💉 Good news, the malaria shot works; Plants are not in vogue anymore; Mosquitoes, choosing where you stay
#604 | Don't buy that cruise ticket; My baby don't need no Vitamin K; Coffee for the win, always
Hello, and welcome back to The Kable.
First things first, when we signed off last week, we had plans for what we would write about in The Kable this week, apart from summarising the stories that met us during the week. Those plans involved putting together the words blue and carbon, and separately putting together the words green and water and India. But life comes at you fast. This week, life came in the shape of a cruise liner, carrying hantavirus on board. And not just any ole hantavirus but the Andes virus which actually is known to spread from human to human. We’ll have a little more to say about that a little further down but we’ll end this bit here by saying we don’t believe this hantavirus outbreak on this cruise liner will result in another pandemic, or even a minidemic. But will it result in more people dying/falling ill than avoidable? Oh, our “health authorities” are certainly trying their best. And in serendipitous news, world leaders met last week, for the 6-and-a-halfth, and final, final, time, to flesh out a pandemic agreement. And they decided to meet again for a seventh time in July. Hopefully, for a final, final, final time.
In regular Kable programming, we doubt it was because saner heads prevailed but the US didn’t go through with their threat to pull funding for HIV meds for Zambia. And Zambia officially stated that the proposed bilateral health deal with the US was not about aid but access to minerals and data.
Over in Sudan, drones attacked the airport at Khartoum, an attack that Sudan explicitly called the UAE out for, while also asking Ethiopia to not let warmongers use their space. Ethiopia responded by calling the allegations baseless. This is exactly what Zecharias Zelalem explained while talking about Ethiopia and Eritrea last week. It is not African nations fighting each other. It is armourers sitting elsewhere creating strife, because that unrest is where they see the biggest gains for themselves.
A week doesn’t go by lately when we don’t hear about Africa’s path to achieving self-sufficiency by 2040. And we need more talking. We need more doing too. A new assessment by the WHO says Africa’s qualified health workforce is on the rise, growing from 4.3 million in 2018 to 5.72 million in 2024. However, the rate of unemployment among these qualified healthcare workers is rising too. In 2024 alone, nearly a million of them were without jobs. And not because Africa has all the health workers it needs. That department is still only staffed at 46%. It is because countries still haven’t invested enough in health budgets. A real chicken-and-egg situation here which, if not solved, will see Africa dealing with a projected shortage of 5.85 million healthcare workers by 2030.
ARILAC. That’s the acronym of the week for the Africa CDC. And it stands for Advancing Regional Integrated Laboratory Capacity for AMR Control, an initiative the agency is launching alongwith the the African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM) and the EU to strengthen microbiology laboratory systems, AMR surveillance, and the integration of One Health data across the continent.
Dr Delese Mimi Darko, the Director General of the African Medicines Agency (AMA) has written an op-ed on the progress the agency has made so far in its mission to achieve regulatory harmonisation across Africa. 31 countries have so far signed on to the AMA. Let’s hope all the others sign on soon too.
In UN news, Bahrain and the US, without even the remotest trace of irony, have passed a security council resolution asking Iran to stop its attacks in the Strait of Hormuz. Ignorance, they say, is bliss. Delusion must be blissest.
Elsewhere, Israel has had enough of the pretend ceasefire and attacked Beirut earlier this week, while also indulging in one of its favourite “double-tap” tactics targeted at paramedics.
Many years ago, when we’d just begun The Kable, there were weeks on end when the news was endlessly about Novartis laying off people here, there and everywhere. Feels like déjà vu to see that not much has changed. BioNTech, too, is saying buh-bye to people and places, because the Covid boom didn’t last long enough for them, we guess.
A little earlier this year, boosted by the US’ declining share in international aid, Germany became the world’s largest aid donor. Apparently petrified by the thought, German lawmakers are scaling down their aid budget.
One bad coffee news day is just the exception that proves the rule about all coffee news being good news. And proving the rule is this study that says coffee not only improves focus, it also reduces anxiety. Heck, even decaf helps with learning and memory. Now, that is a magical bean, Jack!
A standard preventive measure in most “developed” countries, and one of the drugs on the WHO’s list of essential medicines for newborns is a Vitamin K shot which protects them from internal bleeding, brain damage, or death by jumpstarting the clotting process. Except, in the US, thanks to conspiracy theorists and health authorities (yes, we know, they’re now one and the same), parents are increasingly not giving their babies these shots, and more and more babies are dying.
And finally, everybody’s heard of Alcatraz, right? That infamous prison that was so difficult to break out of that when people did do that, they made movies out of it? Anyway, these are modern times, and nobody is trying to break out of Alcatraz anymore. But a coyote swam two miles or more to break into Alcatraz. Wily!
Stories Of The Week
A requiem for malaria? Mosquitoes have ruled the planet for far too long. But in recent times, we have hope that the tide may be beginning to turn. Evidence? Here it is. A rigorous evaluation published in The Lancet confirms what public health officials have been waiting to hear: the RTS,S malaria vaccine is saving children’s lives across Africa. Over four years in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, approximately one in eight child deaths were averted among those eligible to receive it. In 2024 alone, malaria killed an estimated 438,000 African children. If similar coverage could be achieved across the 25 endemic African countries now offering malaria vaccines, tens of thousands of additional lives could be saved annually.
The evaluation, which tracked outcomes from the WHO’s Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme between 2019 and 2023, found something else worth noting: introducing malaria vaccines didn’t cannibalise uptake of other childhood vaccines or erode the use of insecticide-treated nets. In fact, the vaccine schedule created opportunities to deliver measles and meningitis vaccines simultaneously, alongside vitamin A supplementation and bed nets. Children who hadn’t previously accessed any malaria prevention suddenly had at least one layer of protection.
So, the vaccine works. Supply exists. Demand is there. What’s missing? Money. Funding constraints are preventing countries from scaling vaccination to their national targets or sustaining the coverage they’ve already achieved.The urgency to accelerate deployment is real, the obstacles are financial, and the window for action is narrow. To put things into a little more perspective, to vaccinate all children currently aged five to 36 months in malaria-endemic areas of Africa would cost approximately $1.4 billion, with an ongoing annual cost of $592 million to vaccinate new cohorts. The US alone has spent, at a lowball estimate, $25 billion in the first 60 days of attacking Iran. Space Karen spent $40-odd billion buying Twitter and turning it into a circle jerk for conspiracy theorists and hatemongers and ragebaiters. In India, a billionaire spent gazillions on a wedding for his son, and then gazillions more on a private “zoo.” Yet, we can’t defeat malaria.
(WHO, The Lancet)
Refugees of the Nile. Roughly 850,000 Sudanese are now living in Egypt, having fled a conflict entering its fourth year. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, provides registration, protection services, health, education, and cash assistance to these arrivals. But the system is collapsing from underfunding.
In 2025, funding levels remained almost unchanged from 2022, before the Sudan crisis erupted. Yet the refugee population in Egypt has nearly quadrupled, from 300,000 to more than 1.1 million.
The cash assistance programme, which allows refugees dignity by letting them choose whether to pay rent, buy food, or fund education, has received only 2% of required funding. More than half the intended beneficiary families are no longer supported. UNHCR warns the entire programme faces closure within weeks without additional funding.
The impact is acute. Most families receiving cash assistance are headed by women with school-aged children. When support ends, mothers face an impossible choice: feed their children or send them to school. A single breadwinner cannot sustain a family of that size.
There are, however, faint signs of progress. Private companies have begun offering training and job opportunities to refugees through corporate social responsibility programmes. This could equip people with skills transferable when they eventually return home safely. But without basic survival support, these opportunities remain out of reach.
(UN News)
Cruise control. So, hantavirus has been dominating the newsfeed this week, eh? Well, at least ours. So, a quick catch-up. The ship in question, the MV Hondius, is a Dutch-flagged expedition cruise liner, that left Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1, with plans to visit remote parts of the South Atlantic and Antarctica. Stops included Antarctica, South Georgia, Tristan da Cunha, St Helena, Ascension Island, and others. The first person to be infected, who died on arrival at St Helena, was a Dutch passenger who boarded the ship in Argentina on April 1, along with his wife, who also fell ill and died in South Africa, after having”briefly boarded” a KLM flight to Amsterdam. Now, hantavirus generally doesn’t spread from human to human, and is more often spread from from rodents to people. It also has an incubation period between one and eight weeks. So, it is likely the index patients caught the illness in Argentina, where they even visited landfills among other touristy things to do. However, one type of hantavirus does spread from person to person - the Andes virus. And authorities in South Africa confirmed that, in this case, it was indeed the Andes virus at play. At the moment, there are five suspected cases, two deaths, and one infection on the MV Hondius. And four suspected cases, one infection, and one death in South Africa. And one confirmed case in Israel (tender mercies). One confirmed case in Switzerland. And suspected cases in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, the US, Canada, and Singapore. Did our health authorities learn lessons from Covid? On first evidence, no. And we believe that warrants an independent Kable of its own, which we might release mid-week next week. Maybe along with all the wonderful things that cruises can offer you besides. But, even with a 30%+ mortality rate and an R number of 2, we’re pretty certain the Andes virus won’t bring us to the next pandemic. Won’t hurt to buy a few fit-tested N95 masks nevertheless.
Bottom line
The mosquito migration. A new study says mosquitoes have been running human affairs since before we even knew what running meant. Malaria didn’t just kill our ancestors. It herded them around like particularly fragile livestock, fragmenting populations across Africa over 74,000 years and fundamentally shaping which humans ended up next to which other humans. Yeah, so you didn’t choose your neighbours. Bloody mosquitoes chose them for you.
Climate mattered, sure, but a parasitic disease transmitted by an insect the size of a full stop proved equally bossy. The research, which combined mosquito distribution models with paleoclimate data, found that early human populations consistently sidestepped high-malaria zones, creating genetic divisions that ripple through our DNA today. So while we like to imagine our ancestors conquering landscapes through sheer grit and ingenuity, they were actually just trying not to die of fever in swampy bits of Africa.
So far, history has credited climate and geography with sculpting human evolution, but malaria, an organism so ancient and persistent that it makes human civilisation look like a weekend hobby, deserves equal billing. We might have opened with good news on the malaria vaccine front but boy, this story might make us eat our words if a mosquito doesn’t put paid to us first.
(Science Advances)
What do humans need for life? Air, water, food, love, humour? Clothes optional. Everything else is either comfort or luxury, not a need. The one common denominator in air, water and food is plant life. And without air, water, and food, there is bound to be no love or humour either. Funnily (haha), it is plants that we’re not factoring in the extinction numbers. Plants are dying out by the tens of thousands and absolutely no one is losing sleep over it. Between 35,000 and 50,000 plant species will effectively vanish by century’s end. That’s between 7% and 16% of all plant species on Earth, stripped of 90% of their habitat in the next 55 to 75 years.
Climate change is the culprit: warmer temperatures and shifted rainfall patterns are carving up the world into unlivable zones faster than plants can relocate. Even if plants could somehow sprint towards the poles and higher altitudes on pure determination alone, it wouldn’t matter. In places like the Arctic, Mediterranean, and Australia (unsurprisingly), the extinction crisis is already catastrophic.
Yes, we’re about to torch our own survival in the process. Nearly 10,000 flowering plant species are already teetering on extinction, including some that have been around for hundreds of millions of years with no close relatives to pick up the slack. The vanilla orchid is going. The titan arum, the world’s smelliest plant, is going. Species that represent vast swaths of evolutionary history are vanishing because conservation bodies don’t prioritise plants the way they do animals. Which is rather inconvenient given that plants are, technically, how humans eat and survive. When plant futures become unstable, food security collapses. Maintaining the conditions that support human life requires urgent action. But we’re too busy looking elsewhere.
(Science)
Long reads
The art of the steal. The New Humanitarian talks about how Uganda’s new health deal with the US is already seeing lives being impacted on the ground, even though the deal hasn’t even kicked in yet.
(The New Humanitarian)
Have the cows stopped farting, Clarice? Health Policy Watch on the rise and rise of methane emissions from fossil fuels. Hey, records are there to be broken, right?
(Health Policy Watch)
Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn’t want you to see this.