Hello, and welcome back to The Kable. As the song goes, it is September and time to wake up. And we have a fully loaded issue to ensure you wake up, screaming into the void.
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)
And finally, let no one tell you that The Kable is a dark and depressing read. Here, a link to the Ig Nobel award winners for 2026. Buried underpants, cockroach milk, bears that kiss, and proof, if it were needed, that upper-class people will steal candy from kids.