💉 Don't eat cheese before you sleep; Maybe don't eat microplastics either; Vaccines can end AMR
#568 | Beer makes drugs; Your gut kills chemicals; What time is it? It's Pharmaconex time!
Hello, and welcome back to The Kable for what will, hopefully, be a month of light-hearted reading.
And if this first story is any indication, our hope won't be unfounded. Kenya recently drafted new laws around food packaging. And under this new law, pretty much all packaged food sold in the country will need a health warning because they are all generous with salt, sugar or saturated fat. The non-profit, Access to Nutrition Initiative, also carried out an assessment of packaged food sold in neighbouring Tanzania, and has similar gloomy data to report from there to.
On March 14, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing with 239 people on board. Since then, there have been theory after theory on what actually happened to the airplane and there have been several investigations that ended without anything conclusive. Almost exactly six years after that, the WHO declared Covid a pandemic, again with several theories and subsequent investigations in the origins of Covid, all of which are pretty much inconclusive. This week, the WHO concluded another inconclusive investigation into it with a WHO advisory group saying the pandemic was most likely borne of an animal source.
In more WHO action, the agency says it has an awesome new plan "to raise health taxes and save millions of lives." All it needs is for countries to listen to it and impose higher taxes on tobacco, alcohol and sugary drinks. As if lobbyists don't exist.
In more encouraging news, WOAH says bird flu has landed at two farms in South Africa. Woah!
A new study published in npj Science of Food says your diet includes a healthy serving of microplastics, thanks to the glorious miracle of food packaging.
And finally, no matter what all the misheard lyrics say, sweet dreams aren't made of cheese. In fact, cheese gives you nightmares, even if you aren't lactose intolerant.
Before we dive into the stories of the week…
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Stories Of The Week
Breathe easy. This first (and only) story in this section is not breaking news really. It is simply continued indictment of how our leaders are failing us on every front. Authored by two people who have experience in fighting NCDs and climate change, this opinion piece talks about how air pollution, now responsible for more premature deaths than tobacco, is glaringly absent from the draft political declaration for September’s UN High-Level Meeting on Non-communicable Diseases and Mental Health. That omission ignores the single largest contributor to the global disease burden: eight million largely preventable deaths a year from the toxic mix of outdoor fumes and household smoke. Fine-particle pollution infiltrates almost every organ, driving heart attacks, strokes, COPD, lung cancer, diabetes, dementia and more, yet negotiators seem content to leave it off the to-do list, jeopardising any hope of hitting SDG 3.4’s target of cutting premature NCD mortality by a third by 2030.
(Health Policy Watch)
Breakthroughs
99 bottles of beer on the wall. Scientists from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, alongside international collaborators, have pioneered a sustainable, high-speed method to produce and screen macrocyclic peptides, promising therapeutic molecules, using engineered brewer’s yeast. Published in Nature Communications, their approach transforms yeast into fluorescent "micro-factories," enabling rapid analysis of 100 million peptides with precision and eco-efficiency. The team’s fluorescence-based screening, structural validation, and biodegradable design mark a leap in drug discovery, especially for hard-to-target diseases.
(Nature Communications)
My poopy strongest. Oooh toxic PFAs. Oooh forever chemicals. Oh scheisse. Wait, wait, scientists have discovered that some gut bacteria are basically tiny PFAs sponges, soaking up these nasty forever chemicals like a microbial filter, except instead of clean water, the end product is, well, poop. These bacteria (found naturally in our guts) were unleashed into mice, where they heroically absorbed up to 74% of PFAS before flushing them out in fecal form. The researchers are now racing to turn these microbes into probiotic supplements, because if we can’t avoid PFAs in daily life, might as well get our gut working overtime to evict them, right? Viva la revolution de la merde.
(Nature Microbiology)
Long reads
AMR for the win. Around the world, health leaders and medical professionals have been talking about the impending antimicrobial resistance (AMR) pandemic that we're due to encounter any time now. A new Wellcome Trust report synthesises 11 studies showcasing how vaccination can mitigate AMR and how we need to be more vigorous and rigorous about it.
(Wellcome Trust)
Tracking Marburg. A nice piece in The Conversation Africa about a Ugandan scientist who is offering clues on how the Marburg disease spreads between species.
(The Conversation)
Climate change and Africa. Another read from The Conversation Africa about how climate change continues to disproportionately affect Africa, a, well, conversation with an author of a report reviewing global heat.
(The Conversation)
Repeat a lie long enough... And finally, a report, an exposé, from Francesca Albanese about all the corporates that have Palestinian blood on their hands and continue to profit from the genocide in Gaza.
(UN OHCR)
Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn't want you to see this.
Thanks