. Because where you live in your 20s has a huge role to play.

And obesity? Well, turns out losing weight is not the end of it. Because your immune cells retain memory of the days of obesity for up to 10 years.

Oh and, scientists tested 212 varieties of plant-based meat. First, we didn’t even know there were 212 varieties of plant-based meat. Second, every single one of them contained fungal toxins. But since plant-based meat is primarily aimed at vegan people who are singularly toxic themselves, maybe the people toxins and the fungal toxins will cancel each other out?

And finally, the last study we’re bringing you this week is also obviously the most poorly researched. Because it says too much coffee can weaken your bones. Once we get these casts off our wrists, we’re gonna send a strongly worded email to those researchers. Maybe with a gift pack of plant-based meat.

Stories Of The Week

Cloudy with a chance of doomballs. We were talking about the UN and optimism, right? Here is the WMO with the first story proving the UN is ready to give up that ghost. Maybe it is us. Maybe it is the general state of the world. Maybe it is entropy. Whatever the cause, the WMO says that the present El Niño could become the strongest ever recorded, putting the likelihood of the event persisting through February 2027 at nearly 100%. That is the most unequivocal El Niño forecast the agency has issued. Pacific sea-surface temperatures are already more than 2°C above normal in key monitoring areas, while subsurface temperatures have reached more than 8°C above average in places.

El Niño is expected to peak towards the end of 2026, but its consequences will travel further. A very strong El Niño can redraw rainfall and temperature patterns across continents, increasing the odds of drought, flooding and extreme heat. Central America is already confronting crop failures and a severe food crisis, while the WMO warns that agriculture, health, water and energy systems will all face heightened risks. And because El Niño’s effect on global temperatures often lingers after the Pacific itself begins to cool, 2027 could yet become the hottest year ever recorded.

For countries whose food, health and disaster-response systems are already stretched, the next several months will be a test of how much resilience they actually have. And for the people of those countries, it just might be time to eat the rich.
(WMO)

Just the facts, ma’am! As if to prove our point from the previous story, here is another UN agency, UNICEF this time, saying more than 162 million children — over two-thirds of all children in Eastern and Southern Africa — live in areas exposed to the strengthening El Niño. Across 13 particularly vulnerable countries, the threat arrives on top of food and water insecurity, strained health systems and disrupted schooling. East Africa faces greater flood risk during the short rains; Southern Africa could see poorer rainfall and harvests deepen hunger. In Somalia alone, severe flooding could affect as many as 2.5 million people, while South Sudan faces the uglier combination of drought, heat, localised flooding, disease, malnutrition and heightened famine risk. UNICEF says less than 1% of international humanitarian assistance is currently available for anticipatory action, and is seeking $173 million to pre-position nutrition supplies, reinforce health and water systems, keep schools functioning and put assistance in place before conditions deteriorate. The question now is whether financing arrives before the familiar sequence does: failed harvests, overwhelmed clinics, displaced families, and so on. And yes, that was a rhetorical question, if ever there was one.
(UNICEF)

Doom. Gloom. Kaboom. For all the anxiety about what children might encounter in the darker corners of the internet, UNICEF’s latest findings suggest the problem for children is very much in the mainstream. An estimated 20 million internet-using children aged 12 to 17 across 21 countries experienced some form of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse in a single year. And yes, most of these cases - nearly 60% - involved social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and WhatsApp; another 14% occurred through online games. What a surprise to find Meta represented so highly in there. That is one company that cares so much. Anyway, back to the report. More than 15 million children were exposed to unwanted sexual content, nine million were pressured into sexual conversations or sharing images, and four million had sexual images of themselves distributed without consent. Oh, and strangers? Yeah, only part of the story. 57% of cases involved someone the child already knew, although 38% first encountered the perpetrator online. More troubling still, over 40% of children told nobody what had happened and fewer than 1% reported it to police, social workers or helplines.
(UNICEF)

Nicotine and gravy. While tobacco-leaf production is falling almost everywhere else, Africa is moving in the opposite direction. WHO says global production declined by nearly 19% between 2012 and 2024, while African output rose by almost 9%, reaching more than 639,000 tonnes and around 11% of global production. Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique and Uganda account for most of the continent’s crop, with East Africa alone responsible for nearly 90%. Funnily enough, over the same period, Africa’s cigarette import bill more than doubled, from $833 million to $1.77 billion.

That leaves a peculiar development model in which African countries increasingly export raw tobacco while paying more to import the finished product, alongside its health costs. WHO also points to the less visible bill: pesticide exposure (more on this later in today’s issue), deforestation, soil degradation, heavy water use, child labour and green tobacco sickness among farm workers. And for all the claims that tobacco is economically indispensable, exports exceed 1% of GDP in only a handful of African economies, notably Malawi and Zimbabwe.
(WHO)

Bottom line

Giving up the ghost. Talking about UN agencies and the embracing of the dark side, here is the biggie. UNEP officially said global warming is now set to cross the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5°C within the next few years. The agency instead has a new goal for all of us to aspire to: overshoot, peak and decline. Hah! As if the human race has ever declined from any peak it has ever achieved. Not that it matters because the UNEP goal isn’t happening anyway because it depends on countries actually delivering their existing climate pledges. And then implementing immediate emissions cuts, particularly methane emissions, to reach net zero; then moving into net-negative emissions to drag temperatures back down. That last step will require carbon dioxide removal but UNEP is unusually explicit that removing yesterday’s carbon cannot become an excuse for continuing to emit today’s. Nor does returning below 1.5°C eventually rewind the damage incurred on the way there.

In more bleak reporting, the agency also made it a point to prove that the difference between 1.5°C, 1.8°C and 2°C is not academic. Every additional fraction increases the risks of extreme weather, crop and water insecurity, ill health, ecosystem loss and irreversible tipping points, while making adaptation more difficult and more expensive. Small island states and low-lying coastal cities face some of the starkest consequences. The UNEP also said countries with the greatest historical responsibility should move fastest and hardest. Hehe. The report may make it seem like the world has not run out of choices and has simply squandered the least painful ones. But the real ones know what’s what.
(UNEP)

Who watches the watchmen? One of the points in the story about the rise in tobacco production in Africa was about pesticide exposure. And the proof of the pudding, so to speak, is here. Researchers writing in Frontiers in Public Health estimate 402–433 million cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning each year, including around 11,000 deaths. Against a global farming population of roughly 934 million, that works out to about 46% of farmers annually. The burden falls disproportionately on the, you guessed it, Global South: southern Asia records the greatest number of cases, followed by south-east Asia and east Africa. Estimated annual poisoning prevalence reaches 84% in Burkina Faso, 78% in Malawi, 71% in Tanzania and 69% in Nigeria.

The data may actually even be worse. Because pesticide poisoning is poorly monitored, deaths are underreported and the study deals only with acute poisoning, leaving the longer-term burden of repeated exposure largely outside the calculation. Meanwhile, global pesticide use reached 3.8 million tonnes in 2023, twice the 1990 level, with use increasing by 185% in Africa over that period. Did somebody say safe use?
(Frontiers in Public Health)

Long reads

Rich and blissfully ignorant. Apparently being pessimistic is a rich people thing. That’s what Nature says based on survey after survey. We must be filthy rich then. We just need to find our secret Swiss bank account.
(Nature)

From Nepal to the world. What happens in Nepal flows down to the world. You know, because Mt Everest is the tallest damn peak in the world. And also because the rich sowed. And the rest of the world is left reaping.
(Health Policy Watch)

Starting, as we’ve been for over 100 days now, with Ebola. That’s right. The Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) officially crossed 100 days earlier this week. And CEPI doesn’t have a vaccine yet. CEPI does have a statement about the breakneck speed of work, and how much more needs to be done yet. To be frank, when CEPI came up with the 100 Days mission, we didn’t actually expect them to have a working solution within 100 days. And neither, we believe, did CEPI. And no, this isn’t a diss aimed at CEPI. For CEPI, that mission would’ve been a rallying call to garner support and funding to boost response for critical health emergencies around the world. Maybe they just didn’t expect an emergency of this scale to hit so soon. Or, they thought if an emergency were to hit, it would be like Covid, one that affected people in the global North, and for which wallets would’ve loosened significantly faster. CEPI is still doing the work here too. They’ve just pumped in $16.5 million to take Egypt-based Minapharm’s Bundibugyo vaccine candidate into clinical trials. Good on them.

So, what’s up with Ebola then? Is the outbreak slowing down? Not a chance. At last count, it had reached 5,794 cases with 2,786 deaths, with cases being reported from two new health zones as well. They’ve started vaccinating frontline health workers with Ervebo, the approved Zaire ebolavirus vaccine, which we still believe is a double-edged sword. And violence against health workers, and health facilities, continues, making both response and containment that much more difficult.

In a little bit of good news to wind this section up, Uganda has officially ended its own Ebola outbreak, after 42 days of no new cases. Uganda also received a small lot of an experimental antibody from the US government, just in case.

Over in Botswana, the government has signed a 10-year deal with the Abu Dhabi-based M42 to roll out a national genomics programme, and to digitise health records, and to improve access to medicines.

As has been the norm lately, barely a week goes by without a “natural” disaster of some form striking somewhere around the world. This week, it was Nepal, where a flash flood, precipitated most likely by a glacier collapse, has seen hundreds of people killed and thousands of homes destroyed. UNICEF says more than 17,000 children need urgent assistance. Yes, climate change was a factor. And we will see more and more stories like these more and more often. Just recently, a massive (like, really massive) iceberg said bye-bye to Greenland. In the Alps, glaciers are primed for record-breaking ice loss. Skiing may soon be a sport of the future. Or Dubai malls.

But there is no disaster that Israel can’t top. Not only did they seize the last operational UNRWA centre in East Jerusalem, they also killed four children in separate attacks that destroyed aid supplies and caused even more damage to the already precarious water situation in Gaza.

Elsewhere, operating under a US-enforced embargo for over 60 years, Cuba nevertheless managed to build a flourishing science and medical infrastructure, among many other stellar achievements. However, the cumulative impact of all these years, combined with the cruelty we’ve witnessed in the past few months, is now making its presence felt in more ways than one. Health is obviously one. Food safety is another. And food-borne illnesses are the result, as we saw in Santiago where at least 52 people have fallen ill. They’ve all been hospitalised but at least the hospital doesn’t have supplies. Free world ftw!

And finally, in Belgium, a record outbreak of salmonella led to 306 egg-eaters falling ill. Authorities said more people actually fell ill but with mild to no symptoms. But we reckon Belgium hasn’t really atoned at all for everything they did to Congo, and even if 3 million people were to contract salmonella, it wouldn’t be enough.

Stories Of The Week

Work in Africa. This week, the WHO Regional Committee for Africa had its 76th session. And one of the outcomes of the session was a health workforce target: train, employ and retain three million additional health workers by 2035, as part of the Africa Health Workforce Agenda 2026–2035.

The continent’s health workforce grew to an estimated 5.72 million people in 2024, but it is still less than half of what the region needs. Without further action, the shortfall could exceed six million workers by 2035. Ironically, at the same time, around one million trained health professionals across Africa are unemployed, exposing a mismatch between workforce shortages and governments’ capacity to finance and create jobs.

The new agenda therefore shifts the focus beyond simply expanding training, calling for better workforce planning, employment, financing and retention. WHO estimates that closing the gap would require additional investment of around $4–$6 per person annually, arguing that stronger health workforces could deliver wider economic gains through improved productivity and access to healthcare.
(WHO)

Time traveller. So we all know drug resistance is on the rise, right? It is projected to become, if not reason numero uno, at least one of the top five causes, for an increasingly large number of deaths around the world by 2050. But it’s a future problem? Why’re we talking about it now? Well, buckle up baby. The future’s here. A new study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, says antimicrobial resistance may be killing considerably more hospital patients in Asia than existing models suggest.

Researchers followed 9,496 patients across 41 hospitals, covering 19 countries, and found that 73.7% of severe hospital-acquired infections involved drug-resistant bacteria. Resistance accounted for roughly one in five deaths associated with these infections, almost twice the proportion suggested by previous modelling. The estimated regional death toll consequently rises from about 130,000 to roughly 250,000. You may not have self-lacing shoes and hoverboards yet but hey, say hello to the future nevertheless.
(The Lancet Infectious Diseases)

Bottom line

Feeling hot, hot, hot. We looked high and low for a phrase or saying about taking a dip in the ocean to cool down. We didn’t find any. Now we know why. Because our oceans are superhot. Hotter than The Kable on a Friday evening even. Last Saturday, the daily average sea-surface temperature across the extra-polar global ocean reached 21.10°C, edging past the previous record of 21.09°C set in March 2024. More unusually, the record arrived in August, well outside the March–April period when global ocean temperatures typically peak. We guess beach clothes are one more thing we can make less of, on the whole.

Unfortunately, the consequences go well beyond warmer water, and pre-boiled fish. A developing extreme El Niño is adding heat, but it is doing so on top of decades of human-driven ocean warming. Higher temperatures contribute to sea-level rise, intensify marine heatwaves, damage coral reefs and seagrass, threaten fisheries and aquaculture, and can feed more heat and moisture into extreme weather. Warmer oceans can also become less effective at absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide, weakening one of the planet’s major climate buffers. So yeah, no beach clothes. No beaches either.
(Copernicus)

Burn, baby, burn. El Niño, for what it’s worth, is natural. What is increasingly unnatural is its intensity. A new study finds that human-driven global warming is making strong El Niño events more extreme, creating a two-way amplification: El Niño pushes global temperatures higher, while a hotter planet strengthens El Niño itself. Researchers reconstructed about 1,000 years of Pacific conditions using fossil corals from the Galápagos, finding a marked change following industrialisation.

El Niño variability is now about 37% higher than in pre-industrial times, with the sharpest shift occurring over the past four decades. You know what this means, right? The exceptionally strong El Niño that we’re now about to witness is not an aberration. It is a preview of the rest of our lives.
(Science)

Long reads

People over profits... but not if you’re in India. Not a long read exactly, but an exposé from Reuters about how Big Food will flagrantly violate their own standards depending on the market. Food regulators in India wanted to impose warning symbols on packaged foods but F&B companies weren’t having any of that.
(Reuters)

First, Ebola, which is pushing the 100-day mark since the official notification of the outbreak. And as of last update, cases in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have crossed 5,000 and stand at 5,290, with 2,516 deaths. Cases have also been reported from a sixth province now. No vaccine yet, so it looks like CEPI might fail the first real test of its 100 Days mission but last week DRC government authorities requested WHO to release vaccines from its stockpile of shots for the Zaire ebolavirus. The WHO is releasing 70,000 doses, including 20,000 for a phase 3 clinical trial. Ordinarily we would have welcomed this news. But there is little data to indicate that the Ervebo vaccine used for the Zaire virus would work in the current Bundibugyo virus disease outbreak. And if the vaccine doesn’t work, it will only increase the lack of trust in vaccines. In DRC, especially in this outbreak, we are already witnessing how lack of trust in frontline healthcare has manifested in violence against healthcare workers and we fear using a vaccine that may not work may not be the best solution, even if there aren’t other solutions available. And we will be very, very happy to be proved wrong here. Elsewhere, CEPI is also funding four new studies to test if vaccines that worked against Zaire ebolavirus, including Ervebo, could work against Bundibugyo. In a media briefing, the Africa CDC said the numbers in the Ebola outbreak could be three times higher than reported. If true, then this outbreak is already on course to break the record for largest outbreak ever pretty soon.

Disease isn’t all that is on the menu this week. We have disaster again. Earthquakes, specifically. A magnitude 7.7 earthquake, followed by a second, 6.4-magnitude quake, and then nearly 1,000 aftershocks, hit Indonesia late last week. The first quake hit the Flores region in eastern Indonesia, while the second quake struck western Sumatra, with more than 50 people dead.

Speaking of disasters, the UN says 94% of Gaza’s population needs shelter, even as Israel continues its demolition spree. And, in what looks like a bid to boost solidarity, Israel is ramping up demolition in Lebanon as well.

Still on the topic of disasters, blueberries, alfalfa grass, iceberg lettuce, shell eggs, mixed berries, pistachio nut butter, green powder supplements, dips containing jalapeño, salsa and guacamole products, soup kits, salad dressings, granola, dog food, jalapeño peppers, pizza cheese bread products, dried herring fish, requeson cheese, soft ricotta cheese, infant formula, cottage cheese and ricotta products, organic moringa capsules and powder, smoked whole herring, enoki mushrooms, parmesan ranch seasoning, Salmonella, cheese and garlic croutons, tahina, specialty beverages, powdered beverage mixes, potato chips, pork rinds and seasoning products, snack mixes, sour cream and onion cheese curds, flavoured popcorn seasoning, coleslaw products, pita chips, chocolate bars, white cheddar seasoning... phew, those are just some of the products recalled in the last three months in the US. All of these recalls can be traced back to the fact that they no longer have a functioning food safety inspection network in that country. And blueberries? Who even dies from blueberries?

And finally, coffee makes us whole. And swole. It’s just science, baby!

Stories Of The Week

So you want to save lives, eh? On Tuesday, Israel killed 17 people, including at least one child, in different attacks on Gaza. Places attacked included a cafe, a police station, and a refugee camp. Another Palestinian girl died on the same day of severe malnutrition. This was the eve of August 19, so it counts, we guess. Last year on August 19, Israel killed 51 people in Palestine. Not that August 19 is a different date from any other. If you were to go all the way back to 1948 or before even, you would find at least one instance of an Israeli killing a Palestinian every single day. The point of this piece, however, is August 19 because that date is World Humanitarian Day.

And, mainly thanks to Israel, humanitarian work is getting deadlier by the day. And not just by a little. The Aid Worker Security Database recorded 1,187 aid workers as victims of major security incidents in 2025, including 350 killed, 322 wounded and 235 kidnapped. The death toll was the second-highest ever recorded, while kidnappings by non-state and criminal groups nearly doubled from the previous year. Gaza, of course, remained the deadliest context, followed, not surprisingly, by Sudan, South Sudan, the DRC, and Yemen.

National and locally recruited staff account for the overwhelming majority of victims: 1,141 national aid workers were affected by violent incidents in 2025, compared with just 44 international staff. Road travel remained the most dangerous setting, but the threat is increasingly coming from the air, with drone warfare adding a new layer of danger to already volatile environments. In Gaza, 186 aid workers were killed, with 68% of those deaths attributed to aerial bombardment.

And then there is the less visible escalation: 280 aid workers were detained or arrested by state actors in 2025. Yemen alone accounted for nearly a third of those cases, while Yemen, South Sudan, DRC, Myanmar and Palestine together made up 75%. And with Israel taking the lead, aid workers are increasingly being treated not as neutral lifelines, but as part of the conflict.
(OCHA)

Shoo fly, don’t bother me. We’re a little over four years away from the target date for achieving our SDGs. And we’re here to tell you SDG 3 and SDG 6 are both not happening. Why? Well, you’d think a functioning toilet would be a fairly unambitious requirement for a health facility, at least in the year 2026, right? Wrong. A new WHO–UNICEF report finds that just 40% of health-care facilities worldwide met basic sanitation standards in 2025. Water, hygiene and waste management have improved since 2015, but sanitation and environmental cleaning remain stubborn weak spots. Only 59% of facilities met the basic standard for environmental cleaning, leaving patients and health workers exposed to entirely preventable risks. Quick, if you open the window right now, you can see two SDGs wave goodbye.
(WHO)

Bottom line

The future comes calling. There are many people around the world, smart people, who think climate change has really picked up speed over the last, say, two decades. Mother Earth apparently thinks the climate timeline is moving too slowly. And now, using the looming super El Niño, she hopes to push global temperatures up to levels scientists didn’t expect from the underlying warming trend. Researchers now believe there’s a 95% chance next year will be the hottest year ever recorded, with global temperatures potentially reaching 1.67–1.85°C above pre-industrial levels. We already have droughts, disasters, and wars all over the planet with the climate being what it is today. Can you imagine how it will be next September when you have to beat your kindly neighbour to death with a dried-up beetroot just so you can get a bottle of water to last you all winter?
(Earther)

Long reads

Just the one again. But a very good one. A wonderful analysis by Grist about a research paper on the future of infectious diseases. Yes, it is about climate change. And the rise of some diseases. And the rise of some others. And the rise of many more still. Basically, it is best to die. Because if disease won’t kill you, drought will.
(Grist)

We’re once again beginning with Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which is not yet showing any signs of slowing down. In fact, it is still gaining speed. At last count, authorities have reported 4,665 cases with 2,184 deaths. One of these deaths happened in a province that doesn’t have any reported cases yet because an infected person travelled there from another province. A new study says this outbreak was likely caused via transmission from animals while the speed at which it is spreading is sparking concerns of a mutation. Allaying some fears, the WHO said earlier reports that suggested the outbreak may have begun four months before being reported are untrue and it only started three months before the first report.

We don’t blame the Africa CDC for being off its acronym game for a while but, even if for only a while, they were back at it this week with WASTEWISE. Which stands for the Wastewater Molecular and Genomic Surveillance in African Megacities project, a partnership with the African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM) and the European Union to strengthen wastewater and environmental surveillance in DRC, Ethiopia, and Kenya.

In continuing geological devastation for the Andean region, barely six weeks after a brace of earthquakes struck Venezuela, Colombia too experienced a 7.4 magnitude earthquake earlier this week, its largest this millennium, that has already killed over 250 people with more than 300 still missing.

Over in Palestine, Israeli actions are getting so deplorable, even Reuters has started calling them out. Like this piece about “settlers” diverting water that would’ve irrigated Palestinian crops to fill up a pool instead. The UN says the “settler” siege of the West Bank is a new low as if there are no more depths that they will plumb. Another UN report says since the imaginary ceasefire began, the rate at which buildings in Gaza have naturally started getting destroyed has increased by 10%. And MSF says Israel is blocking the entry of healthcare supplies into Gaza. Pretty sure Israel thinks that is the moral thing to do.

For a long time, around the world, we’ve seen the benefits of childhood vaccinations. And the success stories are many. Whether it is the dramatic under-5 mortality decline over the EPI era in Bangladesh, the near-elimination of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis as major killers in countries with sustained DTP coverage, the near extinction of polio, the actual global eradication of smallpox. Till very recently, even the massive reductions in case numbers and mortality rates of measles, especially in the US. Over the past, let’s say ten years or so, there has been rampant misinfo and disinfo about vaccines, and lately it is US health authorities contributing to it the most. No surprise then that they decided to “overhaul” vaccine schedules over there, in an announcement accompanied by a whole lot of outright lies because that is what they definitely specialise in. Unless we missed vaccine doses that are as big as the size of a bottle of soda. But the US dispensation is all in on science. And so, they will no longer fund research on the health effects of public policy.

In Australia, bird flu has made its way to Tasmania as well, making it the sixth Australian state to be affected. So yeah, bird flu is all over Australia.

And finally, July 2026 was the second-hottest July of all time. The good news though is that it was also most likely the coolest July of the rest of your lives till a nuclear meltdown gets us all.

Stories Of The Week

Cold comfort. Usually, stories about trials are reserved for the Breakthroughs section in The Kable. But this story is not usual. Because it is about one of global health’s least glamorous and most stubborn bottlenecks, the cold chain. And news that might finally clear that bottleneck. Around half of vaccines are reportedly wasted globally each year, with temperature failures among the culprits; meanwhile, roughly one in five children in Africa remains unvaccinated.

A new tetanus-diphtheria vaccine formulation has now cleared its first human trial without refrigeration, staying stable for up to two years at 30°C while producing immune responses comparable to existing vaccines. The science is sugar, actually: trehalose, a sugar found in organisms that can survive extreme drying, including so-called “resurrection plants”. In the trial, the formulation used trehalose to stabilise the vaccine’s antigens, helping preserve their structure and potency when exposed to heat. Participants given the heat-stable formulation developed antibody responses comparable to those receiving the standard vaccine, an important early indication that taking the fridge out of the equation need not mean compromising the immune response.

This is definitely a solution for places where unreliable electricity, difficult roads and limited storage can turn perfectly good vaccines into expensive waste. You know, rural Africa, parts of urban conflict zones, other low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

It’s still early days. The next, larger trial will determine whether the promise survives contact with real-world deployment, particularly in places where temperatures routinely exceed 30°C. But if it does, fridge-free vaccines could do more than cut wastage and costs: they could expand the reach of routine immunisation, make outreach campaigns easier and strengthen health systems that currently spend an inordinate amount of effort simply keeping vaccines cold.
(eClinicalMedicine)

Bottom line

Who ate my greens? Parents all over the world through time eternal have been telling their children to finish their veggies before getting to their dessert. But parents of the future may no longer need to do that. Because there may be no veggies in the future. Partly because we’re eating, have been eating, too few veggies. And also because we’re eating too few kindsof veggies. A new analysis of vegetable biodiversity finds that industrial agriculture has steadily narrowed what reaches our plates, even as the world consumes around 40% fewer vegetables than recommended. That is bad news for nutrition, but also for climate resilience: as traditional varieties and wild relatives disappear, so do genes that could help crops tolerate heat, drought and other increasingly awkward features of the 21st century. And, of course, the problem is particularly acute in the Global South, where some of the vegetables being neglected may be precisely the ones that make most sense. African spider plant, for instance, is nutrient-dense and relatively climate-resilient, yet its genetic resources remain poorly conserved. Researchers say the answer is to grow more veggies and more different veggies and also eat them before we all run out of veggies.
(PNAS)

You’re gonna need a bigger boat. So you think marine heatwaves are a problem for coral reefs, fish and other things that, inconveniently, live in the sea? A new review in Nature Sustainability argues you should broaden the diagnosis: unusually warm oceans can intensify storms, fuel harmful algal blooms, reduce seafood supplies and disrupt livelihoods, with the damage eventually showing up in human health. And for coastal communities across Africa and other places where fisheries are tied closely to nutrition and income, that chain reaction is more than academic. Because what happens after the fish disappear or the coastline becomes harder make a living from? Food-safety risks from contaminated seafood, displacement and injury from stronger storms. And worse, anxiety, grief and depression among communities whose livelihoods and identities are tied to the ocean. And also, sharks. So many sharks.
(Nature Sustainability)

Long reads

Make, make, make in Africa. Only one piece here this week, a blog post from Unitaid that sets out to prove that medicines made in Africa are as effective as medicines made anywhere else. And for that, you need the capability to conduct studies on these medicines. And this post is about four Africa-based organisations that are developing those capabilities.
(Unitaid)

Let’s dive right into it with Ebola. The latest report from Democratic Republic of Congo’s public health institute shows the case count has topped 4,000 (standing at 4,053 as of August 5) with 1,850 deaths. This is now officially DRC’s largest Ebola outbreak ever, with it even having reached camps for internally displaced people. There were even concerns that it might find its way to capital Kinshasa. Authorities did intercept one boat carrying a suspected Ebola passenger, with passengers being asked to undergo testing. However, the outbreak is still expanding. Response is nowhere close to catching up. A large percentage of new infections are outside the known chain of contacts, and a large number of deaths are happening outside of treatment facilities. And as an expert says, malaria might have a role to play here too. Add to that the fact that health workers are overworked and have not been paid, which is guaranteed to make the response slower.

But hey, rose-tinted lenses, right? So, here goes. Moderna has launched human trials for its Bundibugyo vaccine, albeit in Canada. The WHO said preclinical data from the experimental trials it is conducting separately have also been encouraging. The Oxford vaccine, which is also in trials, already has over 600,000 doses ready to go, thanks to India’s Serum Institute. And finally, Africa CDC and CEPI have also compiled a list of institutions across Africa that are all systems go when it comes to Phase 1 trial readiness for Bundibugyo vaccines.

That’s a wrap on the Ebola news this week. But there are a lot of positive developments across Africa to cover this week.

In Nigeria, NAFDAC has tied up with the University of Oxford in a $5 million partnership to support the country’s vaccine surveillance system. The partnership is part of a three-year alliance in a consortium that also has Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) and the Thailand-based Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) among others.

In Kenya, the Ministry of Health has partnered with the Beginnings Fund to access funding worth $80 million to improve maternal and newborn health services across 21 counties in the country. Kenya also launched a centralised emergency ambulance network and a real-time incident management system.

Over in Tanzania, the government has upgraded what was till last month the Kibong’oto Infectious Diseases Hospital (KIDH) to the Tanzania Infectious Diseases Institute (TIDI). The institute, in Kilimanjaro Region, will now also serve as a research and training hub for current and future infectious diseases, hopefully in time across Africa.

Health Policy Watch has a brilliant, must-read piece on how the Covid lockdowns led to an explosion in meth use and HIV infections in Fiji.

Over in Palestine, the UN says Gaza is unsafe for civilians. Heh, they’re living right next to Israel. Of course, they aren’t safe. As if to prove their (and our) point, the UN says Israel has killed at least one child per day in the last 300 days of “ceasefire”. And these are just direct kills. Let us not even begin to count the children who die because they are born to malnourished mothers. Or the children who die because they have no access to medicines or healthcare. Or the children who die because they have no food or safe water. Apropos of nothing, the World Food Programme is ready and prepared to ramp up response in preparation for what promises to be a devastating El Niño this year. The WFP expects El Niño will push millions of people into acute hunger and it has a plan to feed them. Earlier this year, the WFP even proudly posted how they devised an alternate route for food supplies when the Strait of Hormuz was not accessible. Funny how they couldn’t find a way for food to make its way into Gaza when it was Israel doing the blockading.

We don’t really cover Big Pharma news in The Kable much anymore but a potential megamerger between AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb was worth covering. Except it turned out to be a damp squibb most likely.

Over at Pfizer, the company released an earnings report, and it has upped its “cost realignment plan” ambitions by $2.5 billion. Sure, there will be “optimisations” in many places but a lot of people across a lot of locations will be saying byezer. Meanwhile, this is what the C-suite is making. And it has gone up from last year. Because they need to be rewarded for a successful cost realignment implementation.

The World Bank has a new report out and it says LMICs now have a lifelife. And that lifeline is AI. The WB report also says LMICS are not prepared to take advantage of this amazing lifeline.

In a big surprise, the US has withheld its dues to the UN once again. Whoa, we didn’t see that coming.

Health Policy Watch is back at it again with an exclusive scoop: the (hopefully) final draft of the Pandemic Pact, alongwith all the reasons why it is unlikely to be agreed upon.

And finally, if you needed a reason for a Pandemic Pact, here, we’re still dealing with an ongoing one. This new study says Covid can wake up all those dormant viruses that have been sleeping in your body all this while. If you’ve been wondering why you’re hearing about so many shingles cases lately, this is why.

Stories Of The Week

The crisis that needn’t be. That there is a hunger crisis in Sudan is beyond question. The solution though might be within Sudan itself because the country has enough fertile land to feed millions. The problem is that the food often never reaches them. As conflict enters its fourth year, humanitarian agencies are increasingly confronting an uncomfortable reality: aid alone cannot keep pace with a crisis this large. A new UNDP initiative is betting that reviving agriculture and reconnecting local food systems may put food within reach of people cut off by war, something that food convoys increasingly cannot.

The strategy is less about growing more food than making existing production count. By supporting farmers with seeds, equipment and infrastructure, and restoring local supply chains, the programme aims to turn productive farming areas into lifelines for nearby communities.

Recent assessments from North, South and West Kordofan are even more proof, if proof were needed, for why this approach matters. Across the region, households report collapsing livelihoods, disrupted markets, reduced crop production and worsening malnutrition. Families are selling productive assets, skipping meals and relying on increasingly fragile coping mechanisms. In Darfur, the picture is even bleaker, with drought and spiralling food prices pushing parts of the region closer to famine despite Sudan’s broader agricultural potential.

The crisis doesn’t stop at empty plates. A worsening cholera outbreak in El-Obeid is exposing the knock-on effects of failing food systems, displacement and collapsing public services. Hunger weakens communities; disease exploits the gaps. Meanwhile, investigations alleging that more than US$100 million in stolen Sudanese gold was exported to the UAE underline another contradiction: valuable commodities continue to leave the country while food, medicines and humanitarian supplies struggle to move within it.

For years, Sudan’s food crisis has been framed as a shortage. Increasingly, it looks like a systems failure. Farms are still producing, but markets have fractured, transport routes have collapsed and insecurity has severed the link between harvests and households. If UNDP’s approach succeeds, it won’t end the war. But it could prove something just as important: in a country that can still grow enough food, rebuilding the path from farm to family may be as critical as the harvest itself.
(UNDP, REACH, REACH, REACH, Dabanga Sudan, PLAN, FT)

Duh! Research presented at the recent AIDS conference argues that income inequality is a stronger predictor of pandemic outcomes than conventional preparedness measures, with more unequal countries consistently faring worse during HIV and COVID-19 regardless of how highly they ranked on global health security indices. Governments can spend years investing in surveillance systems, stockpiles and emergency plans but all that preparedness counts for zilch if large parts of the population cannot afford to isolate, access healthcare, or trust public institutions.

All of these ifs hold especially true for Africa and other LMICs elsewhere, especially with shrinking aid budgets and mounting debt. The research says pandemic preparedness should extend beyond hospitals and laboratories to include social protection, fairer taxation, debt relief, local manufacturing of vaccines and medicines, and stronger community-led health systems. Because pathogens exploit biology but pandemics exploit inequality.
(UNAIDS)

Breakthroughs

Eat s*it and heal. A breakthrough, sure, but not that momentous. But that headline was too juicy (hehe) not to carry. Researchers say they may have finally found the cure for peanut allergies. Faecal microbiome transplantation (FMT). You know, poop pills. The catch? This was a tiny Phase I trial involving just 15 adults, and only six showed a meaningful increase in peanut tolerance over four months. Still, the results are intriguing. Participants who responded appeared to acquire gut bacteria that nudged their immune systems towards tolerating peanuts rather than attacking them, with bile acid metabolites emerging as a key part of the mechanism. Even allergy-prone mice given the microbiome from human responders gained protection. That’s a long way from replacing EpiPens or telling people to raid the peanut aisle, but it does strengthen the idea that food allergies may be treatable by fixing the gut ecosystem rather than retraining the immune system alone. The real story isn’t that peanut allergies have been cured. It’s that eating poop, even in pill form, almost certainly will make you more tolerant of peanuts. You might get a double dose otherwise.
(Science Translational Medicine)

Bottom line

Double-duh. Pretty much everybody other than the smartest people on the planet agree that Earth is heating up, and heating up fast. How fast though? Governments and corporations will tell you not too fast. But scientists have done science-y things and now they have a definite answer: way too fast. A new study analysing five independent global temperature datasets has found that global warming is no longer following the steady upward trend of our nice, cosy dreams but is accelerating. Which means the prospect of breaching the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C threshold before 2030 is real. Not that it matters because we’ve already breached it. There is no closing that Pandora’s box.

But still, the researchers say it is down to a combination of relentless greenhouse gas emissions, weakening natural carbon sinks and climate feedbacks that are amplifying warming beyond what short-term events like El Niño alone can explain. Buh-bye, health planning, food security, infrastructure investment. Hello, frequent heatwaves, crop failures, disease outbreaks and extreme weather. Oh, we promised you rose-tinted lenses, didn’t we? Here. 🌹👓
(Geophysical Research Letters)

Long reads

Not too many reads. Just a couple. Both from SADC’s investigative journalism hub, IJ Hub. One story from Malawi by PIJ Malawi about the legacy of the UK’s colonial rule which even today continues to extract blood, sweat, tears and taxes from the people of Malawi. And one by Inhlase from eSwatini about how the lack of a drug testing facility in the country means people are still paying for drugs that are later found to be spurious or expired or worse.
(PIJ Malawi, Inhlase)

Beginning, as we’ve been for two months now, with Congo and Ebola where the outbreak is already the second-largest Ebola outbreak, exceeding 1,000 deaths in less than a quarter of the time that the worst outbreak, in 2014-2016 in West Africa, took. At last count, the official tally from Congolese health authorities stood at 3360 cases, with 1487 deaths. Which was an increase of nearly 100 cases and exactly 50 deaths from a day before. The 2018-2020 outbreak was so far Congo’s worst outbreak with a little over 3,400 reported cases. At the rate at which this outbreak is growing, by the time you read this, we’re pretty certain that number will be left way behind. Unsurprisingly, a hunger crisis is exploding in eastern Congo too. Unfortunately, so is sexual violence. And, in what might answer how this outbreak grew so large so quickly, an analysis by on-ground researchers says the outbreak likely began at least four months before it was first reported. There are some positive developments, however. CEPI has partnered with Singapore’s Hilleman Laboratories to make doses of another experimental vaccine against the Bundibugyo virus. And over in Uganda, after 42 days of no new cases, they’ve declared the outbreak over.

Meanwhile, in spite of a court-ordered ban and public outcry, it seems Kenya has been quarantining Americans exposed to Ebola in Congo.

It’s been another busy week of it for the Africa CDC. Apart from leading the continental response to Ebola, the agency partnered with Population Services International (PSI) to expand access to immunisation and integrated primary healthcare services across Africa. One of the primary aims of this partnership is to further Pharmacy-Based Immunisation Delivery (PBID) models to expand access to vaccination and preventive health services through community-based platforms across Africa. The Africa CDC also released a strategy document on wastewater surveillance, which honestly is the best early-warning system any public health agency could ask for.

Speaking of Africa, the African Medicines Agency has been on a flurry of activity recently. Health Policy Watch got an interview with Dr Delese Mimi Darko, the Director General of the agency, to talk about how the agency will harmonise regulations across the continent, among other things.

In excellent news, AfDB signed a $15 million agreement with Biovac to expand their upcoming vaccine manufacturing plant in Cape Town. This deal will expand the plant’s capacity to 500 million doses annually, and we expect a large part of that to be allocated to cholera vaccines.

There are a few updates from the International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2026), held in Brazil this week. Let’s lead with the good news first. Merck-MSD has announced voluntary licensing agreements with seven manufacturers, including three from Africa, for an investigational once-monthly oral HIV PrEP candidate it is developing. The three African drugmakers are South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare, Universal Corporation from Kenya, and, of course, Quality Chemicals in Uganda. That was pretty much the only good news. The bad news is the continued lack of access to lenacapavir, (no) thanks to Gilead. Brazil, one of the countries where the drug was tested, still doesn’t have it, and they had things to say about it.

Brazil’s health regulator Anvisa separately approved ​five new injectable GLP-1 drugs for diabetes ‌and obesity treatment.

Elsewhere, the International Criminal Court (ICC) dismissed its chief prosecutor Karim Khan for sexual misconduct. Not at all because he issued, and was pursuing, arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and other war criminals.

In India, at a conference called the Global Drug Regulatory Conclave, Indian regulators said they’ve taken action against 90% of high-risk pharma facilities, in the wake of many incidents linked to spurious drugs made in India. At the same conference, India’s health minister said India is building a future-ready drug regulatory framework. And it will be powered by AI.

The US has finally unfrozen the $600 million funding to Gavi that it had frozen last year. But Gavi has still been asked to move away from vaccines that use thimerosal, because the US health department is now led by a flailing content creator.

In Australia, seven new cases of bird flu were reported in birds, followed by confirmation that it is now spreading in native species too.

And finally, can long Covid be prevented? We don’t yet know but a study with two drugs holds promise. One of the drugs is Paxlovid, and the other one, unsurprisingly, is metformin. Is there anything metformin isn’t useful for?

Stories Of The Week

Nothing compares to these blue and yellow green green pills. Pretty much all over the world, for products of all kinds, their carbon footprint has been making it to the news as much as their efficiency or lack thereof. With medicine, however, the carbon footprint has rarely made it onto the prescription label. There has been increasing talk in this space and now, regulators may start paying more attention. Because the WHO has launched the first global framework to help regulators support lower carbon pharmaceutical manufacturing without compromising quality, safety, efficacy or access.

Rather than rewriting the rulebook, the framework focuses on using existing regulatory levers – standards, scientific guidance, reliance pathways and digital tools – to accelerate greener technologies across the pharma lifecycle. Whether regulators move as quickly as the climate demands is another question. But the days when environmental performance sat outside medicines regulation are looking increasingly numbered.
(WHO)

Bottom line

The age of the mosquito. And honestly, when has it not been the age of the mosquito? Even during the Jurassic age, we’re pretty sure mosquitoes ruled. Can you even imagine a T-Rex trying to swat a mosquito, with those arms? Anyhoo, here is Nature with four charts showing how mosquitoes still rule. Malaria, dengue, mosquito migration, climate change are the charts. And mosquitoes are top of the pops on all of them.
(Nature)

Long reads

Planning ahead. After a series of COPs with all talk and no action, COP32 makes its way to Ethiopia next year. And this piece breaks down how Ethiopia can, for a change, make a COP summit meaningful. TL;DR: do all the work beforehand.
(The Conversation)

Waiter, there’s a drug in my water. Rivers and water systems in general around the world have become carriers of drug remnants, fuelling the global rise of antibiotic resistance. Things are no different in South Africa.
(The Conversation)

And finally, not strictly the kind of piece we would cover in The Kable. But this investigation by The Namibian about young Namibians recruited to become lovers on the internet is fascinating reading.
(The Namibian)

As has been the norm for the past several weeks, we begin with Ebola and an update from Congo where confirmed cases as of last reporting have reached 2,905 with 1,269 deaths. “If we do not stop this outbreak today, it could become one of the worst Ebola outbreaks the world has ever documented,” said Africa CDC Director-General Dr. Jean Kaseya. The outbreak, however, shows no signs of even slowing down, much less being controlled. Violence and medicine shortages continue to hamper the response as well, even as Congo’s neighbours amp up border control measures. Amid all this comes this new article in The Lancet with the discovery of a novel clade of the Bundibugyo virus. A teeny-tiny ray of sunshine comes from another study that says the existing Zaire ebolavirus vaccine could offer some protection in the current outbreak too. Not that other diseases have taken a backseat, mind. Congo recorded nearly 32,000 suspected cholera cases as well in the latest update from the Africa CDC.

In more news from Africa, the war in Sudan continues, with North Kordofan, El Obeid in particular, as the new epicentre. A drone attack in a market killed and injured many, including children, while the Sudanese Armed Forces were accused of using banned chemical weapons in an airstrike on Umm Garfa. To no one’s surprise, El Obeid is now Sudan’s nucleus for hunger and displacement.

Kenya is looking to launch a new biotech park, worth $216 million, to not only reduce reliance on imported medicines but also to make the country a regional manufacturing hub. Bahati njema, Kenya.

Heads of state, and health ministers, and other stakeholders gathered in Accra, Ghana for a two-day health summit - the Extraordinary Session of the AU Assembly - to end AIDS and TB by 2030. Neither is likely to happen but it is encouraging to see Africa come together and have a plan for a future that is not dependent on international aid, or imported medicines.

It was a busy week for the Africa CDC too, who released a framework for controlling AMR on the continent over the next five years, and another for ensuring food safety. The agency also released a toolkit for healthcare workers responding to Hepatitis B, with a companion mobile app as well. The Africa CDC also launched a call for applications for anybody interested in a 3-day residential training program in mRNA technologies at its HQ. Apply now, if that is you.

Just a short while ago, we were bemoaning the very little time that hantavirus got to occupy the limelight. But this week, it raised its head again, with three confirmed deaths being reported from Venezuela. Health authorities said these cases are not likely linked to the devastating twin earthquakes the country recently experienced.

Ebola, hantavirus, Covid (which is still around), bird flu... so many potential pandemics in the wings. Great that our leaders have agreed on a pandemic pact. Not exactly but like we said when the latest round of talks began, they’ve agreed on deferring an agreement to the next round of talks. This time though, we’re so close, really close, like, unbelievably close, to an actual agreement because now we have two pathogen sharing models to choose from.

The UN Security Council also met this week to discuss whether critical minerals can fuel peace and prosperity instead of conflict. Heh!

In Gaza, food security and child nutrition both remain critical, while settler-terrorists continue attacks on people and property. And in south Lebanon, people can’t find a way home. And the ones who do find a way, find that they no longer have a home. Hey, homes are Hezbollah.

Elsewhere, a new report from two late-stage trials exploring a once-weekly HIV pill, combining Merck’s islatravir and Gilead’s lenacapavir, suggested that this regimen kept the virus suppressed. And in even better news, long-term data from two trials with lenacapavir with thousands of people, showed that only one person actually contracted the disease. Gilead still won’t sell the drug to MPP though.

India got its first dengue vaccine, with regulatory approval for Takeda’s Qdenga, making it the 43rd country to approve this jab. Talking about India, USFDA censure over quality control and manufacturing issues, we’ve seen a lot of those. This week, Alembic Pharma was at the receiving end of the regulator’s ire for not seeking explicit consent from patients involved in a study. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life.

Over in the US, the world’s foremost expert on pulling numbers out of one’s sun-starved rear end decided to impose 100%, going up to 200%, tariffs on generic drug imports beginning 2027. The US is also determined to ensure that we don’t see the back of AIDS, because ideology. Apropos of nothing, PAHO also released a report saying two out of five people in the Americas live with a neurological disorder.

The WHO has launched seven strategies to prevent drowning. We’re guessing swim, and stay afloat, are two of those. One other might be don’t enter water.

In the UK, in continuation of a centuries-long pattern, a woman was taken to the hospital where staff thought she was overreacting and they gave her an oxygen mask, attached to nothing. She died of a pulmonary embolism not long after.

And finally, it is time for good news. And is often the case in The Kable, the good news is caffeinated. A new review says three to five cups of regular black coffee is generally safe and may even be linked to lower risks of heart disease, stroke, heart failure, and Type 2 diabetes. Personally speaking, this editor can vouch for this. Because we have not suffered a single stroke or heart failure in over 30 years of drinking coffee. Go on then, brew yourselves a cup. It is science, after all.

Stories Of The Week

The law of averages. Global hunger is falling for the third year running. Great news, unless you happen to live where hunger is increasingly concentrated. The latest UN figures show 645 million people experienced hunger in 2025, down from 659 million the previous year. But while Asia and Latin America are pulling the global average in the right direction, Africa has quietly inherited an unenviable title: the world’s hunger capital. More than 300 million people on the continent are undernourished, and nearly two-thirds of Africans still cannot afford a healthy diet.

It’s a reminder, if one were needed, that global averages can be spectacularly misleading. Progress in India, Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America masks a widening geographic divide, where conflict, climate shocks, debt pressures and soaring food import bills continue to squeeze African food systems. The challenge is no longer producing enough calories. Globally, we already do. The challenge is making nutritious food affordable and resilient to increasingly frequent shocks. And that’s a much harder problem to solve with emergency food aid alone.

The uncomfortable truth is that hunger is becoming less of a global crisis and more of an African one. Unless investment shifts from short-term relief to local agriculture, infrastructure and regional food systems, the world may well hit its hunger targets on paper while leaving the continent carrying an ever-larger share of the burden. Statistics, after all, are remarkably good at hiding where the pain actually lives.
(UN)

Use it, don’t abuse it. A new global analysis, published in The Lancet, found that almost every country is overusing WHO’s “Watch” antibiotics, the powerful medicines meant to be reserved for specific infections. Instead, they’re increasingly becoming the default, accelerating the very problem they were designed to prevent. Meanwhile, many lower-income countries still struggle to access basic first-line antibiotics, creating a dangerous double standard: overuse where restraint is needed, and scarcity where access is essential. And it is not down to any one factor. Weak diagnostics, over-the-counter sales, fragmented surveillance and under-resourced health systems mean clinicians often prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics because they have little else to go on. The result is a perfect breeding ground for antimicrobial resistance that doesn’t respect borders. Superbugs may be a global problem, but without stronger stewardship and better access to diagnostics, the next chapter of the AMR story will be written where health systems can least afford it.
(The Lancet Public Health)

A gift for our future. They say we don’t inherit the world but borrow it from future generations. It is apt then that antibiotic resistance in children is on the up. And getting worse. A global study analysing more than 106,000 samples from 82 countries found resistance rising across every region between 2004 and 2022, with dangerous pathogens such as Klebsiella and Acinetobacter baumannii becoming increasingly difficult to treat. Worse still, resistance to last-line antibiotics is projected to climb sharply by 2035, threatening to turn routine childhood infections into life-threatening illnesses.

Children have fewer antibiotic options than adults, yet they’ve largely been an afterthought in AMR surveillance and drug development. That’s a costly oversight. The bugs aren’t waiting for better paediatric formulations, more clinical trials or improved stewardship programmes. They’re evolving anyway. And unlike childhood, antimicrobial resistance is something we don’t simply grow out of.
(JAMA Pediatrics)

Disease in the water. Ah so you thought climate change is making the weather harder to predict and that’s it, eh? Well, it is also rewriting the rulebook for waterborne diseases because why the hell not! A new review warns that rising temperatures, floods and droughts could undo decades of progress against illnesses such as cholera and diarrhoea, particularly as shifting weather patterns make outbreaks more frequent, less predictable and harder to contain. The old assumptions about where and when these diseases emerge may no longer hold. Great news for quacks. Not so much for public health planners who already struggle to stay one step ahead. Investing in clean water and sanitation continues to remain essential (and we aren’t doing enough of that) but the study argues this needs to be paired with climate adaptation, better surveillance and more resilient health systems. Or, if you’re a believer, we could wait for the rapture or qayamat or pralaya and continue on our merry way till then.
(Nature Reviews Microbiology)

Boil and bubble. Who came up with the name El Niño? Sounds like such a cute, widdle thing. Not a name one would associate with large-scale destruction. But that is exactly what El Niño is promising this time around. Scientists are saying this could become the strongest El Niño in at least 150 years. Like we even know what happened 150 years ago. But we digress. Forecasts are that 2027 could be the hottest year ever recorded. And if the forecasts hold, it won’t be just broken temperature records. Crops will fail where they once thrived. Diseases will appear in places they didn’t before. Droughts, floods and wildfires will become less like disasters and more like seasons. Food prices, insurance costs and migration pressures will all follow. Climate change, even today, is often framed as tomorrow’s problem. Well, maybe El Niño circa 2026 is a time traveller from the future. All of the above was the good news though. The real danger is that this El Niño is unprecedented now but won’t in the future. Because every “once-in-a-century” event is already starting to sound like an annual record, simply waiting to be broken.
(Nature)

Breakthroughs

Old drugs, new tricks. The world’s antibiotic cupboard isn’t exactly overflowing, so perhaps it’s time we stopped throwing out the old ones. And, for a change, scientists have done useful research. They’ve shown that vancomycin – one of medicine’s last lines of defence – can be given a second life. Rather than inventing a brand-new antibiotic, they paired it with a small companion molecule that blocks a bacterial enzyme responsible for resistance, allowing the drug to do what it used to do best: kill bacteria. Considering that Big Pharma isn’t really breaking the bank chasing the next blockbuster antibiotic, one should be grateful maybe that researchers are building libraries of clever molecules that can restore the potency of existing drugs.
(Nature Communications)

Bottom line

A drain on the national wallet. Yes, we’re back to talking about climate change. Because India’s informal workforce is currently subsidising climate change by burning through roughly $78 billion in lost wages annually, roughly 2% of the national GDP. These workers, mostly migrants trapped in construction, brick-making, and agriculture, are losing up to 9% of their income because their bodies simply shut down in the sweltering conditions. The misery extends well beyond the workday, as many return to cramped, airless shelters that offer zero relief from the daytime furnace. With nearly a fifth of surveyed workers suffering from heat-induced kidney issues due to a lack of basic sanitation and hydration, the situation highlights a systemic failure to protect those doing the most physically demanding jobs. In a country like India, these numbers are still deceptive. Because these workers, this informal workforce, they’re the ones making all the buildings and the bridges and the tunnels and all the private and public infrastructure around the country. Right now, climate change is only accounting for 2% of national GDP bleed from them but if the country doesn’t make living conditions better for them, we might discover that all the castles we’ve built will come crumbling down around us.
(IIED)

The comeback kid. Just a few stories up, we spoke about how disease patterns are no longer what they once were. Here is proof by way of dengue which is enjoying a remarkable career resurgence thanks to climate change and chaotic urban planning, with warmer temperatures effectively turning previously safe zones into mosquito playgrounds. A systematic review of recent studies confirms that rising heat accelerates viral replication and extends the transmission season, allowing Aedes mosquitoes to thrive in highland and temperate regions that were once immune. This biological upgrade is compounded by unplanned urban sprawl, deforestation, and inadequate sanitation infrastructure, creating perfect breeding grounds in densely populated areas where residents have little control over their environment or health outcomes. The geographic expansion of the virus means that communities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are facing a dual threat of hotter weather and more aggressive disease vectors, often without the resources to implement effective early warning systems or vector control.
(PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases)

Woah, woah, woah! So many human illnesses in recent history can be attributed to animals. One would think this would’ve resulted in an increased budget for global animal health. But no, it is still being treated as an afterthought, receiving a mere fraction of a per cent of worldwide health spending. So what if it is the primary defence against pandemics and food insecurity. The latest report from the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) highlights that diseases wipe out over 20% of global animal production yearly, devastating livelihoods in developing nations where livestock are essential for survival. Yet, veterinary services remain critically underfunded, with many countries seeing declines in capacity just as outbreaks of avian influenza, foot-and-mouth disease, and screwworm fly threaten to spiral out of control. The report also has a nod to irony, saying that bringing every country’s veterinary system up to international standards would cost less than a tenth of one per cent of the economic losses incurred as a result of the Covid pandemic, which likely originated from animals. Without integrating animal health into broader economic and security strategies, the world remains dangerously exposed to the next spillover event. But hope can move mountains, right? Who needs robust surveillance then?
(WOAH)

Long reads

A legacy unsought. We have a fair few items in this section as well today. Beginning with this piece in The Conversation talking about how political violence impacts the lives of young Africans for many, many years. The young people surveyed for this piece are from Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. One dreads to think what a similar survey would present from respondents in Congo and Sudan.
(The Conversation)

Everything everywhere all at once. Another sobering read from The Conversation about the confluence of crises affecting the Greater Horn of Africa. Take your pick. Conflict. Climate change. Disease. Famine. Inflation. There is nothing that is off the table.
(The Conversation)

Gumming up the works. A brilliant exposé by The Reporters’ Collective on the loopholes that allow for a flourishing cannabis delivery business in India’s alternative medicine ecosystem.
(The Reporters’ Collective)

Tying ‘em up in knots. An investigation by Lighthouse Reports into Big Food and how much they care for public health around the world. Hint: Big Food cares about as much as Israel cares about people in Gaza.
(Lighthouse Reports)

And finally, speaking of Israel, a new report by Palestinian Feminist Collective traces Israel’s history of predatory, sexual violence. History that began in 1948.
(Palestinian Feminist Collective)

Maybe it is the speed of the outbreak, maybe it is the intensity. Or maybe it is the struggle to keep pace with it. Whatever the cause, though, health authorities in Congo aren’t as diligent with posting updated info as they were in the first month of the outbreak.

The latest info, via the country’s public health institute, says cases are now being reported from two new provinces, Haut-Uele and Tshopo, with total confirmed cases now standing at 2124, including 828 deaths. Contact tracing is still not at 100% and patient zero is still unidentified. Ebola hospitals are still being attacked, causing patients to run away and health workers to stay away. The WHO says the outbreak might actually be up to four times larger than reported numbers, thanks to gaps in contact tracing and reporting. The agency also reiterated Africa CDC’s message last week about the outbreak outpacing response, and about a shortfall in response funding. Complicating matters further is the fact that new infections are being reported from outside known and verifiable transmission chains and the fact that the virus has spread way beyond the original outbreak area. There are credible reasons to believe that the outbreak might be making its way to South Sudan. But not to the US because the US says Americans returning to their homes from DRC will have to quarantine elsewhere, whether they appear ill or not.

It’s not all bad news, however. 60+ days into the outbreak, CEPI has launched a Phase 1 vaccine trial with Oxford, based on the same platform Oxford used for its Covid vaccine. CEPI might yet achieve its 100 Days mission in the first real test of it. The WHO-backed EBO-PEP clinical trial to check post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) with obeldesivir was launched in Congo by the National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB). The Africa CDC launched an initiative to manage biosecurity in the outbreak response, something that doesn’t often get the importance it deserves.

And the best news from this outbreak, Uganda discharged its last patient and began the 42-day countdown to declare the outbreak over within its boundaries.

Elsewhere at the UN, officials said six schools in Palestine “remain inaccessible” while six more have been closed and ten have been abandoned due to “settler” attacks. In fact, Hamasthe UN went so far as to say “settler attacks have become a leading cause of Palestinian injuries in the West Bank, accounting for 55 per cent of all injuries in 2026. “

The mRNA patent lawsuits, they just keep on coming. Sanofi has joined the fray, filing separate lawsuits against Pfizer and Moderna because why not?

After taking aim at dengue last week, India’s Serum Institute has tied up with Gates MRI to potentially launch a once-in-a-hundred-years vaccine for TB.

In a bit of a surprise, Bavarian Nordic has actually entered into a partnership with a country from the global South, tying up with Brazil’s Eurofarma for a chikungunya vaccine.

New Zealand is coming to the bird flu party with reports of the first case in a native bird.

And finally, worried about ageing? Go to a concert, or a museum. Or better yet, watch a movie at the cinema. If you need a recommendation, here is the perfect one.

Stories Of The Week

A shot in the arm, but not for everyone. Global childhood immunisation coverage edged higher in 2025, marking a slow recovery from pandemic-era setbacks, but millions of children remain without protection against preventable diseases. According to the latest estimatesfrom the WHO and UNICEF, 90% of infants received at least one dose of the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP) vaccine, while 85% completed the recommended three-dose series, both up by one percentage point from 2024. However, 13.5 million children still received no routine vaccines during their first year of life, highlighting persistent gaps in access to essential healthcare.

While the number of “zero-dose” children fell by nearly 750,000 compared with the previous year, progress remains uneven. More than half of unvaccinated children live in countries affected by conflict, instability or humanitarian crises, where disrupted health systems continue to hamper immunisation efforts. At the same time, vaccine hesitancy and inequitable access remain significant barriers in many regions, contributing to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles (hello, freedumb) and diphtheria.

The gains, modest as they may be, are likely to be only temporary though. Because the real impact of all the recent funding cuts is only beginning to affect immunisation programmes worldwide. The data next year will probably be much grimmer. Looks like yet another SDG - SDG3 this time - that we’re unlikely to achieve. Oh well, misery sure loves company.
(UNICEF)

Gumroad. In Sudan, the conflict is increasingly being financed through an illicit trade in looted gold, gum arabic and other natural resources, according to a new UN report, which warns that armed groups are exploiting the country’s economic assets to sustain the conflict. The report describes a war economy built on smuggling, resource theft and the collapse of state institutions, allowing rival factions to generate revenue while deepening one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

The consequences are being felt far beyond the battlefield. There has been a fresh cholera outbreak, with thousands of suspected cases reported in recent weeks as conflict continues to disrupt healthcare, water supplies and sanitation services. Communities displaced by the fighting remain particularly vulnerable, with limited access to clean water and essential medical care.

Elsewhere, the UK announced that it is imposing sanctions on the “illicit gold networks fuelling Sudan’s war.” For a minute we thought that meant the UK would be imposing sanctions on the backers of the RSF. You. Aye. Eee. That would be expecting too much.
(UN, UN)

Bottom line

A lesson for the futurepresent. Climate shocks are placing growing pressure on South Africa’s food businesses, with extreme weather disrupting crop yields, supply chains and operating costs, according to new research, and the evidence of our own eyes. Small and medium-sized enterprises are among the hardest hit, facing challenges ranging from drought and flooding to power disruptions and volatile input prices. Yet many businesses continue to rely on short-term responses rather than long-term adaptation strategies.

The study argues that building resilience will require more than reacting to the next climate event. Businesses need better access to climate information, affordable finance, stronger infrastructure and closer collaboration across the food system to improve preparedness. Without greater investment in adaptation, climate-related disruptions are expected to become a recurring business risk rather than an occasional setback. And this is a learning that will increasingly be true for countries all over the globe.
(The Conversation)

Long reads

Lessons from Africa. A brilliant piece on Africa’s response to the ongoing Ebola outbreak and the lessons the world can learn on how to manage global health in the future.
(Nature)

From the river to the sea. Palestine has become the litmus test for most of the world today. And this searing essay in Equator Mag illustrates exactly why the western mind can’t cope, and why it needs to keep slandering Palestine to preserve its own delusion of moral rectitude.
(Equator)

War, water, women. We almost didn’t include this piece because Oxfam says it was published by their country office for the occupied Palestine territories. What crap! There is only Palestine. However, the report is essential reading, and it talks about how the ongoing Israeli genocide and the water blockading has made life especially daunting for women. Because even crises are gendered.
(Oxfam)

Ebola continues to remain the big story. But first, the possible Marburg outbreak in Uganda we mentioned last week... yup, there has been no further reporting on it. Even though the WHO chief mentioned in a statement last week that authorities in Uganda had notified the agency of a case, there is no such statement from Uganda itself. And considering that there is no follow-on statement from either the WHO or the Africa CDC, we guess it is kinda safe to say that Marburg is not looming right now.

Back to Ebola then. Uganda hasn’t reported any new cases but in DRC, the outbreak continues to gather steam. Cases rose significantly through the week, from 1,561 to 1,708, to 1,759, with over 600 deaths so far. Suspected cases have also been reported from a new province. The WHO said the outbreak is still spreading and the Africa CDC said the outbreak is moving way faster than the response. Amid all this, frontline health workers in DRC have been protesting against payment issues outside Ebola treatment centres.

Elsewhere, news that we missed earlier, South Sudan became one of the latest countries to sign up to the US’ America-first bilateral health deals. Now, we have been largely critical of these bilateral deals but in South Sudan’s case, we’ll make an exception, even if the deal won’t begin to make up for all the aid the country has lost.

From Sudan, Radio Dabanga brings an interview with the director of Lighthouse Reports, highlighting their new report that details the RSF training camps and supply routes in Libya that keep on stoking conflict in Sudan.

Over at the WHO, it was time to discuss the pandemic pact again. This meeting is the 7th time the Intergovernmental Working Group is meeting to discuss the same thing again and again over what we assume will be flakey-flaky croissants and delectable scones and hopefully bitter coffee. And we don’t need a crystal ball to predict that when the meeting concludes on July 17, they will release a statement that they’ve agreed to continue talking at the 8th such meeting in September.

DNDi has signed a licensing agreement with India’s Serum Institute for an in-development mAb for dengue. The deal will also see them take the candidate through Phase 3 trials in Malaysia, Thailand and Brazil.

The heatwave that roiled through western Europe recently saw nearly 4,000 excess deaths in France, Belgium and Netherlands while a preprint study claimed it might even be as high as 20,000. The WHO also told Europe to not sit back and take it easy just yet because more heat is en route. So what if June 2026 was the hottest June western Europe has ever seen?

Right. Back to disease updates then. Germany has reported a case of swine fever, Australia has reported bird flu in yet another state, and more worryingly, in a local seabird. At The Kable, we still believe if another pandemic were to hit the world, it will come on the wings of bird flu. This newly published paper where researchers discovered H5N1 in porcine tissue is just more grist for the mill. Oh, that’s just tissue, not something alive. Yeah, but it is happening with current strains. And pigs are where flu viruses of all kinds go to mix and mingle and mutate. And it is probably already happening in the real world. We’ve already seen seals and whales and bears and cats and dogs and various other animals contract bird flu. Hey, yolo!

And finally, since it is the brave new world of 2026 we’re living in, it is an AI announcement we’re ending with. A Sino-American biotech (techbio?) company Aureka has launched what it calls Open Drug Discovery Engine, or OpenDDE (so innovative) for short. The tool, according to them, will be the basis for the next generation of drug discovery. And they want researchers, startups, labs, and even MNCs to use it.

Before we dive into the stories of the week...

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Stories Of The Week

Tropic of Cancer. By 2050, if A global climate meltdown doesn’t kill us all or Bird flu doesn’t take us all, then Cancer will claim its rightful place in the limelight. Why? Because the WHO says by 2050, cancer could be diagnosed almost 35 million times a year. That’s up from 20.6 million in 2024. It is already killing close to 10 million people annually today. More than 26,000 a day, second only to heart disease on the world’s list of ways to die.

The real story, however, is in the survival numbers. A woman diagnosed with breast cancer in a wealthy country has an 87% chance of being alive five years later. A woman diagnosed in a low-income country has something closer to 42%. Fewer than one in three countries have bothered to fold cancer treatment into universal health coverage, which tells you roughly how seriously “universal” is being taken. Access to the WHO’s own list of 20 essential cancer medicines runs as low as 9% in poorer countries, against numbers in the 90s for rich ones.

Geographically, the load falls unevenly and not always where you’d expect. Asia carries over half the world’s cases and deaths, roughly proportionate to its population. Europe, however, has 9% of the world’s people, but 21% of cases and a fifth of deaths. Africa and much of Asia see fewer diagnoses but disproportionately more deaths, obviously because systems aren’t built to catch cancer early.

Then there is the part WHO’s own patient survey turned up, which is less about biology and more about what illness does to a household. Nearly half of patients surveyed reported financial hardship because of their diagnosis. Over half reported mental health strain. Caregivers, largely invisible in these figures, absorbed the unpaid labour and the isolation that comes with it, more or less everywhere.

But hey, it is not all doom and gloom. Tobacco use is falling. Eighty-two per cent of countries now have a national cancer control plan on paper, up from half in 2010. HPV vaccination is spreading. Not that it changes any of arithmetic above, but we gotta take a silver lining where we find it.
(WHO)

Bottom line

It’s official. El Niño is here, and it is developing fast. The WMO expects a strong event to take hold between July and September 2026, with ocean temperatures across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific running more than 2°C above normal in some monitored regions. The forecast models agree with unusual consistency, which is the sort of thing meteorologists say when they want you to actually pay attention.

The mechanics are familiar by now. Warmer Pacific waters reshuffle rainfall and pressure patterns worldwide, nudging the odds toward heatwaves, drought, and heavy rainfall depending on where you happen to live. Indonesia and Southeast Asia are looking at a drier monsoon season. East Africa may see a wetter rainy season from September through December, and possibly flooding, if the Indian Ocean Dipole develops alongside it as expected. The Indian subcontinent and much of Australia are pencilled in for below-normal rainfall.

But what gets lost in the meteorology prediction is that El Niño is, functionally, a public health event. Past ENSO cycles have tracked with spikes in heat stress, wildfire smoke exposure, vector-borne disease, and malnutrition tied to failed harvests, with the severity depending on how vulnerable the local population already is. None of that is coincidence, and none of it is confined to any one region’s problem to solve.

For the WMO, this isn’t a seasonal footnote. At least, we hope it isn’t. Because it’s prepping for an unprecedented mobilisation across the UN system, briefing humanitarian agencies and regional climate centres directly, saying early warning only helps if it arrives before the drought does. Regardless, the window for preparedness is narrowing in some regions already, which is a diplomat-speak for some governments are going to be planning water and energy rationing later than they should have.

And this fragility is not one El Niño is making. El Niño is simply exposing what we’ve caused, arriving as it does on top of a climate baseline that is already roughly 1.3 to 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels. This, combined with the natural cycle’s own temperature bump, typically around 0.2°C, is smaller than the warming already loaded into the system. Which means the countries with the thinnest health infrastructure and the least fiscal room to absorb a bad harvest are, once again, the ones being asked to prepare fastest for a problem they had the smallest hand in creating. Cue the violins.
(WMO)

Long reads

You scratch my back... There are many things the US has given the world. Collapsed democracies. Bombed out countries. Exploitation. A profits over people mentality. Arguably though, none of these are as insidious as that grand old American tradition of lobbying. The Examination takes a look at how lobbyists are opening doors for Big American Tobacco all over the world.
(The Examination)

Match made in heaven. There have been papers on the rise of antimicrobial resistance, and on the rise of microplastic pollution. And we’ve covered them in The Kable. We’ve even covered papers on how the two are increasingly intermingling. But here Mongabay lays bare in graphic detail how a marriage between microplastics and microbes is the perfect afterlife for AMR.
(Mongabay)

In Ebola news, the outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) shows no signs of abating. The latest update from the health ministry shows confirmed cases at 1,406 with 438 deaths. Worryingly, there is still a large number – over 17% – of untraced contacts. Cases have spread to two new provinces over the past week, with authorities banning gatherings as a means to curtail further spread. Experts, meanwhile, worry that we’ve not even begun to see the peak of the outbreak yet. In potential good news, WHO’s PARTNERS (Platform Adaptive Randomised Trial for New and Repurposed Filovirus TreatmentS) clinical trial – to test an antiviral drug and an antibody cocktail – has begun but in a secret location. The Africa CDC has asked for an urgent infusion of $18 million to help with research, trials and outbreak response. The WHO also added the first diagnostic test for the Bundibugyo virus to its Emergency Use Listing, a molecular RT-PCR assay that detects BDBV by identifying viral genetic material in blood samples.

In Uganda, no new Ebola cases have been recorded in over 10 days, but it looks like there may be an outbreak of Marburg brewing over there. There is a bit of conflicting information here and no official info available yet on either Africa CDC or WHO channels but reports say two cases have been notified to the WHO, with one death. Uganda has had five Marburg outbreaks before, most recently in 2017, when it contained the outbreak within one month. In this particular instance though, there is no confirmation even from Ugandan health authorities about any outbreak. Also, the one confirmed death is an 18-month-old child, who is very unlikely to be the index patient, if there were an outbreak.

Marburg or not, experts are worried about malaria in Congo because, with history as proof, more people die of malaria during an Ebola outbreak than of Ebola itself.

Speaking of dying, spare a thought for the poor Andes hantavirus which couldn’t even have a proper day out in the sun, failing to dominate headlines for even a fortnight. The WHO has now declared the outbreak so over.

Tanzania has become the newest African nation to sign up to the US’ America-first bilateral health deal. In the announcement, Tanzanian authorities proactively said the deal does not include specimen sharing, and that Tanzania and the US share priorities in, among other things, health and human development. Pity there is no readily available emoji for irony.

It wasn’t too long ago that Big Pharma and Big Tech were two distinct entities, each trying to extract everything they could while putting on a benevolent face. Lately, that distinction is increasingly blurry. Blurring it even further is Anthropic, who this week launched Claude Science, an AI tool to help drugmakers discover drugs.

And finally, the UN has its first global AI assessment out. The report, with the usual mealy-mouthed title, covers advances in AI, applications in science, health, education and agriculture, implications for economies, and the environment, among others, and the impact of AI on human rights, information, democracy, child safety, and a whole bunch of other factors. However, considering that this panel also includes someone who was part of the Israeli military’s Unit 8200, yeah, we aren’t taking anything this panel has to say about AI’s impact on anything human seriously.

Stories Of The Week

Not done with Ebola yet. Why? Because a new UNDP assessment says the ongoing outbreak is likely to push nearly one million additional people into poverty. Because it is not just the the immediate health toll that needs counting. The disease disrupts trade, closes borders, and destroys informal livelihoods, hitting women hardest as they dominate cross-border commerce and caregiving roles. Even if contained soon, which is not looking likely, the economic damage could exceed $1 billion in GDP losses for the DRC alone, wiping out tens of thousands of jobs and halting education and healthcare services. The ripple effects threaten to undo years of fragile development gains across neighbouring countries too.
(UNDP)

Hungry AF. Northern Nigeria is facing its worst hunger crisis in nearly a decade, driven by escalating conflict and severe cuts to humanitarian aid. Over 17 million people across nine states are now experiencing crisis-level food insecurity, with hundreds of thousands in Borno state alone facing catastrophic starvation. Insurgent attacks have spread beyond their traditional strongholds, displacing families, destroying farmland, and blocking aid routes. With funding shortfalls forcing agencies to slash assistance, millions of vulnerable people, particularly children, are left without life-saving nutrition support. The collapse of aid networks has triggered desperate coping mechanisms, including recruitment into armed groups and increased gender-based violence. Women and girls, as always, bear the brunt of the crisis, facing heightened risks of exploitation as resources vanish.
(WFP)

The SDGs? Who even believes in them anymore? If last week, it was SDG.7 on the brink, this week, we’re talking air pollution so SDG.3 and SDG.11 join in the fun too. Global progress on reducing air pollution hit a wall after 2020 and hasn’t moved since. While high-income nations have managed to lower fine particulate matter levels, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) continue to breathe dangerously polluted air. Roughly 6.5 billion people live in areas exceeding even the least strict safety guidelines, with the burden falling disproportionately on poorer regions. Asia shows some improvement, but Africa and parts of Western Asia remain stagnant, meaning billions are still exposed to toxins linked to heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and respiratory illnesses.

Indoor pollution remains a silent killer, with 2 billion people still relying on inefficient stoves and dirty fuels for cooking. Rural areas in low-income nations are seeing rising pollution levels, while urban centres slowly improve. The gap between those who can afford clean energy and those trapped by poverty keeps on widening. So those sci-fi movies where air quality was a marker of economic privilege aren’t too far from becoming reality, if they aren’t already. Without urgent policy shifts and investment in clean technologies for developing regions, these health disparities will only deepen. Oh. These health disparities will deepen.
(WHO)

Who’s a fun guy? Not me! Fungal infections, often dismissed as minor annoyances like athlete’s foot, are quietly killing millions and resisting treatment, yet they’ve been largely ignored by global health agendas. Heck, mortality stats for fungal diseases are comparable to major infectious diseases but they still have a disproportionately weak therapeutic pipeline. The neglect stems from a combination of underfunding and the misconception that fungi are less dangerous than bacteria or viruses. However, with agricultural chemicals and medical overuse driving resistance, deadly invasive fungal infections are becoming harder to treat. A new WHO blueprint aims to fix this oversight by addressing the rising threat of antifungal resistance and improving diagnosis, treatment, and surveillance. These diseases affect over 300 million people annually, hitting immunocompromised individuals hardest, but they rarely make it into national health plans or antimicrobial resistance strategies. The new plan calls for better stewardship of antifungals, expanded access to diagnostics, and integrated One Health approaches to curb environmental drivers of resistance. The new framework seeks to integrate fungal threats into broader public health monitoring, train healthcare workers, and support research into neglected pathogens. The question remains though: development costs are high. Commercial incentives are thin. Will Big Pharma step in? Wait, don’t answer that. Let us live in hope.
(WHO)

Breakthroughs

Did we just say fungus and hope? Well, well, well... A South African research team has turned a fungus harvested from compost into a potential game-changer for vaccine independence on the continent. By using this modified fungal platform, they can produce virus-like particles cheaply and quickly without the need for ultra-cold storage or expensive mammalian cell cultures. Early tests show promise for both livestock diseases like Rift Valley Fever and human vaccines, including one tailored to HPV strains prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. The goal is to shift Africa from being a mere packaging hub for imported medicines to a centre of genuine design and manufacturing, potentially dropping costs to around a dollar per dose.

This approach tackles two major hurdles: cost and infrastructure. Traditional vaccine development requires millions of dollars and specialised facilities that LMICs lack. This fungal method uses basic fermentation techniques available locally and produces doses stable at standard refrigerator temperatures, easing distribution in remote areas. Sure, regulatory and funding challenges lie ahead but this is pure innovation, and one that could lead the path that Africa has been seeking toward sovereign health security.
(Gavi)

Bottom line

That ocean, it’s so hot right now. Global sea surface temperatures have officially smashed the record set in 2024, pushing Earth into what scientists are generously calling “uncharted territory.” We’ve mentioned previously that we aren’t betting people. But to borrow a metaphor, this ocean warming is a perfect storm of human-driven climate change loading the dice and a strong El Niño rolling them. The oceans, having absorbed 90% of excess heat from global warming over the last century, are now so primed that a natural weather cycle easily tips them into new highs. Experts warn this isn’t a blip but likely the start of a sustained era of extreme warmth, setting the stage for 2026 and 2027 to dethrone previous hot years while fueling stronger storms, faster ice melt, and more chaotic weather patterns worldwide.

And yes, you know how the story goes. Warmer waters mean more energy for hurricanes, increased evaporation leading to heavier rainfall and flooding, and accelerated marine heatwaves that devastate ecosystems. What used to be a once-in-lifetime kinda record is rapidly becoming/has become the new baseline. The window for preventing further escalation theoretically exists but it is a really narrow window. If you live on the coast anywhere, brace for impact.
(Copernicus)

Long reads

The long road ahead. Making its entry for the first time in The Kable, Semafor Africa talks about the challenge ahead for Africa’s vaccine sovereignty goal. And it may not be the most obvious one(s).
(Semafor)

And the truth there is that Ebola is on a non-stop rampage. Confirmed cases in DRC have crossed 1000, with the latest report from Congolese health authorities pegging it at 1,155 cases, including 304 deaths. 37 new cases and ‌five ⁠new deaths just 24 hours after the previous update. No new cases have been reported from Uganda or anywhere else in Africa but France did report its first case in a doctor who returned from DRC, after having arrived as part of a humanitarian mission and spending one month in Ituri. Now ordinarily, we salute people who perform humanitarian service, especially when done truly altruistically. However, this doctor boarded a commercial flight to France when symptomatic - almost asymptomatic, according to authorities, which we believe is French for bullshit. So now, not only is this one doctor diagnosed, everybody else on that flight needs to be traced and monitored and potentially their contacts too. Très bien. Anyhoo, after this case was reported in France, authorities in DRC have tightened domestic and international travel rules.

In other Ebola news, the Africa CDC said the earlier $518 million estimate it had worked out with the WHO may not be enough to combat this outbreak. The agency’s new estimate is $1.4 billion. However, at the rate this outbreak is spreading, combined with the slow rate at which pledged funding is actually coming in, we’re pretty confident that number may not be enough either. In Kenya, the government said it is pausing a planned facility to quarantine Americans exposed to Ebola. The WHO said it is deploying antivirals from Mapp and Gilead in a trial to see if either drug can reduce mortality in patients, either used individually or in combination. The drugs are coming, thanks to donations from the US and Gilead, surprising on both counts. Elsewhere, UNICEF and Gavi too have launched a joint call, asking manufacturers to pitch in for accelerated access vaccines for Bundibugyo.

With all of this happening in the Ebola front, one would think the world wouldn’t have space for much more disastrous at the same time, right? Well, on Wednesday, two earthquakes - first, a magnitude 7.1 one, followed barely 40 seconds later by a magnitude 7.5 one, devastated Venezuela. On the same day, there were two other “lesser” quakes - a magnitude 5.6 one in California, and a magnitude 6.9 one in Japan. But let’s stick with Venezuela because this was the strongest earthquake in over 125 years. Early estimates are at 235 lives lost, with more than 40,000 people still missing.

In Sudan, roughly around 8 months ago, the RSF took control of El Fasher, and the world was silent witness to everything that unfolded after. Ethnic cleansing, mass executions, forced displacement. Now, all of that history is looking very likely to be repeated in El Obeid, and once again, we will all bear silent witness.

A teeny-tiny bit of sunshine: at a UN meeting on HIV/AIDS earlier this week, countries were able to adopt a declaration to end AIDS as a menace to public health by 2030. Sure, it is just symbolic, and we are not gonna make AIDS less of a threat in four years. But it is good nevertheless to know that multilateral agencies can still get countries to pull together for a common cause, even in the face of the usual dissenters like the US, Israel, Russia, and five others and 14 abstentions.

In Australia, a second state has reported a case of bird flu, resulting in increased testing.

In France though, it is not bird flu but heat that is killing poultry by the hundreds of thousands. And people by the dozens. All as part of the heat wave roiling Europe. No ordinary heatwave this. France has already twice broken its record for hottest June day ever. In Switzerland, older people are flocking to movie halls to beat the heat. In the UK, they had to cancel a conference on climate change, because of climate change. Maybe Europe will now push to join the climate vulnerable countries list and maybe even support their push for a global funding framework.

One of the lesser-talked about facets of colonisation is how the English especially criminalised and taboofied any form of alternate sexuality in all the places they invaded in their quest for salt, spice, flavour and riches. And now, after a few decades of pretend-progressiveness, the UK government is back to its frigging friggishness, this week in the form of an act criminalising gender and sexuality conversion therapies.

In the US, not too long ago, all the establishment figures were talking about how they will no longer be subject to the tyranny of vaccines. Their “Secretary Of War” went on to make vaccines optional for military cadets because ‘Murrica wipes the floor with flu. Earlier this week, the flu shot was made mandatory for all recruits, thanks to a flu outbreak at a camp that, at last count, left at least 300 cadets wiping the floor, after possibly leaving all kinds of snot and snivel on it.

Was a time when techbros was a term exclusively reserved for one gender. Can’t say that anymore. Regardless of gender, what hasn’t changed is the obsession anybody that identifies as a techbro has with saving the world. OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Bill Gates are joining hands to pool $500 million into a new venture which wants to prevent the flu, and one day eliminate all respiratory viruses. They’ve even already got all their acronyms in a row. Because all we needed was new air cleaning technologies to end respiratory viruses. Especially with money from industries already known to pollute air and water.

There was another announcement about fighting respiratory viruses on the same day, this time from the UK-based, fake-sounding but very real, Advanced Research + Invention Agency. This announcement actually has the legs to maybe effect some real change.

And finally, the US has been leaving no stone unturned in rolling back protections for endangered species on air, land, and water. But, at least, it is working with a “deextinction” company to create a vault of genetic material from endangered and threatened species so that in 10,000 years, we can revive the dugong.

Stories Of The Week

War, and it’s always women’s bodies on the line. A new UN human rights report sets out the scale and brutality of conflict-related sexual violence in Sudan since the war began in April 2023. Investigators verified 546 incidents across sixteen of the country’s eighteen states, affecting at least 838 victims, all but fifteen of whom were women and girls. The report is explicit that these figures represent only a fraction of the true total, with stigma, displacement and the collapse of services leaving most cases undocumented. The violence has spread along the same routes as the conflict and the mass displacement it has caused, and has been used consistently to terrorise civilian populations.

The catalogue of abuses is extensive: rape and gang rape, sexual slavery, forced marriage, forced prostitution, sexual torture and trafficking. Almost a quarter of verified incidents involved gang rape, and in one case at least ten men raped a single girl. At least eighty-five women and girls were held in sexual slavery and forced into domestic labour or income generation. Most incidents were attributed to fighters in RSF uniforms, affiliated fighters and allied militias, though the national armed forces and other armed movements were also implicated. At least thirteen victims died, mostly following gang rape, and the youngest among them was nine years old.

The report identifies a clear ethnic dimension, with many Masalit victims from West Darfur reporting that attackers asked about their tribe before assaulting them. The UN finds reasonable grounds to believe that some of these acts, committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack on civilians, “may” (quotes ours) amount to crimes against humanity. It warns that without justice, victim-centred responses and serious efforts to address stigma, the prospects for peace and social cohesion in Sudan will be undermined for years to come, and it calls for independent investigations and accountability extending to those who held command responsibility.
(UN)

Target the kids. An independent UN commission of inquiry has concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children, amounting to genocide and atrocity crimes in Gaza and war crimes in the occupied West Bank. The finding builds on the commission’s earlier determination that genocide had been committed against the Palestinian population in Gaza, and states that the scale and systematic character of military operations have continued to produce death, injury and trauma among children. The report covers the period since late 2023, when an attack on Israel killed around 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage, followed by a war that has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians in the territory.

The commission reports that 20,000 children have been killed and a further 44,000 injured since October 2023. It documents children arrested and subjected to torture and other mistreatment in Israeli detention, with families left without information about their whereabouts, alongside the use of sexual violence against children. It points to the targeting of neonatal and maternity care, the destruction of schools and orphanages, and a blockade-driven starvation that has directly caused deaths. The commission stresses that the harm is not confined to those physically wounded, describing lasting and intergenerational psychological damage and a childhood that has, in its assessment, been erased.

The killing has not stopped under the “ceasefire” announced in October 2025. UNICEF reports that 265 Palestinian children have been killed in the eight months since, an average of one child a day during a period supposedly defined by restraint, with the children dying in their homes, in schools, and while playing football or fishing rather than in any battlefield. They were shot, bombed and struck by quadcopters, and the agency attributes more than 90% of these deaths to Israeli forces, citing shifting boundaries of occupation and a near-total absence of accountability. The child deaths form part of nearly 1,000 Palestinians killed and more than 3,100 injured since the ceasefire began. Conditions for survivors remain dire: no hospital in Gaza is fully operational, clean water is a daily uncertainty for 1.1 million children, nearly 1.9 million people have been displaced, and more than 770,000 children are experiencing heightened distress. Israeli authorities continue to block the spare parts and fuel needed to keep generators and water systems running.

The commission frames the targeting of children as an assault on the Palestinian people’s capacity to exist and to determine their own future, tying the survival and protection of children to the right of self-determination. It calls for an end to the violations, for Israel to end its presence in the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem in line with the International Court of Justice advisory opinion, and for member states to uphold their legal obligations and prioritise accountability and access to justice. Heh.
(UN, UN)

Energy, energy, energy. Yet another SDG tracking report. Yet another shortfall. This time, it is with SDG 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. The latest Tracking SDG 7 report finds that 655 million people worldwide still lack access to electricity, while around two billion continue to rely on polluting fuels for cooking. Sub-Saharan Africa carries a wildly disproportionate share of both deficits, with over 560 million people there living without electricity and roughly 970 million without clean cooking. Most regions are now close to universal access, but progress in Sub-Saharan Africa has slowed to the point where the pace of electrification would need to triple to hit the 2030 target. The rural electricity deficit in the region has actually grown since 2010, which is a striking direction of travel for a goal the world has formally committed to meeting.

However, unlike most recent reports, this report is not unrelievedly grim. Renewables now supply more than 30% of global electricity consumption, generating capacity has reached record levels, and off-grid solar and mini-grids are already serving hundreds of millions of people as a cost-effective route to access. The trouble is distribution. Generating capacity in low-income countries sits at 33.6 watts per person against 1,224 watts per person in high-income countries, a roughly thirty-sevenfold gap that rather punctures any narrative of shared progress. Affordability is the recurring obstacle, with many households unable to meet connection fees or wiring costs even where infrastructure exists.

Financing tells its own story. International public flows for clean energy to the poorest countries fell by 11% in a single year, and around 80% of what does arrive comes as debt, loaded onto economies already straining under the cost of borrowing. Clean cooking remains the largest gap of all, affecting a quarter of humanity and linked to roughly three million deaths a year from household air pollution, a burden that falls hardest on displaced populations and on the women and girls who spend their hours gathering fuel. The custodian agencies warn that on current trajectories the world will (surprise, surprise) miss this SDG entirely, and that closing the gap will require political will and grant-based support aimed squarely at the communities most at risk of being left behind.
(WHO)

Bottlenecks? What are bottlenecks? Many places around the world, historically and even today, are dealing with drug shortages leaving people resorting to shady marketplaces and alternative treatments for their various ailments. And then, there is this growth industry. The UN’s World Drug Report 2026 finds that traffickers are exploiting new technology and a generally unstable world to roll out novel products, test fresh routes and muscle into markets that were previously left alone. An estimated 331 million people used a drug in 2024, around 6.2% of the working-age population, up from 5.2% a decade earlier. Cannabis remains the runaway leader with 256 million users, trailed by opioids, amphetamines, cocaine and ecstasy. Innovation, that prized quality of legitimate enterprise, is flourishing here too: five times as many drug types turned up in seizures in 2024 as before 2000, and 755 new psychoactive substances were circulating, 118 of them appearing for the first time.

The product lines are shifting in revealing ways. Afghanistan’s 2022 opium ban has throttled plant-based supply, and the increases in Myanmar, Laos and Mexico have not made up the difference, so traffickers are pivoting towards synthetic opioids such as fentanyls and nitazenes, a turn that could permanently reshape the market and the harms that come with it. Methamphetamine has gone fully global, with seizures rising 13% a year on average and new footholds in the Middle East, Africa, parts of Europe and the Pacific Islands; the collapse of the captagon trade after the fall of the Assad regime appears to be nudging West Asian users towards meth instead. Cocaine production has more than quadrupled over ten years to beyond 4,000 tonnes in pure form, and supply may soon outpace even the expanding demand, which is precisely why the cartels are working so hard to open new customer bases in Africa and Asia. Cannabis use has climbed 40% in a decade, helped along by softening perceptions as legalisation spreads, with North America increasingly exporting to the rest of the world.
(UNODC)

Breakthroughs

Dirt strikes back. Good news, and for once it is not buried in a continent-sized caveat. A common soil bacterium has been hiding a whole pharmacy in plain sight. Researchers have found a so-called megacluster of genes in Streptomyces, one of the most studied bugs on the planet, that churns out five compounds at once, four antibiotics and a helper protein, all ganging up on different stages of the same essential metabolic pathway that bacteria need to grow. The pathway in question is the production of biotin, otherwise known as vitamin B7, which it turns out superbugs cannot live without. And because evolution spent who knows how many millennia perfecting this multi-pronged assault, the chemistry is already optimised, free of charge. The cherry on top is that hitting four targets in one pathway makes it fiendishly difficult for bacteria to wriggle out via resistance, which is rather the whole point given that drug-resistant infections are forecast to kill some 39 million people between 2025 and 2050.

The team confirmed the find by cloning a 65,808-base-pair stretch of DNA containing the whole cluster and dropping it into a lab strain to watch it work, then spotting the same arrangement conserved across several Streptomyces species, which suggests nature has been quietly running this combination therapy for ages while the pharmaceutical industry wrings its hands over why new antibiotics are so unprofitable. It is, frankly, a little humbling that the answer to one of medicine’s most expensive and intractable problems may have been sitting under everyone’s feet, in the same genus that gave us streptomycin and the first real weapon against tuberculosis. There is the usual long road from petri dish to pharmacy, naturally, and nobody should start celebrating the death of the superbug just yet. But after a run of stories where the microbes are winning, it is genuinely cheering to report that the dirt has been keeping an ace up (down?) its sleeve (hole?), and that someone finally thought to look.
(Nature)

Bottom line

Setting the sky on fire. There is a special kind of genius in importing expensive gas to keep the lights on while simultaneously burning off vast quantities of the stuff at your own oilfields, and in 2025 the world managed it with real conviction. Global gas flaring rose for the third year in a row to 167 billion cubic metres, torching an estimated $54 billion worth of energy into the sky for no purpose whatsoever. To put the scale in perspective, that is nearly the entirety of Africa’s annual gas consumption and more than the LNG passing through the Persian Gulf in a year, set alight and waved goodbye to. Nine countries, including Russia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria and the United States, are responsible for over four-fifths of the bonfire while pumping nearly half the world’s oil, which is at least a tidy correlation between producing the most and wasting the most.

The report shared by the World Bank is at pains to point out that the technology, policies, regulations and financing to capture this gas all exist and have done for years; what is missing is the will to bother. Ending routine flaring everywhere would cost somewhere between $70 and $100 billion, which is less than twice the value of the gas being wasted annually, making it one of the rare problems that pays for itself if anyone deigns to act. And action works when it happens: Kazakhstan has cut its flaring by 87% since 2012, including a further 16% in a single year, which rather demolishes the excuse that this is all too difficult. The rest is structural inertia, poor regulation and operators who simply do not treat the waste as their problem, with the bill, as ever, landing on the millions left short of reliable power while the flames keep climbing. Well.
(World Bank)

Long reads

The violence of climate change. How does climate change lead to an increase in FGM, you ask? The Conversation is here to answer that very question. One of those stories, which, once you’ve read them, you wonder how it could ever have been any other way.
(The Conversation)

The mosquito migration. Gavi has a piece on the recent malaria outbreaks across Africa. Turns out the mosquito involved made its way from South Asia.
(Gavi)

Let’s hop right in then. Beginning of course with Ebola which shows no signs of slowing down. The most recent update from authorities in DRC had confirmed cases pegged at 837, with 196 deaths. The silver lining here is that the same bulletin says 49 people have also recovered in the current outbreak. However, as the Africa CDC pointed out in an interaction with Al Jazeera, contact tracing is a huge issue, with more than 85% of active contacts not being followed up on. In Uganda, the outbreak hasn’t assumed worrying proportions (yet) with no new cases in 10 days, and total cases holding steady at 19, including 10 recoveries. The Africa CDC also said this Ebola outbreak might be the worst ever, and at the four-week mark, this outbreak is actually three times bigger than the previous largest outbreak. Financial support, at least in the form of pledges, is still rolling in, $910 million from a slew of donors at an AU meeting being the latest. The EU has committed to over $500 million in aid, including treatments. The US is allotting $107 million in emergency funding, but this covers both its domestic response and whatever they do in DRC. In a bit of a surprise, the US also committed $50 million to CEPI to fasttrack a vaccine, whenever available, into clinical trials.

In other news, the Africa CDC was accredited as an implementing agency by the Pandemic Fund, wonderful news for the continent’s health sovereignty agenda. In more good news, Egypt became the first African Union state to sign up to the African Pooled Procurement Mechanism (APPM).

ECOWAS’ recently launched West African Health Organisation (WAHO) received $14.26 million from the African Development Fund to improve health systems across Benin, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Togo.

In India, for no reason whatsoever, authorities have now decided that cough syrups can only be sold by pharmacies.

There was also a UN Security Council meeting to discuss Gaza this week but we’re not really bothering with summarising anything that comes out of that toothless body. Not when Israel is doing what it’s doing on the beach at Khan Younis, in Gaza city, or across Lebanon. A council that includes Israel should not have security in its name.

And finally, a two-year-long investigation by the MSF into the actions of its own staff in Chad who sexually exploited and abused Sudanese refugees, women and children, resulted in 16 MSF staff members being dismissed. Which is good but not enough. They need to be named in public so they never again get access to positions where they can take advantage of people who’re already in desperate straits. How low do you have to be to abuse people who’re escaping strife with whatever they can, reposing their trust in people who’re supposed to help them? How is the MSF okay with being so quiet about it themselves? Just one short note on their website? They are the ones who should be making a bigger noise about it, especially considering this is not the first time this is happening with them. Each time something similar has been reported with MSF, their own statements say the number of cases of abuse is likely an understatement. Yet, they can’t seem to change the system that enables this abuse.

Stories Of The Week

Too good to be true. UNICEF has released a new report - The Children’s Climate Risk Report 2026 - and honestly, without even reading the report, we could have predicted most of what it said. But read it, we did. And almost every one of the 2.3 billion children alive is now exposed to at least one climate hazard, around 1.1 billion are juggling three or more at once, and a few million have managed to collect as many as six, and UNICEF can now tell you almost exactly where each of them lives. How? Because the mapping tech has improved oh so much. And that has shown us that the picture is way, way worse than we thought. Heatwave exposure has jumped from the 820 million children estimated in 2021 to 1.5 billion, and the number breathing air that breaches safe limits has climbed from one billion to 2.3 billion. Some of that jump is obviously a warming planet. Some is possibly also down how little anyone bothered to measure before.

Like a movie we saw recently where multiple disasters strike almost simultaneously, the hazards in this case too do not arrive politely, one at a time. Drought pairs with extreme heat and heatwaves to afflict an estimated 296 million children, a loop that manufactures malnutrition, thirst and heat illness with every turn, and the rate at which these extremes overlap rose by 69% in the decade to 2021. The burden is distributed with the usual care. Children across the Sahel breathe wind-blown dust that carries meningitis through a belt already recording the world’s highest rates of it; every child in the two dozen small island states sits one storm away from losing their health system overnight; and roughly nine in ten air-pollution deaths occur in the low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) that did least to warm the atmosphere. Climate shocks uprooted the equivalent of 21,000 children a day between 2016 and 2023. Italy, where six million children also swelter, is offered up as cheerful proof that adaptation spending works, which rather gives the game away about what actually decides whether a hot day becomes a catastrophe.

Oh but it is so expensive! Who can even fight nature? Well, the UNICEF report actually says the economics are not in dispute. Every dollar spent adapting essential services for children is reckoned to return more than ten times over a decade, while the schooling that climate disruption wiped out for 242 million students in a single year could cost them up to $11 trillion in lifetime earnings. Against this, developing countries need somewhere between $310 billion and $365 billion a year for adaptation by 2035; in 2023 they received $26 billion in international public finance, a shortfall of twelve to fourteen times. The response from COP30 was to agree to triple the adaptation target to $120 billion a year by 2035, an act of ambition slightly undercut by the fact that the previous, smaller target of $40 billion had yet to be met.

But that has always been the way. Miss a goal. Then announce a larger one. Then move it further away. And so on till the kids are all grown up or dead.
(UNICEF)

We won’t let climate kill our kids. Because we’ll do it first, in large part aided and abetted by our governments. For the past three decades, the UN has been counting the grave violations committed against children in war, and 2025 was the year it had to report the worst figures of the lot: 38,558 violations verified against 24,174 children, the highest tally since the monitoring began, with girls making up a third of the victims. For the first time, it was not the rebels and militias but national armies and government forces who led the field, particularly in killing and maiming children, bombing their schools and hospitals, and blocking the aid meant to keep them alive. These are, of course, the same states formally entrusted with protecting children in the first place, which the UN noted points to a deeper erosion of respect for international law. International law. Two words that have increasingly meant less and less over the past decades and centuries even!

But let’s stick to the UN report because the breakdown there is more like a catalogue of everything the laws of war were written to prevent. Killing and maiming stayed the most-verified category, with 6,266 children dead and 7,958 maimed, the former up 34% in a single year; denial of humanitarian access ran to 8,322 incidents; 6,607 children were recruited into hostilities and 5,129 abducted, frequently for that purpose or for sexual violence, with gang rape increasingly deployed as a deliberate tactic. The worst settings were Palestine, obviously, the DRC, again obviously, Nigeria, Myanmar and Somalia, and the report flags the growing use of artificial intelligence in deciding whom to target, so the future at least promises to be efficient about it.

There were, however, some bright spots. Over 13,112 children were pulled out of armed groups and given reintegration support, and around 40 fresh commitments to do better were extracted from warring parties, commitments whose track record is rather summed up by the document they appear in.
(UN)

Let them have bread at least! Hah, not a chance. The FAO and the World Food Programme have produced their twice-yearly forecast of where mass starvation will arrive next. Not much has changed since the last such forecast. Thirteen countries are flagged as hunger hotspots for June to November, with Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen and Palestine at the top, and northeast Nigeria and Somalia newly promoted to the highest tier on the strength of populations now staring at the technical category called Catastrophe, defined with bureaucratic precision as starvation, death and destitution. Sudan alone has 19.5 million people, two in five of its population, at crisis levels or worse, with a famine risk identified across fourteen areas and the number facing outright Catastrophe projected to climb to 200,000. The number of people facing severe acute food insecurity across these countries has risen to around 266 million, while funding for food, agricultural and nutrition assistance has fallen by an estimated 59% between 2022 and 2025, dropping back to levels last seen nearly a decade ago. Conflict drives twelve of the thirteen emergencies, which is to say almost all of this hunger is being manufactured deliberately, and the agencies helpfully add a forecast El Niño on top, in case the wars were not delivering on their own. Boy, where’s a cheeseburger when you really, really need one?
(WFP)

Breakthroughs

Hope on the horizon? Did you notice hantavirus has completely receded into nothingness almost as if it never existed? Except maybe for that one quarantining American who is being kept in confinement by their “health” secretary against medical opinion. Not everybody else has forgotten hantavirus though, thankfully. Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch have published findings in The Lancet showing that a single dose of an experimental mRNA vaccine gave animals complete protection against Andes hantavirus. Yup, the same one from the cruise ship. The new candidate triggered detectable antibodies within 14 days and held its protection even at a fraction of the standard dose. Researchers also suggest the speed of the immune response could open a post-exposure window, theoretically allowing the vaccine to intercept the virus in people already exposed but not yet symptomatic. It remains preclinical and human trials are the next step but progress is progress, yaar.
(The Lancet)

Bottom line

Teach a man to fish... and he will deplete the sea. But the world did eat more fish in 2024 than ever before, with FAO logging a record 188.2 million tonnes of fisheries and aquaculture production, and per capita consumption at an all-time high of 20.7 kilograms a year. And for the first time, farmed fish has overtaken the wild-caught kind for human consumption, with aquaculture alone hitting 103.3 million tonnes. The report - The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2026 - says this is a turning point for global food systems, and in fairness it is a genuinely useful source of protein and omega-3s for poorer coastal populations, supporting the livelihoods of roughly 600 million people. It is also the fact that we have caught so many wild fish that we now have to grow our own, which the report files under achievement rather than warning. The report does have warnings though. Hehe. How could it not? Intensive fish farming strains ecosystems, spreads disease and pollutes when run badly, while warming, acidifying and species-scrambling oceans are already disrupting capture fisheries and the communities that live off them. So yes, we did break a record, yay! But it might be one of the very last we do. But no matter how many fish in the sea...
(FAO)

2 is the new 1.5. Or maybe it is 2.5? Whatever, it’s hot. And it’s gonna get hotter still. Health Policy Watch has all the tea from the fourth annual Indicators of Global Climate Change report. And the report says we are about ready to stop flirting with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit, and marry it permanently. The wedding will happen anytime from now to about 2034, assuming emissions hold their current course. Thankfully, emissions are showing every sign of doing just that. Human-caused warming reached 1.37°C in 2025 and is climbing at 0.27°C a decade, the fastest rate ever recorded, and the carbon budget stood at 130 billion tonnes in January and will be spent in a little over three years. Nearly every indicator the report tracks moved the wrong way: greenhouse gas emissions hit a record 56.8 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent, atmospheric CO2 passed 425 parts per million, seas reached a record high, and the Earth’s energy imbalance, the heat coming in versus the heat getting out, has more than doubled and now runs 40% above what the IPCC reckoned five years ago. In what they probably meant as comfort, the scientists who delivered the report pointed out that none of this is a surprise.
(Health Policy Watch)

Long reads

Take a dip in the sea. Getting into the water may soon cease to be an option to cool down, as Nature describes here. Oceans across Asia broke heat records last year, and it is very likely ocean warming cannot be reversed. What a hopeful note to end this week’s issue on.
(Nature)

Without much ado, let’s quickly get into the Ebola story then, shall we? At last count, 676 confirmed cases in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as per the health minister, combined with the 19 confirmed cases in Uganda from the Africa CDC’s latest update, taking the number of confirmed cases to just under 700. Worryingly, the update from the DRC health minister above also says the outbreak has spread to three new health ‌zones. Equally worrying, an update from the UNHCR says two Ebola-related deaths have been confirmed in a displacement camp in eastern DRC. The Africa CDC and the WHO have partnered in a $518 million plan to fight the outbreak. The Africa CDC has also got financial support from other places - $12.54 million from the European Commission and $220.6 million from the Pandemic Fund. CEPI has invested $60 million to fast-track three vaccine candidates from IAVI, Moderna and University of Oxford into trials and Gavi too has committed an additional $50 million. Hopefully all of these commitments will come in handy soon, especially in DRC where shortages have caused testing to lag, or even stall in some cases. And where orphaned babies are dying to Ebola. In a slight bit of good news, the number of caseworkers who’ve recovered from Ebola has gone up fourfold since we last reported on it. No confirmed cases of Ebola have been reported from anywhere outside of DRC and Uganda yet which is a positive but we fear unless there is at least a cluster somewhere in Europe or North America, the urgency to find a vaccine that we’re seeing now may not persist.

In other Africa news, there has been a surge in cholera cases in Borno State, Nigeria with 7850 suspected cases and 74 deaths in five weeks.

In Ghana, the parliament passed its regressive, transphobic, homophobic bill into law.

In disease news elsewhere, 26,000 Saiga antelopes have died of unknown causes in Kazakhstan, bang in the middle of calving season. Must be pre-partum angst.

In Kerala, India, an outbreak of Shigellosis that was first reported in the north of the state has resulted in one confirmed death and over 400 people seeking treatment with reports now coming in from three districts. Thankfully, this is India’s most advanced state when it comes to public health infrastructure. Testing, containment, community contact tracing and disease surveillance that most other Indian states, and even many other countries, simply do not match. Which is why this state reports more illnesses than any other. Like this Nipah virus infection it has confirmed in one person, immediately identifying 77 contacts, including 58 health workers, with all high-risk contacts already in quarantine.

In the US, after nearly 60 years without a confirmed domestic case, USDA confirmed the first local detection of New World Screwworm in a 3-week-old calf in Texas, with larvae identified in its umbilical area. Since then, additional detections have been confirmed in other counties in Texas, as well as New Mexico, and earlier this week, even in a dog in Texas. As with many other things with the current US dispensation, you could call this manifest destiny because they did have a screwworm monitoring programme which was abruptly terminated last year when they made their government efficient.

Separately, for whatever reasons of their own, two US researchers were arrested for bringing mpox samples - deactivated of course (hopefully) - back to the US, and then lying to authorities about it.

And since we are talking about disease, with recent reports from India and Bangladesh, we have now crossed more than 1,000 cases of bird flu in humans, with a nearly 50% fatality rate. We’re not betting people, but if you offered us long odds on bird flu being the next pandemic, we’d take it.

In good news, last month was only the second-hottest May ever recorded. Yay. And also the coolest May of the rest of your lives.

And finally, in the most Australian of Australian news, Australia’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (DCCEEW) has seized more than 100,000 live exotic cockroaches, the largest seizure of illegal exotic invertebrates in Australia. This is honestly the first time ever we’re keying in exotic and cockroaches in the same sentence. And since this is Australia, yes, the cockroaches are gonna die. They’re getting euthanised.

Stories Of The Week

Sounds like a baby, heats like a stir fry. The WMO confirmed it last week: El Niño is back. The Pacific-warming phenomenon is now reckoned to have an 80% chance of taking hold between June and August, rising to 90% after that, and it arrives promising above-average temperatures nearly everywhere along with the extreme weather that tends to follow. Tropical Pacific readings are already running roughly 6°C above average, which gives the system plenty of extra heat to feed on.

The WMO is at pains to point out that climate change does not make El Niño itself more frequent or more intense. What a warmer ocean and atmosphere do is load the dice, handing each event more energy and moisture for heatwaves and downpours. The last El Niño, in 2023-24, was among the five strongest on record and helped push 2024 to its unwanted title of hottest year yet. Which means either 2026 or 2027 will take that throne over from 2024. UN authorities call this “the urgent climate warning it is.” Well, sure. Doesn’t mean we have to treat it as urgent. Why buck history and tradition? Bolster early warning systems? Ignore! Fund seasonal forecasting? Boooooring!!! Sweat buckets? Woo-hoo!
(WMO)

Leggo my eggo! So you ate some undercooked chicken and got a grumpy tummy, eh? Or maybe it was the three-day old pizza that did it? Yeah, but that isn’t what the WHO calls unsafe food. New WHO research published in The Lancet this week suggests the deadlier threat is quieter and slower. Unsafe food kills 1.5 million people and sickens 866 million every year, a burden the WHO puts on a par with TB, and the leading cause of those deaths is not even a bug.

The headline finding, quantified for the first time, is that more than a million people died in 2021 from cardiovascular disease and cancer linked to inorganic arsenic and lead in their food. Diarrhoeal diseases still cause the most illnesses, but chemical hazards top the death toll. Arsenic, lead and methylmercury enter soil and water from both natural sources and human handiwork, decades of leaded paint and petrol among them, are taken up by plants and fish, and end up on the plate.

The burden, predictably, is not shared evenly. Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific fare worst for chemical contamination, while Africa and Southeast Asia carry the heaviest overall load. Children under five, who make up 9% of the world’s population but account for roughly a third of all foodborne illness, are the most exposed, and for them lead and mercury are not a passing sickness but a lifelong sentence of neurological and developmental harm. The report’s authors add that climate change and antimicrobial resistance are both making matters worse, the first by raising contamination risks, the second by rendering infections harder to treat.

The prescription is the same old One Health line: clean up contamination at source through better farming, tighter industrial controls and stronger environmental rules, and stop treating health, agriculture and environment as separate filing cabinets. Yeah. Tighter industrial controls. Stronger environmental rules. Maybe in a faraway distant utopian future, both of those will happen. But for now, the poison is already in the soil, and chemicals, once in the food system, are stubbornly difficult to get back out.
(WHO)

Peace? Not when we can have war! The Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) has been publishing the annual Global Peace Index for 20 years now. The 20th edition just landed. Considering that for 12 years running, peacefulness in the world is going down, maybe the index needs to be renamed? Anyhoo, the data. There are 119 countries less peaceful than they were in 2008, with conflict the chief culprit, and the number of conflicts is the highest since the end of the Second World War. Sixty-one active state-based conflicts were under way in 2024, double the figure of fifteen years ago, and almost all of that growth comes from internationalised intrastate wars, the kind where outside powers wade into someone else’s civil conflict. Those are up more than 175% since 2010. We won’t even begin to guess how many of these conflicts are in Africa with countries from West Asia taking part in fomenting them. Or in West Asia with terrorist-settlers causing them.

One new note in the report is the machinery. The report warns that warfare is undergoing a technological revolution that international law and diplomacy have not begun to catch up with, and that for the first time machines are making life-and-death combat decisions faster than any human can review them, with no global agreement on the rules meant to govern them. Drones have become the defining weapon of the age, spreading faster than any government can track: attacks rose by roughly 11,500% between 2018 and 2025, with 565 separate armed groups managing at least one. The footprint reaches well beyond the battlefield, too. AI data-centre electricity demand is projected to double to 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, and Ireland’s data centres alone already draw 22% of the country’s metered power.

Against all of this, the world spent $49.2 billion on peacebuilding and peacekeeping in 2025, up from $37.3 billion in 2008 but still just 1/2 a percent of total military spending. If we spend 200 times as much on war as we do on peace, do we even deserve peace?
(IEP)

Good news comes drip-drip-dripping. There are 41.6 million documented refugees in the world today. If you’re wondering what’s good about that, it’s down 3% from the previous year. The UNHCR released its flagship Global Trends Report this week and this drop in refugee numbers is the first in a decade.

The reason the totals dropped is that returns picked up sharply. Some 14.7 million displaced people went back to their areas or countries of origin in 2025, 4.4 million refugees and 10.3 million internally displaced, with the steepest rises in Afghanistan, Sudan and Syria. Refugee returns were the second highest in the 60 years the agency has kept records. It is careful to note, though, that many of those journeys happened under pressure and led back to precarious conditions, which is a long way from the safe and dignified return the Convention envisages. Meanwhile 5.4 million people fled across borders during the year, so the flow has not stopped, only shifted.

The backdrop keeps generating new caseloads faster than old ones close. Sudan remains the largest crisis on earth, with 9.1 million people displaced inside its borders, and in West Asia, one “country” is insistent on creating as many refugees as it can every hour. At least the ones it can’t kill.
(UNHCR)

No worker, no cry! We’ve all read the news and reports about how cancer is on the rise around the world and how we’ll have yea so many cases of cancer by 2050 or whatever. But one so far unreported corollary of that is that we’re also on track for a devastating shortfall of cancer care workers. How devastating? Is 100 million devastating enough? Who says? The Lancet Oncology does! No prizes for guessing that the burden will overwhelmingly fall on LMICs, where nearly 70% of new cancer cases are expected to occur.
(The Lancet Oncology)

Breakthroughs

AI in your body. The day has come. Way sooner than anybody could’ve predicted. The first AI-designed vaccine has entered human arms in a clinical trial. Researchers at the University of Cambridge and its spinout DIOSynVax have put a universal coronavirus vaccine through its first human trial, and it cleared the bar that first trials are meant to clear: in 39 healthy volunteers it proved safe and produced no significant side effects. More interesting than the safety result is the design. Rather than chasing a single strain, the team used AI to comb genetic data from across the Sarbeco coronavirus family, the group that includes SARS-CoV-2, the original SARS and various bat viruses with spillover potential, and distilled the features they share into one synthetic “super-antigen”. The aim is a jab that holds up against viruses not yet circulating in humans, escaping the reactive cycle of reformulating shots to catch each new variant. In the trial it stirred immune responses against SARS-CoV-2, SARS and related bat viruses alike, and was delivered needle-free through a micro-fluid jet. But hold on to your horses. This is just a Phase 1 trial. The vaccine has not been shown to prevent infection or disease in the real world, the cohort was 39 people aged 18 to 50, and a larger Phase 2 study is still to come to test whether the broad protection holds across a more diverse group. Let’s hope it does, even it was designed by AI. Maybe it will only cause aitism.
(Journal of Infection)

Bottom line

Spend now, save later? Pshaw! The FAO has released a new report, which like a lot of recent reports, has put a price on inaction. This time, it is making the economic case for weaning the global livestock sector off its antibiotic habit. On current trends, driven by rising appetite for animal-source foods and ever-more-intensive production, antimicrobial use in livestock is set to climb by nearly 30% by 2040 against 2019 levels. Cumulative production losses under a high-resistance scenario could reach around $318 billion by 2040, against roughly $53 billion under the most aggressive phase-out of antimicrobial growth promoters.

But who even has time for the long game? Antimicrobial growth promoters deliver clear, immediate productivity gains, particularly for producers in resource-poor settings with high disease risk and little access to vets, biosecurity or affordable alternatives. The costs of giving them up are up-front, concentrated and obvious. The costs of resistance, by contrast, arrive slowly and are spread thinly across everyone, which is precisely why the reckoning keeps getting deferred.

The FAO nevertheless is framing it as antimicrobial effectiveness being a global public good, and the gains from preserving it being long-term and widely shared while the pain of restraint is felt now and locally. True that but the “solution” offered is regulation paired with economic incentives, investment in veterinary services, surveillance and diagnostics, and a push towards vaccination, biosecurity and better husbandry, with the report pricing the transitional bill at a minimum of $28.4 billion.

The geography is worth noting too: by 2040 Asia and the Pacific are forecast to account for nearly 65% of livestock antimicrobial use and South America around 19%, while Africa’s share stays smaller but grows among the fastest. Global livestock production is projected to rise about 23% by 2040, led by poultry and milk, so the demand driving the antibiotics is not going anywhere, and the question is whether the sector pays a manageable bill now or a far larger one later. We know we said we don’t bet but we’re betting on the latter.
(FAO)

The good we do. New research led by Lancaster University finds that the chemicals brought in to replace the ozone-destroying CFCs, the refrigerants and air-conditioning gases we congratulated ourselves on adopting, have been quietly seeding the globe with a “forever chemical”. Between 2000 and 2022, the team estimates, the breakdown of these CFC replacements and certain inhalation anaesthetics deposited around 335,500 tonnes of trifluoroacetic acid, or TFA, onto the Earth’s surface. It is a member of the PFAS family, it resists breaking down, and it is now turning up in rainwater, in human blood and urine, and in Arctic ice-cores thousands of miles from any factory. The fix came with its own slow leak.
(Geophysical Research Letters)

Not your (amoe)bae. Most disease and pandemic scenarios talk about viruses, bacteria, and maybe, in passing, fungi. Nobody even talks about amoebae. Maybe it’s time to take them a little more seriously. That, in essence, is the argument of a new perspective published in the journal Biocontaminant, in which researchers make the case that free-living amoebae, the single-celled organisms that live quietly in lakes, rivers, soil and our water systems, are an overlooked public-health risk that warrants far more attention. Most are harmless. A small number are not, the best-known being Naegleria fowleri, the so-called brain-eating amoeba, which can cause a rare and almost invariably fatal brain infection when contaminated water gets up the nose. What makes the group worth worrying about is its sheer hardiness: these organisms shrug off high temperatures, tolerate chlorine and other disinfectants, and can take up residence inside the very distribution networks we assume are clean. The sharper concern is what the amoebae carry. They can act as living shelters for other pathogens, with bacteria and viruses hiding inside them and riding out the disinfection that would otherwise kill them, a Trojan-horse trick the authors say may also help spread antibiotic resistance.
(Biocontaminant)

Long reads

Wanna hear a joke? Pandemic-ready! The Conversation Africa talks about how Africa and the world isn’t ready for the next pandemic. Of course we aren’t. We haven’t learnt any lessons yet.
(The Conversation)

No country for girls. In India, foetal sex determination and then abortion if it turned out to be a girl was so rampant the government banned it decades ago. Now, SciDevNet says these tests have gone online. And shady. And the practice itself has gone with Indians to wherever they go.
(SciDevNet)

Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn’t want you to see this.

The big story of the week is still Ebola and we know we told you last week that the chances of it becoming a pandemic are slim-to-none. We still don’t think it is likely to become a pandemic but the chances now are slightly better than slim. It is already the second-largest outbreak ever, with over 900 suspected cases. The Africa CDC’s latest situation report had 904 suspected cases, 106 confirmed cases, 204 suspected deaths, and 11 confirmed deaths. However, case counts are growing exponentially. Just days after that report, the agency had a briefing in which suspected cases had already gone past a thousand - a four-fold increase in two weeks since the first notification.

The WHO has convened a panel to recommend candidate drugs and vaccines for the disease for which none exist at present even though Russia claimed to have developed a vaccine that could even work against the Bundibugyo strain. The WHO panel recommended evaluating monoclonal antibodies (mABs) MBP134 and Maftivimab and the antiviral remdesivir for treatment and a combination of an mAB with remdesivir. For post-exposure prevention, the panel suggested using the oral antiviral obeldesivir but this strategy depends on contact tracing, which in the DRC especially, is... well.

Ebola outbreaks are not new for Africa, and for DRC. But as the Africa CDC chief Dr Jean Kaseya made brutally clear in his latest briefing, if Ebola outbreaks were happening with this frequency in Europe or North America, we would’ve had vaccines and drugs long ago. In the same briefing, he also bemoaned the lack of actual funding, noting that there were pledges of over $500 million, but actual funds received amounted to barely half of that. The WHO asked for a ceasefire to contain the outbreak (as if), an outbreak that the agency said is fast outpacing the response to it.

Elsewhere, the US had an innovative idea to combat Ebola on its soil... relocate exposed Americans to Kenya, a plan that the Kenyan government even okayed before the courts put a temporary kibosh on it. Multiple countries have imposed travel restrictions on several African nations, another point that drew the Africa CDC’s ire, as it should. As for spread outside Africa, there was some concern over two suspected cases in India, one in Bangalore, and another one in Ahmedabad. Both of them later tested negative. In Austria, one person has been hospitalised with possible symptoms. Although initial tests returned negative, a second test is still pending.

In very good news though, the WHO also announced that the first person in this outbreak has been successfully treated and discharged from the hospital.

We will end our Ebola briefing for today with one final word. The WHO is on the ground, and they’ve arranged emergency supplies, etc. However, in this case, it might be better for the WHO to take the backseat and let the Africa CDC run the show, with the WHO’s support. Honestly, at the moment, the WHO may not be best equipped to lead the response anyway. Take their hantavirus response, for example. They couldn’t even come up with an efficient and effective tracking, testing and containment strategy with just 23 countries to coordinate with.

Speaking of hantavirus, it is still trying to make its presence felt, with cases rising by 1 to thirteen. This was probably made easier by the fact that all Spanish passengers on the “hantavirus cruise” were quarantining together. What is funnier still is that authorities are not extending the quarantine period. So hantavirus can still spread further. Go, you little virus, go!

Elsewhere in Africa, the resurrected pharma firm in Malawi that we told you about a little over a month ago, the one that was selling expired insulin to the hospitals it stole them from, has got a new government contract - worth K1.6 billion - to sell extremely overpriced gloves to hospitals.

In Uganda, Quality Chemical Industries (QCIL) launched locally manufactured Hydroxyurea capsules. The drug is used to treat sickle cell disease, and continues QCIL’s often-underrated journey in local manufacturing in Africa.

In Kenya, regulators have issued a public safety alert after detecting a falsified batch of Phesgo, a breast cancer treatment, circulating within the Kenyan pharmaceutical market.

There was some more left-over wishy-washiness from the World Health Assembly, including the adoption of an action plan to counter AMR, a meeting to commit to strengthening collaboration to end malaria and other NTDs, and other meetings involving other words like reaffirming and ratifying and endorsing and corroborative.

The WHO also agreed to convene a conference for donors on a way to “rehabilitate” Gaza. The same Gaza that Israel says it wants to eventually take over 100% of, beginning with 70% now. The same Gaza where Israel says it has made plans for ‘voluntary emigration’ for the people staying there. The same Gaza where Israel continues to kill people every single day, and destroy whatever buildings are still left standing. The fact that Israel is still part of the UN is staggering beyond belief, considering they’ve attacked every UN body and every UN principle.

And Gaza is not all. They’re still at it in Lebanon too.

Amid all this, some relief comes from the fact that some things simply never change. One of those is Indian drugmakers love of quality control and adherence. In the latest instalment of that story, the US FDA highlighted data integrity and maintenance issues at a Dabur India plant and issued a warning letter to Intas Pharma after deeming their response to a previous Form 483 not quite there. Also jumping into the fray were the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar along with Ashirwad Hospital & Research Centre, Ulhasnagar who both received identical letters for not following agreed protocol during a clinical study testing a new treatment for ovarian cancer.

And finally, every time we have a new vaccine, like clockwork, misinformation follows. This time, it is coming for the new HIV jab. Bhekisisa has a reckoner on how to get ahead of it.

Stories Of The Week

Oh, it’s hot now, is it? Wait for the future, why don’t you? Because the climate story has officially become annual programming. The WMO’s latest warning says there is now an 86% chance that at least one year between 2026 and 2030 will surpass 2024 as the hottest year ever recorded. And that is not even the scary part. The scary part is that temperature breaches that we once - even maybe up to three years ago - treated as political red lines, have become completely normalised now.

The Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C threshold was supposed to function as a guardrail. The world “temporarily” crossed it in 2024. Now, the WMO says there is a 91% chance annual temperatures will exceed that level again within the next five years, and a 75% chance the entire 2026–2030 average will stay above it.

The timing is awkwardly symbolic. Britain just recorded its hottest May day ever at 35°C, while parts of France and Spain are running as much as 10°C hotter than normal. Europe’s latest heatwave has already turned airports, rail systems and city centres into stress tests for infrastructure built for a different climate.

Meanwhile, in the Arctic, temperatures are rising more than three times faster than the global average, with further sea-ice decline expected across the Barents, Bering and Okhotsk seas. The knock-on effects are no longer confined to polar scientists and satellite maps. Changing rainfall patterns are already reshaping agricultural and economic risk across the Sahel, Amazon and parts of the subtropics.

The uncomfortable reality is that climate adaptation is quietly becoming a development issue as much as an environmental one. Countries least responsible for emissions remain among the most exposed to heat stress, crop volatility, flooding and rising sea levels. Which brings us to the recurring policy contradiction at the centre of global climate politics: everyone agrees the temperature targets matter, while simultaneously behaving as though overshooting them is manageable.

The WMO is careful to note that a single year above 1.5°C does not mean the Paris goals are permanently dead which is technically true. But technically, we might even achieve all of the UN SDGs. Fact is temporary breaches have a habit of becoming permanent negotiating positions. Look at where the Pandemic Pact talks are as a case in point.

At this point, there is no debate on whether warming is accelerating. Are governments, food systems and urban infrastructure moving quickly enough to keep up with a world that is heating faster than the institutions designed to manage it, that’s the question? The answer, unfortunately for all of us, is no.(WMO)

Progress? Not in this life! For decades, global development operated on the assumption that progress, while uneven, was broadly inevitable. The World Bank’s Atlas of Global Development 2026 suggests that assumption is now breaking down. According to the report, global development is advancing at its weakest pace in 75 years. The slowdown is not abstract macroeconomic drift. It is showing up in lives shortened, opportunities delayed and poverty reduction losing momentum. Funnily enough, all of this happening at a time when global inequality was supposed to be narrowing.

One statistic alone captures the scale of this reversal best. Had global development maintained its earlier trajectory, 150 million fewer people would be living in extreme poverty today. The report also estimates that global life expectancy would be nearly a year higher had previous development trends continued. Women’s empowerment indicators, meanwhile, would have advanced further than they have.

The world is still improving in several areas, but at a pace too slow to keep up with the scale of demographic, economic and climate pressures now colliding simultaneously. Part of the problem is that the old engines of development are weakening all at once. Debt burdens are climbing across low- and middle-income economies. Climate shocks are repeatedly wiping out infrastructure and agricultural gains. Aid budgets are under pressure. Trade fragmentation is growing. And geopolitical competition is increasingly crowding out long-term development planning in favour of short-cycle strategic interests.

The result is a development environment where countries are expected to grow, industrialise and build resilience while facing higher borrowing costs, more volatile weather and weaker external support than previous generations experienced.

Africa sits directly at the centre of this tension. The continent remains one of the few regions with significant demographic momentum, urban expansion potential and untapped industrial capacity. Yet many African economies are also navigating rising debt servicing costs, currency instability, food insecurity and shrinking fiscal room at the same time. That combination makes development slower, more expensive and politically harder to sustain.

The Atlas does not argue that progress has stopped. Extreme poverty rates have still declined over the long term. Health and education outcomes continue improving in many regions. Digital access has expanded dramatically. But the report’s broader message is harder to ignore: progress is no longer compounding fast enough to offset the pressures accumulating underneath it.
(World Bank)

Breakthroughs

Say no to drugs. Yet another of those breakthroughs which is not happy. Scientists have now discovered that beta blockers, the heart medication prescribed almost automatically after heart attacks for roughly four decades, may be doing very little for millions of patients with otherwise normal heart function. In some women, the drugs may even increase the risk of death, repeat heart attacks or heart failure. Which is awkward, considering beta blockers have been handed out ever since cardiology collectively decided in the 1980s that more medication must obviously mean more medicine. The broader lesson here is less about one drug and more about how modern healthcare quietly accumulates standard practice. It’s like being at a large corporate firm with legacy software that nobody wants to audit because the system still works. Medicine is excellent at celebrating new therapies, but spectacularly less enthusiastic about revisiting old ones once they become institutional muscle memory. This is true for drugs, and this is true for practices and protocols as well.
(New England Journal of Medicine, European Heart Journal)

Bottom line

Wrap it before you tap it. Governments around the world are fretting over falling birth rates and lowering fertility rates and plummeting replacement rates of populations. They’re even offering rewards for people birthing more children. Yet, none of them has stopped to consider if Earth can afford more children. The answer is no. Not for a long, long, long time. Maybe never. Because humanity is already living far beyond what Earth can sustainably support, with a new study estimating the planet’s “comfortable” long-term carrying capacity being closer to 2.5 billion people rather than the current 8.3 billion casually stress-testing the biosphere every day. Which is unfortunate timing, given the global economy is still built on the assumption that infinite consumption, permanent growth and same-day delivery are all basic human rights. The researchers argue fossil fuels effectively allowed humanity to borrow ecological capacity from the future, which sounds remarkably similar to how modern finance handles almost everything else.

Naturally, this does not mean civilisation collapses tomorrow. It simply means there is a reason why we’re noticing the planet’s support systems beginning to wither. Food systems are under strain, water security is worsening, biodiversity is collapsing and climate disasters are becoming recurring line items instead of “once-in-a-generation” events. The genuinely awkward part is that the study also found population size explained environmental damage more strongly than per-capita consumption alone, reopening one of those debates policymakers prefer to approach with kid gloves. Because while everyone agrees sustainability matters, far fewer people enjoy discussing what sustainability actually requires in a world where every government simultaneously wants higher consumption, more industrial output and rising birth rates.
(Science Advances)

No river, no cry. Speaking of support systems collapsing, scientists have found that rivers around the world are quietly losing oxygen, with nearly 80% of more than 21,000 river systems showing steady deoxygenation over the past four decades. Tropical rivers, including those in India, are being hit hardest, which is deeply inconvenient considering billions of people already depend on these waterways for drinking water, agriculture, fisheries and the occasional government promise about sustainability. Yes, climate change is the main culprit, with rising temperatures reducing oxygen solubility in water and heatwaves accelerating the process further.

Unlike hurricanes and wildfires or collapsing glaciers and other photogenic disasters though, rivers losing oxygen is an invisible crisis. Fish simply disappear gradually, biodiversity quietly erodes and ecosystems begin malfunctioning. Slowly at first, then all at once. The study also found that dams and altered river flows complicate oxygen dynamics further, proving once again that every large-scale intervention in nature eventually comes back with giant teeth to bite us in the butt.
(Science Advances)

Under my Salmonella, ella, ella, eh! Climate change isn’t done nipping at our arses. Scientists have now found that it is also helping fuel the rise of antibiotic-resistant Salmonella, because melting glaciers and destabilising food systems is not enough payback. This study in The Lancet Planetary Health, which analysed more than 480,000 Salmonella genomes across 139 countries, found that warming temperatures and changing rainfall patterns are linked to a significant rise in antimicrobial-resistance genes. Higher heat speeds up bacterial growth and gene exchange, floods spread resistant microbes through water systems and droughts conveniently concentrate them into shrinking water supplies.

The particularly grim detail is where the strongest climate-linked increases are happening: West Asia, North Africa, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, regions already carrying heavy infectious disease burdens alongside fragile healthcare infrastructure. Globally, antibiotic resistance genes in Salmonella have risen 38% over the study period, with climate change accounting for roughly a tenth of that increase. Which may not sound catastrophic until one remembers humanity is already losing the antibiotic arms race largely through overprescription, weak regulation and the agricultural industry’s commitment to treating antibiotics like seasoning. Climate change is now acting as an accelerant on top of that dysfunction. Over the course of curating The Kable, especially this year, we’ve come to believe that the future of public health is like a group project where every global crisis has decided to collaborate. Either that or Israel.
(The Lancet Planetary Health)

Typhoid Mary, come to me. Dust, it turns out, is not just dead skin, cat dander, insect skeletons and regret. Scientists at Ohio State vacuumed schools, dorms and offices and found genetic traces of 54 different viruses lurking in the fluff, including Covid, flu and norovirus. The particles themselves are harmless by then. What remains is essentially the forensic residue of everyone who coughed, sneezed or simply existed in the building. Which means your office carpet now doubles as an epidemiological archive. Somewhere inside every neglected corner is a complete historical record of who brought the plague in after that long weekend.

The researchers think dust surveillance could become a middle ground between individual testing and wastewater monitoring: less invasive than swabbing people, more precise than analysing an entire city’s sewage. Schools, hospitals and workplaces might eventually detect outbreaks before anyone notices half the staff sounding like honking ducks. The only obstacle is standardising how to collect the stuff. If AI takes over all the lab tech jobs, they can apply for janitorial positions the world over to save humanity.
(Building and Environment)

Long reads

Learn from Africa. Only one long read again. Fittingly, it is a lesson from Africa on how to manage climate volatility. The continent only has decades of experience picking up everybody else’s slack.
(The Conversation)

Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn’t want you to see this.

Before moving on to talking about ills of the world and other things, have you realised that there seems to be more disease around lately? Cholera, malaria, TB, flu, RSV, mpox, measles, dengue... all seem to be on the rise. Heck, true-blue, card-carrying meat-eaters in the US are turning vegan thanks to tick bites. Even “tiny” outbreaks that you rarely heard about previously are becoming more and frequent. Rare diseases are becoming increasingly less rare. Not a week goes by when some kind of fungal, or bacterial, or viral disease doesn’t affect some part of Africa. Sure, climate change has a part to play. As does air pollution. Even ultra-processed foods. Smoking and tobacco, for some. Alcohol. Sedentary lifestyles. But what is really at play here is Covid. A disease that is proven to cause immune dysfunction. A disease that affects your immune system so thoroughly that it leaves your body wide open for any other disease that wants to walk in. And it is the collective failure of our health authorities, our medical fraternity, our governments, our corporations, our return to work and school, our back to normal approach that has landed us in this place. Even in the face of growing evidence that we need clean air to mitigate this disease (and pollution but that’s a separate discussion), we’re doing nothing to implement clean air protocols in our schools and offices and indoor environments. And masking, hey, that’s for sheep. I’m free-spirited and can think for myself. I don’t follow the herd of maskers. I stand free, along with my 7 billion like-minded, free-spirited rebels. Not too long ago Ignaz Semmelweiss was forced out of medicine and shunted to a mental asylum because he insisted that doctors should practise the unheard-of custom of washing their hands before treating children in hospitals. Would the anti-maskers be okay with surgeons working on them in hospitals without disinfecting themselves today? Because rebels. Anyway, change is unlikely, but in the hope it does, some reading: Covid and a 49% higher risk of new-onset autoimmune-related diseases, the myth of “immunity debt,” increased risk of chronic pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease, mental health conditions, increased risk tolerance leading to more automobile accidents, and, ooh, flight issues. But buckle that seat belt tight, eh!

So yeah, poor hantavirus, relegated so quickly to the back pages. The UK is not sitting by though, having already secured for itself supplies of an experimental drug from Japan. Might the world have had more treatments for hantavirus, specifically the Andes hantavirus, by now? Possibly, if not for one of the scourges of the modern world, Donald Trump, and his administration that cut funding for a study on it. One last thing to add about hantavirus before we move on: it spreads primarily through contact with infected rodents, not via bites necessarily, but by inhaling aerosolised particles from rodent urine, droppings, or saliva. Touching contaminated surfaces and then touching the mouth, nose, or eyes is another way of exposure. And yet another means of contracting it is by consuming food or water contaminated with rodent excreta. All of these situations have been created, and enforced, by Israel in Gaza over the past three years. Sewage systems, water networks, buildings have all been destroyed. Combined with uncollected waste, rubble, and stagnant water across displacement camps, this has created optimal conditions for rapid proliferation of rodents and insects. And there is no capacity for pest control, sanitation, or healthcare in Gaza because Israel has ensured that. Since the beginning of 2026 alone, there have been more than 70,000 cases of ectoparasite infections and rodent-borne illnesses recorded in Gaza, with rodents contaminating food supplies, chewing through tents, and raising the risk of diseases including hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, leptospirosis, and rickettsial infections. And children who have lost the ability to dream. Israel still keeps weaponising even the barest of bare resources left in Gaza to breed more infectious diseases.

So, on to Ebola then. We began last week’s issue with the news about the outbreak of Ebola in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). And immediately thereafter, the Africa CDC declared it a pan-continental health emergency, the agency’s second-such declaration. The WHO stepped in too, declaring the Ebola outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, the third-such declaration in the last 6 years. Someone said something about escalating disease outbreaks post-Covid? Anyhoo, this is the 17th Ebola outbreak in DRC. Testing over the weekend confirmed that it is the Bundibugyo virus, which has had two reported outbreaks before: one in Uganda in 2007, and one in DRC (of course) in 2012. And the Bundibugyo virus doesn’t have any vaccines or treatments, just like the Sudan virus. When it comes to Ebola, only the Zaire virus has approved vaccines and drugs. But might we have had a treatment though? Possibly. But the world’s “smartest” man put paid to that. Here anyway is a list of treatments under development with no Musk involvement. There is a lot to unpack with this present outbreak, which within three days of being reported was already the third largest Ebola outbreak ever, and is well on its way to becoming the largest ever. The outbreak was first reported on April 24, but given the spread and the number of cases, researchers believe the disease has been circulating for weeks, maybe even months, and either went unnoticed or misdiagnosed. Easy to misdiagnose because there are no tests either for the Bundibugyo virus. Cases have also been reported in Uganda. Genomic sequencing of the outbreak reveals a more complex transmission pattern than a straightforward single-source outbreak. Instead of one linear chain, the viral genomes show branching transmission - multiple distinct clusters with geographic spread across Bunia, Katwa, and Uganda. This could indicate either multiple independent spillover events from the animal reservoir or a single introduction that went undetected long enough to establish several separate human-to-human transmission chains spreading in parallel. The pattern matters operationally: Ebola containment depends on contact tracing and ring vaccination, both of which become substantially harder with multiple active transmission hotspots. A dispersed, multi-focal outbreak suggests more locations requiring surveillance, possible undetected community transmission, and an outbreak potentially larger or older than initial assessments indicated. And we’re already seeing that in play on the ground. So, do we think Ebola is what the next pandemic will be? Just like we said with hantavirus, unlikely. We do think Ebola will cost us way more lives, and possibly take much, much longer to contain. But thankfully, there have been no reports of asymptomatic spread so far, or even in the past. At the moment, case counts, and deaths, are on a steep upward trajectory but Africa has shown several times in the past that she knows how to handle an Ebola outbreak even with very limited resources. And this time, the Africa CDC is fully present, and has support from the WHO, with CEPI, Gavi et al hopefully ready to jump in. So no, we don’t think this will become a pandemic.

Ebola isn’t the only thing rampant in DRC though. This year, there have been over 25,000 suspected cholera cases, over 71,000 suspected measles cases, and over 2,300 cases of bacterial meningitis. Not even counting mpox which is still doing the rounds across Africa with more than 250 confirmed cases, and one death, in the last three weeks. In Nigeria, an ongoing Lassa fever outbreak has seen the death toll rise to 191.

But enough with the disease. Let’s look at what else has been happening. The Africa CDC partnered with the Global Fund to strengthen health systems across Africa and further the continent’s self-reliance plan. The agency also launched a report demonstrating the investment potential for health R&D in Africa. How much is it, you ask? $668 billion in additional GDP over the next 20 years. Both of these announcements came on the sidelines of the ongoing World Health Assembly (WHA), at which the Pandemic Pact was not discussed or presented.

What did happen at the WHA though? Well, they agreed to discuss the Pandemic Pact later. Sometime later. They agreed to suspend the US’ voting rights if outstanding dues didn’t get paid, although considering the US has exited the WHO, why should they have voting rights anyway? They also condemned Iran’s attacks on Gulf states, while saying nothing about the attacks on Iran which necessitated Iran’s response. China, and to some degree South Africa, were the only countries to call out the US attack on Iran.

On the sidelines of the WHA, the African Medicines Agency (AMA) took a couple of large strides too: a partnership with the US Pharmacopeia (USP) for regulatory collaboration, and a collaboration agreement with the WHO to advance regulatory harmonisation in Africa.

Elsewhere PAHO partnered with Google “to expand access to trusted health information.” Hehehe. Google. One of the biggest purveyors of misinformation in the online space alongside Meta and whatever Space Karen wants to call his venture is what PAHO thinks will credibly disseminate reliable health information “while countering the spread of misinformation online.” Meanwhile, this is the kind of shit on YouTube that proliferates in the name of science.

There was stuff happening at the UN Security Council too. Bahrain continued again to try and get support to force an intervention in the Strait of Hormuz. And the UK said Iran should halt all attacks. The UK didn’t ask anybody to stop attacking Iran though. The best statement, with not even a hint of irony though, came from France who said the Council has a duty to protect civilians. Okay, nothing ironical in that but in the same statement France said “the Council must support efforts aimed at holding perpetrators of war crimes to account, including by the International Criminal Court.” Okay, the ICC did issue warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in November 2024. Initially, a French foreign ministry spokesperson said the country would act “in line with the ICC’s statutes.” Then, the French foreign ministry said that provisions for immunity from prosecution apply to Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders. The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) said France is lying because when the ICC issued a warrant against Vladimir Putin, France didn’t have any such diplomatic qualms. So, yeah, offer rhetorical support when it is politically cost-free, then retreat from it at every point when it requires something concrete. Then grab a Security Council pulpit and preach. Nous sommes très honorables.

In other news, Roche has partnered with the Medicines Patent Pool to increase access to its influenza antiviral medicine Xofluza in 129 countries. The deal will allow selected generic manufacturers to develop and supply lower-cost versions of the treatment.

Speaking of partnerships, Gilead also expanded its collab with the WHO to supply roughly 400,000 more doses of its treatment for visceral leishmaniasis. Gilead also inked yet another deal, this one worth $140 million, with South Korean API maker Yuhan. Gilead also continued to ignore MSF’s plea to sell HIV meds directly to them.

And we’re not done with death and other mysteries yet. In the US, four people died and emergency responders had to be quarantined because of exposure to “an unknown substance.”

China has denied entry visas to pigs and wild boar from the Philippines because of swine flu.

And for the last three years, we have been talking about the disease most likely to cause the next pandemic: bird flu. It has now been found for the first time in a polar bear on Svalbard, the same place that hosts the world’s seed vault, in case of world-ending apocalypse. And bird flu isn’t done changing form yet. A new study has found a reassortment of Eurasian, North American, and South American genes. Unfortunately, we have not been paying any heed on the scale we should be to bird flu. If a pandemic were to hit, we are not prepared. And unlike Ebola, unlike hantavirus, unlike Covid even, a bird flu pandemic would be pretty much disastrous. For humans, and for all kinds of animal and avian life.

And finally, for what it is worth, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution saying countries are obligated to protect the environment from greenhouse gas emissions. The resolution has no legal bearing but at least it is a good moral victory to end this section with.

Stories Of The Week

Are we ready yet? Ready for what, the next pandemic? Hell, no! A new Global Preparedness Monitoring Board report says the world is not getting safer from pandemics. In fact, pandemic risk is rising faster than preparedness investment, leaving countries more exposed than they were after Covid.

The report, A World on the Edge: Priorities for a Pandemic-Resilient Future, tracks a decade of Public Health Emergencies of International Concern, from Ebola to Covid to mpox. Its verdict is blunt: outbreaks are becoming more frequent, more damaging, and harder to recover from. Health systems are under strain, economies are more fragile, societies are more polarised, and development assistance has fallen to levels not seen since 2009.

One of the sharpest warnings is around equity. Access to diagnostics, vaccines and treatments is not improving fast enough. Mpox vaccines reached affected low-income countries almost two years after the outbreak began, slower than the 17 months it took for Covid vaccines to arrive. Of course, there was only approved manufacturer who was more interested in selling to countries in the Global North who wanted stockpiles, so there’s that.

Ebola outbreaks, and Covid especially, also weakened trust in government, civil liberties and democratic norms, while politicised responses and attacks on scientific institutions have left societies less resilient for the next crisis.

AI and digital tools could help monitor threats and strengthen preparedness, but the report warns that without governance and safeguards, they could also deepen access gaps and weaken health security.

The GPMB sets out three priorities: create a permanent independent mechanism to monitor pandemic risk, finalise the Pandemic Pact (hehe), and secure financing for both preparedness and early response.

Simple then. Build trust. Manufacture equity. Work on following through. But first, a Pandemic Pact. Maybe before the next pandemic.
(GPMB)

Bottom line

Divided by borders, united by weather. Millions of people across India and Pakistan are sharing the same truth: pre-monsoon heat is becoming longer, earlier and deadlier. A new analysis by World Weather Attribution finds that human-caused climate change made the heatwave across northwestern India and Pakistan last month roughly three times more likely, and about 1°C hotter than it would have been in a pre-industrial climate.

The event is no longer rare. The study estimates that a 15-day April heatwave like this now has about a 20% chance of occurring in any given April. In plainer terms: this is becoming a one-in-five-year problem, not an exceptional weather anomaly.

The heat was brutal on the ground. From mid-April into May, several Indian cities crossed 46°C, with at least 37 heat-related deaths reported in India and 10 in Karachi. The heat also pushed electricity demand to record levels and compounded agricultural drought conditions across more than 1 million sq km.

The more worrying signal is timing. Extreme April heat is intensifying faster than May heat, which means South Asia is facing a longer danger window before the monsoon. Dry heat is arriving earlier, humid heat is compounding the risk later, and the season of survivable discomfort is turning into a season of serious public-health stress.

Heat Action Plans are helping, but the report says implementation remains uneven and too focused on emergency response. Outdoor workers, daily-wage earners, older adults, people in poor-quality housing and informal workers remain the most exposed. The funding problem is also basic: because heatwaves are not formally declared disasters in India and Pakistan, they are often excluded from disaster relief support.

The climate crisis of the future is already here for South Asia. Hospitals, farms, power grids, streets, homes are all now relics from the future.
(World Weather Attribution)

Glass half-full? Doesn’t matter even if it’s half-empty. Coz whatever is in it is gonna boil, baby, boil. But let’s begin with good news. Climate scientists are revising the old climate scenario playbook. The very worst-case pathway, the coal-heavy future that projected around 4.5°C of warming by 2100, now looks less likely. That is progress. Unfortunately, the best-case pathway is also slipping away, with even the most optimistic scenarios now expected to overshoot the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit. The new proposed worst-case scenario sits closer to 3.5°C by the end of the century, while the “middle” path, roughly where the world is currently headed, lands near 3°C of warming. The planet is already about 1.3°C warmer than pre-industrial levels, and every extra tenth of a degree sharpens risks around heat, floods, water scarcity and ecosystem loss.

The grim bit: 1.5°C is now considered implausible without first overshooting it, then somehow pulling warming back down later through large-scale carbon removal. In the best-case scenario described by scientists, warming peaks around 1.7°C and may stay there for decades before any theoretical cooling happens.

Doesn’t mean the apocalypse has been cancelled. Emissions are still rising, action is still too slow, and climate feedbacks, from ocean heat release to forest carbon loss and cloud changes, could add further warming beyond human-controlled emissions. The window has narrowed, but the danger has not disappeared. Not that it matters much because by 2100, one pandemic or the other would’ve taken care of pretty much all of us. If not, there’s always Israel.
(Copernicus)

Long reads

It’s getting smoggy in here. Only one story here this week but wear a mask while reading this. Because it is about air pollution in India and how it is years of political denial that has brought it to the state it is in where redemption seems almost impossible.
(Drilled)

Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn’t want you to see this.