💉 Everybody has hypertension; Everybody's getting cancer; HIV prevention just got cheaper

#577 | Prepare for a drought, bathe today; Beware of squirrels; Digging up antibiotics

Sep 26, 2025

Hello, and welcome back to The Kable. We know you missed us last week and we’re sorry about that. But to make up for it, we’re back this week. Yay.

First things first, the Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo, far from being under control, has actually moved to new regions as well, with 8 new cases this week, according to the Africa CDC weekly brief. From the same briefing, continent-wide mpox numbers continue their downward trend but Liberia and Kenya are bucking the trend, with numbers growing by 130% and 120% respectively.

As always, there is more disease plaguing Africa, with cholera prominent. In Sudan, every state is now reporting a cholera outbreak.

In Gaza, where the UN officially declared a famine not too long ago, Israel continues to escalate its violent occupation and four more hospitals have shut down.

In other parts of the world, the Matanzas region in Cuba is being buffeted with a double outbreak - dengue and chikungunya.

CEPI is turning to AI in its 100 Days mission, funding a project that will use AI to “help the world prep” for the next pandemic. Heh!

The WHO, having dropped the ball on multiple fronts in the first pandemic of this century, is digging in deeper on traditional medicine with plans to launch a global library for it this year. As someone who has used Yadom, this editor can say that traditional medicine might have its place in the world, if backed by data and evidence. Most traditional medicine lacks both data and clinical evidence. And the country that is hosting the WHO’s summit on traditional medicine this year has a whole bunch of charlatans using traditional medicine as the means to pull the wool over the eyes of a trusting bunch of sheep.

Speaking of wool over the eyes, the world’s foremost medical expert has a cure for autism. And this orange expert believes paracetamol causes autism and that pregnant people should just grin and bear it when it hurts. His administration even found a willing flunky at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to release a study proving his claims. So what if the exact same claims made by this supposed expert were thrown out of court two years ago?

In more US tomfoolery, the country vetoed a UN declaration on NCDs, sending it to a vote instead. And the stupidity is catching with ostrich farm owners in Canada citing US support to prevent culling ostriches on their farm with bird flu. The US also announced 100% tariffs on branded pharma imports. Our First Kabler welcomed this announcement because it would’ve meant small-time manufacturers in the pharmacy of the world who play fast and loose with regulations would be forced to cease and desist. However, the new US announcement excludes generics so loopholes exist for the brave.

Health authorities in the US also released a report this week that said between 2019 and 2023, there was a 461% increase in the infection rate of certain bacteria that can thwart most antibiotic treatments. This will matter lesser and lesser as time passes though because fewer and fewer people in the US are taking meds anyway. And if AMR affects them, they’ll take their president’s advice and grin and bear it.

This editor recently got a deep clean done of their house and somehow the news made it to Ecology journal because apparently insects are disappearing from the last places we thought were safe. Pretty sure that was Ecology calling out our teenager.

And finally, the rodent revolution is here. And it has begun in the US with a ‘very mean squirrel.’

Stories Of The Week

Rewriting HIV prevention. It was barely a fortnight ago that Luciana de Melo, HIV/AIDS Coordinator at Brazil’s health ministry, speaking to UNAIDS, said “When an innovation can save people’s lives but does not reach the people who need it, can we consider it an innovation?” In a movie that would’ve been called foreshadowing because Luciana de Melo was talking about innovations in HIV treatment which have been out of reach for the people that need it most. But this week, two Indian generics makers, Hetero and Dr Reddy’s, announced that they will launch low-cost versions of Gilead’s twice-yearly HIV prevention jab, lenacapavir, priced at about $40 a year from 2027. Funded by the Gates Foundation and Unitaid with guarantees to cover production risks, the plan aims to fast-track access, create competition, and cut costs further. Nearly 100% effective and easier to stick to than daily pills, this is the shot that could finally shift the economics and trajectory of a 44-year epidemic.
(Fierce Pharma)

SSDD. A new WHO/UNICEF report finds that despite growing national commitments and standards, billions of people still rely on health facilities without safe water, sanitation, hygiene, waste management, or reliable electricity. While more than 100 countries are scaling up assessments and roadmaps, financing remains the critical gap, leaving patients and health workers at risk unless urgent investment accelerates progress toward 2030 targets. Which isn’t gonna happen.
(UNICEF)

When neither prevention nor cure works. The WHO’s latest report says 1.4 billion people are living with hypertension, but barely one in five have it under control. Every hour, over a thousand people die from strokes and heart attacks tied to it. And most of these deaths are entirely preventable with drugs that are cheap, safe, and effective. But in low-income countries just 28% can reliably stock all the basics. And here we are, staring at a trillion-dollar tab, rising mortality, and a health crisis that needs political will and supply chains rather than science for resolution. Progress is possible. Bangladesh and South Korea have proved it. But unless others follow suit, hypertension remains medicine’s most boringly solvable catastrophe.
(WHO)

Cancer 2050 for the win. The Lancet has a new analysis and it makes for rather grim reading: by 2050, annual cancer deaths are projected to hit 18.6 million, nearly 75% higher than today, driven not by some mysterious new plague but by the perfectly predictable facts of population growth and ageing. New cancer cases will rise 61% to 30.5 million. Almost half of deaths are tied to modifiable risks like tobacco, diet, and high blood sugar - problems the world could, in theory, fix. Yet low- and middle-income countries, where cases are rising fastest, face the fewest resources to prevent, diagnose, or treat cancer. For all the talk of “sustainable development goals,” the study warns that unless governments invest in cancer prevention and care now, 2050 will deliver a crushingly expensive, deeply unequal, and entirely foreseeable disaster - one we’ll only be able to say we saw coming. And The Lancet report only talks about conventionally accepted cancers. Neither the future impacts of air pollution, water scarcity, coltan mining or Israel are factored in.
(The Lancet)

Breakthroughs

From dust, ye have come. For decades, medicine’s antibiotic cupboard has been running bare - in no small part because most microbes can’t be coaxed to grow in the lab. Now, scientists have hacked the problem by pulling giant fragments of DNA straight out of soil, stitching together hundreds of never-seen bacterial genomes, and mining them for bioactive molecules. Out of a single forest scoop came two promising new antibiotic leads, erutacidin and trigintamicin, with unusual ways of killing even resistant bugs. It’s a reminder that the ground beneath our feet is still medicine’s greatest R&D lab, and that we’ve barely even begun to, well, scratch the surface.
(Nature Biotechnology)

Bottom line

Water, water, everywhere... NOT! A new study warns that by 2100, nearly three-quarters of the world’s drought-prone regions could face crippling “day zero” water shortages - and for many places, the countdown starts decades earlier. By 2030, more than 750 million people may already be vulnerable as demand outpaces supply and recovery times shrink between droughts. Hotspots range all over the world, with climate change and rising water use colliding in a slow-motion crisis. The good news is that by 2100 most of us will be dead and the dead don’t need no water. Suck it, science.
(Nature Communications)

Long reads

Popping pills. Don’t want to grin and bear it when it hurts? Trust the science. Pop a painkiller. Fish the fascist anti-science bottomholes. Nature tells you why paracetamol is still gold.
(Nature)

The comeback no one wanted. Okay, so, dengue never really went away to make a comeback but it is resurgent everywhere right now. The Conversation wonders why. TLDR: it’s mosquitoes.
(The Conversation)

Build in Africa to make in Africa. KEMRI writes in Nation about the urgent imperative to expand global databases to include African genetic data.
(Nation)

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