💉Eat more fish today; Kids may not have a pretty future but at least they don't have a good present either; The hungry get hungrier
#609 | Ebola continues its record run; A hot wedding, and a hotter marriage; A vaccine for hantavirus?
Hello, and welcome back to The Kable. We’ve had a year of lengthy issues of The Kable so far, but this week, after 21 long issues, finally promises to be the lightest issue this year. In length, if not in morbidity.
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)