💉 Hungry? Don't buy a snack; Your pet is fat, and it's your fault; Methane on the rise
#584 | The world can't get enough of hitting women; Women not safe online either; Vaccines work, take that naysayers
Hello, and welcome back to The Kable for yet another week where the bad news weighs far too much on the scales for even the bleakest ray of sunlight to shine through. The good news, though, is that we may not have hit rock bottom yet. Yay, humanity!
In Ethiopia, the mystery haemorrhagic fever that authorities reported last week turned out to be the country’s first outbreak of Marburg, an outbreak that has already claimed three lives as of last update. Amid the ceaseless conflict with Eritrea over access to the Red Sea and worsening conditions in Tigray, we’re not sure Ethiopia is equipped to handle a large-scale Marburg outbreak.
Elsewhere in Africa, the Africa CDC has unveiled a new “vision” for the continent’s health security and sovereignty. Aptly called the Africa Health Security and Sovereignty (AHSS) Agenda, the plan seeks to align global health initiatives with Africa’s needs while unifying the a pan-continent healthcare network including surveillance systems, labs and public health institutes, among others. The plan also has three other “pillars” in service of Africa’s health independence. As much as we want the Africa CDC to succeed in becoming the strongest voice for Africa’s health, we also want the agency to become successful at implementation and execution. And the fact that 16 African countries are in talks with the US’ modern-day imperalist agenda doesn’t bode too well for either the Africa CDC or for general African independence.
Speaking of agencies and failures, we hope every single member of the UN Security Council is drowning in shame somewhere for passing a US-initiated mandate to set up an “international security force” in Gaza. Even the two absentions deserve shame for abstaining from, and not rejecting, the vote. The only country exempt from shame is obviously the US because we all know they are incapable of feeling shame. Or remorse.
We spoke just last week about how one can’t keep ignoring what happens in other parts of the world simply because it’s not in your backyard. Germany seems to have belatedly woken up to that realisation and is now reversing cuts it was considering to the global polio eradication fund. Nothing like a virus in your wastewater to develop a conscience.
Last week, we also said how, at COP30, Brazil announced a fund to protect the world’s forests and not many contributed to it. Well, Germany has just pledged €1 billion.
Nestle continues to do Nestle things, selling “healthier” products in rich countries and sugar-laden junk in Africa. This is a multi-billion dollar global corporation that can’t even perfect the packaging on their instant coffee bottles so expecting any better of them is just more fool us, we think.
Drug resistance is coming for your gonads, says the WHO. And maybe now, Big Pharma will spend some R&D money on developing better, newer drugs.
Bird flu is still around. Everywhere. In South Korea, a fourth farm has been affected this season. In Cambodia, the human infections continue, with 18 cases this year. The latest was a 22-year-old man who no longer has bird flu. Or life. Austria joins the list of European countries reporting outbreaks. And in the US, men and mice are getting infected. The man in question was infected with the H5N5 strain that has never before been reported in people.
And finally, if you live in a city, better get used to living in increasingly close quarters coz everybody wants a slice of that city life.
Stories Of The Week
Tale as old as time... Eight hundred and forty million women. That’s the scale of intimate partner or sexual violence the WHO is now willing to put a number to in a new report released this week. That is roughly one in three women worldwide, with progress moving at a glacial 0.2% a year. There’s no mincing words in the report. The violence starts early (12.5 million girls face it before turning 20), it spans every region, and it doesn’t soften with age, disability, or displacement. Non-partner violence adds another 263 million cases, though everyone agrees that under-reporting keeps the real figure comfortably worse. And while the evidence for prevention is clearer than ever, global funding is evaporating, especially from donors pulling back on sexual and reproductive health services, often the only entry point survivors have.
(WHO)
...Modern tools, medieval thinking. And yes, the violence in the real world is now faithfully mirrored online. What was once sold as women’s gateway to empowerment has become, for millions, a digital minefield shaped by AI, anonymity, and a stunning lack of accountability. A new report from the UN says 1.8 billion women and girls have zero legal protection from online harassment, and fewer than 40% of countries even bother with cyberstalking laws. Meanwhile, deepfake abuse - 95% of it pornographic and nearly all of it targeting women - has gone from fringe to industrial scale, pushed by tools often designed without women in mind at all. And the “online–offline divide” is pure fiction. Digital abuse spills into lost jobs, dropped schooling, real-world stalking, and, in the darkest cases, femicide. If technology is going to serve equality rather than supercharge misogyny, someone needs to redesign the incentives, and preferably not the same all-male teams who trained the deepfake engines in the first place.
(UN)
You are what you eat. And what you’re eating is mostly garbage. Ultra-processed foods (UPF) are having their Lancet moment, and the verdict isn’t subtle: these products aren’t just bad snacks, they’re structural drivers of what experts are now calling a “chronic disease pandemic.” The numbers are grim and consistent across more than a hundred long-term studies. Higher UPF intake tracks with obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, and early death. The science isn’t perfect, and no one serious is pretending correlation equals causation. Meanwhile, the industry responsible has spent decades reformulating, rebranding, and reassuring, swapping fats for gums and sugars for sweeteners while disease rates keep climbing. The underlying message from the Lancet’s UPF series is that this isn’t about individual choice or one too many ready meals. It never has been. It’s about a food system engineered for profit, not public health.
What makes the whole picture feel uncomfortably familiar is the political choreography surrounding it. Researchers describe a playbook straight out of Big Tobacco: lobbying, litigation, agency infiltration, manufactured scientific doubt, and global networks of front groups working to stall regulation. With UPFs accounting for up to half of daily calories in most countries and upto 80% in some, the health impacts aren’t abstractions; they’re baked into modern diets. The Lancet team wants governments to stop tinkering at the edges and tackle UPFs directly: warning labels, marketing restrictions, taxes, procurement reform, and real limits on corporate influence. Because if your entire food environment is ultra-processed, your health outcomes will be too. No amount of “balanced diet” messaging is going to fix that.
(The Lancet)
Not inevitable. Just ignored. UNICEF’s latest State of the World’s Children report paints a blunt picture: 417 million children in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are severely deprived of at least two essentials - nutrition, sanitation, housing, healthcare, education, or clean water - with 118 million facing three or more. Progress that once looked promising has stalled under the weight of conflict, climate shocks, demographic pressure, rising debt, and sweeping cuts to development aid that could push millions more into deprivation. The inequalities are starkest in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where both multidimensional and monetary poverty cluster, but rich countries hardly get a pass: relative child poverty has risen by more than 20% in places like France, Switzerland, and the UK. Despite the scale of the problem, examples from Tanzania, Bangladesh, and Slovenia show that poverty can fall quickly when governments treat children’s rights as policy, not charity, prioritising social protection, public services, and economic security rather than outsourcing responsibility to “growth” and hoping for the best.
(UNICEF)
Bottom line
The cows, they just won’t stop farting. Halfway to the 2030 deadline, the world has managed to shave just 8% off methane emissions, barely a quarter of what more than 100 countries pledged in Glasgow in 2021. The UN’s first global stocktake since COP26 is blunt: methane levels are at an 800,000-year high, rising faster than commitments, and three of the top five emitters - China, India, and Russia - still haven’t signed the pledge. Yet the science hasn’t changed: methane is responsible for a third of current warming, packs 86 times the punch of CO₂, and declines quickly in the atmosphere, making it the closest thing climate policy has to a fast-acting brake. The report shows that “maximum feasible reductions” could still exceed the 30% target and deliver $330 billion a year in benefits by 2030, from avoided deaths to rescued crop yields. Most of the cheapest cuts sit in the fossil-fuel sector, where stopping leaks and ending routine flaring would cost industry just a sliver of annual profits. But with global emissions still rising, US backsliding on regulations, and satellite data revealing massive underreporting, the gap between what’s promised and what’s happening keeps widening. And no, it is not all cows’ fault.
(UNEP)
Pets for me, no pets for thee. There’s an old saying that goes something along the lines of how pets begin to mimic their humans’ personalities over time. But a new study says pets are taking that a bit too literally. Chronic diseases once labelled “human” are now turning up across the animal kingdom, from diabetic house cats to arthritic pigs and beluga whales with gastrointestinal tumours, not that beluga whales are anybody’s pets. A new framework from researchers at the Agricultural University of Athens argues that these rising non-communicable diseases share the same drivers across species: selective breeding, poor diets, chronic stress, pollution, and an environment reshaped by climate change. The patterns are strikingly consistent. Over half of domestic pets are overweight, intensively farmed pigs show high rates of osteoarthritis, salmon develop cardiomyopathy, and wildlife in polluted waters carry tumour burdens comparable to industrial-era humans. Urban heat, chemical runoff, collapsing ecosystems and biodiversity loss all amplify these risks, yet surveillance systems for animal NCDs barely exist. By integrating One Health and Ecohealth approaches, the study offers a model for understanding how genetic susceptibility and environmental pressure collide, and why the chronic disease crisis isn’t just a human story but a planetary one. But hey, we’re killing the planet anyway, why not take our pets along?
(Risk Analysis)
Long reads
Decide locally too. Countries are leaving millions on the table by sticking to outdated or politically skewed Essential Medicines Lists instead of routinely reviewing what actually works and what’s worth paying for. A recent analysis from Uganda shows how swapping out newer, pricier diabetes drugs for older WHO-recommended options could save over $2.6 million a year - money that could be redirected to screening, diagnostics, or staff. This piece argues that all of Africa could benefit from this.
(Health Policy Watch)
Get that jab. And this one too. Get them all. This piece in Gavi’s VaccinesWork beautifully illustrates how well the HPV vaccine is doing its job. Proof, if it ever were needed, that antivax, antiscience antiholes like a certain someone in the US health hierarchy are ignorant at best, but more likely malicious.
(Gavi)
AMR in Africa. Antimicrobial resistance is already killing more than a million people a year, yet remains largely invisible because the drug-resistant infection behind a death rarely makes it onto the chart. As misuse of antibiotics in humans and animals accelerates, and intensive farming systems leak resistant bacteria into food, water, and soil, the line between a “treatable” infection and a fatal one is thinning fast. Experts warn that without urgent, coordinated action across health, agriculture, and the environment, AMR won’t stay silent; it will simply become unavoidable.
(AllAfrica)
Cough syrup? No, thank you. Reuters breaks down how Indian-made cough syrups often turn fatal. Yup, it’s greed is what it is.
(Reuters)
Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn’t want you to see this.
Thanks for the eye opener report on Cerelac in Africa and cough syrup in India