💊 Life in the time of cholera; Life in the time of bird flu; Life after the time of Covid

#285 | Health regulations anew; PFAs can kill you; Sleeping less too can kill you

Hello, and welcome back to The Kable, for what looks like a weekend news cycle filled with Covid and bird flu.

The US FDA recently authorised its first-ever joint Covid and flu test. However the company that makes the test is downing shutters because the US FDA delayed approval for the test.

The US Energy Department, with low confidence, says Covid most likely originated due to a lab leak in China.

And the proposal to outlaw Covid vaccines has now been passed in a county in Florida.

In Hong Kong, the government, which had set up the Chinese Medicine Development Fund with an initial outlay of HKD500 million, is pumping the same amount again into the fund aimed at promoting Chinese medicine research and development.

And finally, the human death caused by bird flu in Cambodia last week seems to have (excuse the pun) set the cat among the pigeons. One other person from the same family also tested positive for bird flu, which authorities have identified as a clade endemic to Cambodia. The WHO says the situation is worrying and that it is working with Cambodia. Elsewhere, the agency's flu experts have gathered for their biannual meeting on flu mitigation, where bird flu is certain to feature high on the agenda. The US has recently detected bird flu in a whole raft of non-bird mammals, including skunks, raccoons, foxes, bobcats and bears. The UK is already prepping contingency plans for a bird flu outbreak. We end with a sobering wrap-up of all the recent developments.