💊 Kenyan pharma making moves; Canadian healthcare failing babies; Africa proof of climate change-disease connect

#310 | Human catches plant infection; Mpox makes an annual rotation; Secret to net-zero lies in the ocean

Hello there. Welcome to another week with The Kable. Did you have a good weekend?

This man in India sure didn’t, as he gained fame as the first human to get ill with a plant fungus. He was infected with Chondrostereum purpureum, which ordinarily causes silver leaf disease in plants.

Over in Africa, Kenya continues to welcome foreign investments in its pharma and biotech sectors. While Moderna is set to establish its first mRNA facility in Africa, Kenya is looking to partner with Belgium’s Univercells to produce drugs and vaccines in a new biotechnology centre in Nairobi.

Meanwhile, Germany’s life sciences group Sartorius is on its way to acquiring France’s Polyplus for 2.4 billion euros. This gives Sartorius access to key components in the production of viral vectors, which are used in cell and gene therapies.

A couple of weeks ago, health officials in the UK withdrew cough medicines containing Pholcodine amid the discovery that they could trigger life-threatening allergic reactions in patients who received general anaesthesia before surgery up to 12 months later. The WHO has now issued an alert about these anaphylactic risks. Australia, Malaysia and the EU have also already withdrawn all Pholcodine-containing products from their markets.

In February, India’s Global Pharma Healthcare initiated a recall of 50,000 tubes of eye drops linked to vision loss from the US market. This report details the US FDA’s observations during an investigation of Global Pharma’s facility in Tamil Nadu, India.

In the US, fallouts of the pandemic continue to come to light as research indicates that the number of teens seeking care for eating disorders doubled during this period.

In Europe, despite high vaccination rates in the region, 17 mpox cases have been identified in Centre-Val de Loire in France.

Syphilis has been rising around the world in the past half-decade. In Canada, the number of cases of congenital syphilis is rising faster than in any other wealthy nation, a growth fuelled by increasing meth use and lack of healthcare access for Indigenous people.

And finally, migratory birds are helping the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus migrate as well. In Senegal, authorities are drawing epidemiological links between a bird flu outbreak in a national park and another one on a poultry farm.