💉 The WHO launches the next phase of mRNA tech transfer; Climate change claims millions; A weapon against AMR?
#581 | Indian drugmakers go trick-or-treating, as always; The world's forests are still disappearing, just slower; Bird flu, your furever friend
Boo, and welcome back to The Kable for the last time this October.
Good news from DRC where the last Ebola patient was discharged last week. With no new cases reported since, we can hope that this latest outbreak is past us. However, the country is still struggling with a devastating cholera outbreak though. Cholera is also rampant in South Sudan.
Last week also saw doors close on the fourth International Conference on Public Health in Africa (CPHIA) in Durban, South Africa with the next edition scheduled for November 2026 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This edition concluded with the launch of “The Durban Promise,” which we sincerely hope doesn’t turn out to be just another in a long list of promises/manifestos/declarations that multilateral agencies have been dropping for a long time now. On paper, this “promise” is great, with seven continental commitments to set Africa on the continent’s continuing path to health self-reliance and independence. Making in Africa, innovativing health financing, ensuring pandemic preparedness and response, and ensuring data ownership and governance are part of this “promise.” Funding remains a critical challenge though and we hope capable pan-African leadership finds a way to overcome this soon.
South Africa has launched an ambitious initiative to clamp down on fake and substandard drugs in the country, another plan that we can put all our energy behind.
Elsewhere, after the spectacular success (/s) that Phase 1 of the WHO’s mRNA tech transfer program has been, the agency has gone ahead and launched Phase 2 to see it till 2030.
CEPI has entered into another partnership with India’s Serum Institute, this time to set up a stockpile of vaccines for Nipah virus. The release says this will be the world’s largest such reserve, which sounds impressive, until you realise there really aren’t that many around to begin with. CEPI also launched a vaccine safety network, spanning 6 countries, to generate safety data for new vaccines in LMICs.
In a boost to local manufacturing in the Global South, CSL Seqirus is partnering with Saudi Arabia to make seasonal and pandemic flu vaccines locally.
In unsurprising Halloween news, Indian drugmakers are either recalling products in the US, or facing rebukes from regulators, or, in one case, not even trying to hide lizards and cats at their unauthorised API warehouse. Well, if it’s unauthorised, then it should be beyond regulatory purview, one supposes.
Considering the lack of news around it, one might be forgiven for believing bird flu is not around anymore. Well, a lot of Europe won’t be eating chicken for Christmas this year. And scientists may have found a strain of bird flu that has already adapted itself to warm, human bodies.
And finally, if you don’t like mosquitoes, you’re pretty much out of options now because mosquitoes have now been found even in Iceland. This leaves Antarctica as the only place on Earth that doesn’t have mosquitoes. That’s probably because even mosquitoes are afraid of all the sexual assault that happens over there. Mosquitoes don’t really have pricks, do they?
Stories Of The Week
Millions. That’s the body count of climate change already. And it is not getting any better any time soon. The latest Lancet Countdown reads like a global autopsy: heat, pollution, wildfires, and infectious diseases are carving through populations faster than policymakers can hold a summit. Thirteen of twenty health indicators just hit record highs. The planet blew past 1.5°C in 2024, greenhouse gases hit new peaks, and scientists are out of synonyms for “catastrophic.” Heat exposure alone is killing roughly one person every minute, mostly in places least responsible for the mess, while drought, hunger, and lost work hours are dragging entire economies backwards. The world’s “climate strategy,” if you can call it that, remains an expensive game of denial. Fifteen countries now spend more on fossil fuel subsidies than on healthcare, and the biggest emitters are still doubling down. Even the UN had to admit the 1.5°C target is dead on arrival; the new target seems to be surviving the overshoot without mass collapse.
(Lancet)
Breakthroughs
AMR? Maybe no more. Researchers have accidentally unearthed a long‑overlooked biosynthetic stepping‑stone - pre‑methylenomycin C lactone - and, surprise, it smashes Gram‑positive superbugs like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) a hundred times harder than the tired old methylenomycin A. Even more astonishing, the usual suspects don’t scramble to develop resistance under the same pressure that renders vancomycin practically obsolete, suggesting we finally have a bullet that the bugs aren’t eager to dodge. With a clean, “obviously scalable” synthesis now in hand, the molecule is poised for pre‑clinical trials, offering perhaps the breakthrough the AMR battlefield has been begging for. But if, and only if, pharma stops treating antimicrobial resistance as a charitable side‑project and starts funding real solutions instead of polishing their next blockbuster cancer pill.
(Journal of the American Chemical Society)
Bottom line
Chop, chop. The FAO’s 2025 forest report tells us that the world’s woodlands have finally stopped sprinting toward oblivion. Deforestation now dribbles at about 10.9 million ha a year instead of the previous marathon pace. However, that’s still a lot of trees getting the axe, so the alarm isn’t switched off. At 4.14 billion ha (roughly a third of Earth’s land), forests are now half‑managed, a fifth locked behind legal fences, and 71 % publicly owned, which sounds impressive until you remember fire, pests and freak weather still torch or chew through hundreds of millions of hectares each year. Net loss has dropped dramatically - from 10.7 million ha in the ’90s to 4.12 million ha in the 2015‑25 window - and primary‑forest loss has halved, yet naturally regenerating woods (92% of the total) are still shedding a hefty 324 million ha since 1990.
(FAO)
Killing me softly. The new State of Global Air report shows that the invisible cloud we all love to blame on traffic is quietly killing. About 7.9 million people a year, from frail infants to forgetful retirees, with dementia alone claiming 626 000 lives in 2023 (that’s more than one senior citizen per minute). PM₂․₅, nitrogen oxides and even ozone slip past our lungs, hitch a ride to the brain, and spark inflammation that accelerates Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia and other cognitive declines, while also leaving newborns vulnerable to pneumonia, jaundice and lifelong respiratory woes. Low‑income nations shoulder the bulk of the toll (over 3 million deaths in the lower‑middle‑income bracket alone), and men die slightly more often than women. Good news: cleaner cooking fuels have trimmed household‑pollution deaths, and countries like France, China and Germany have nudged PM₂․₅ downwards, but the biggest polluters - Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Brazil and Iran - have seen concentrations rise again.
(State of Global Air)
Long reads
Dying, dying slowly. In rural India, people, by the thousands, are dying of chronic kidney disease of unknown aetiology (CKDu), a mysterious, heat‑ and toxin‑linked illness. Gavi takes a look at why this might be happening.
(Gavi)
Fast and reliable. A piece in Devex contends that to keep African regulators both swift and credible, they must embed permanent digital tools while pairing those efficiencies with transparent, community‑focused communication that openly explains every step of the approval process. We kinda agree.
(Devex)
Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn’t want you to see this.