💉Ebola becomes DRC's largest outbreak ever; UNDP says Sudan can feed itself; The Pandemic Pact is here finally almost nearly maybe
#616 | Inequality itself is a pandemic; Peanuts, we love peanuts; Is the world getting hot, or is it just us?
Hello, and welcome back to The Kable, where we will once again bring you all the news and the views with rose-tinted lenses.
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.
Before we dive into the stories of the week...
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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)