💉 Selling towers for cheap; Indian drugmakers rise from the dead; Amazon can't wait for AI to replace humans
#601 | Sudan: the crisis the world doesn't want to solve; Mystery illnesses in Burundi and India; Not all men? Yeah, right!
Hello, and welcome back to The Kable for another fairly light issue this week. Light only in quantity, mind you. The coverage is dark as always. Yay!
As of midnight yesterday, a 10-day ceasefire has apparently been agreed between Lebanon and Israel. Let us not get into the nitty-gritties of how two sides can agree to a ceasefire when only one side is doing the firing but let us instead place odds on how long before Israel violates this ceasefire, unless they’ve already done so by the time you’re reading this. Because there are still some schools and hospitals standing. The Israeli “defence” minister has already said they will continue occupying all the land they’ve seized in Lebanon. Because that is just the Israeli way. A history lesson is called for here. In 1978, the UN set up a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, called United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon (UNIFIL). The interim in the name might lead you to believe UNIFIL would’ve ceased operations nearly 50 years later. But it is still around. And it is still being attackedterrorised by Israel.
Attacking schools is the number one rule of conflict zones around the world. Proof? Here, this report from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that shows a 300% rise in attacks on schools in the past year.
In neighbouring Burundi, it is illness of the mystery kind that is attacking kids and adults, with 35 people ill and five already dead. Disease symptoms include fever, vomiting, diarrhoea, and blood in urine, and severe cases have also reported jaundice and anaemia. Authorities have already ruled out Rift Valley fever, yellow fever, Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF), Ebola and Marburg.
If you’re looking to visit Nigeria this year, especially between July and September, be prepared to swim a lot. Because the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NiHSA) just released its annual flood outlook for the country, and it’s gonna be a really, really wet year. The outlook predicts widespread flooding across 33 of Nigeria’s 36 states, and also capital Abuja, with a peak between July and September.
In Haiti, water, health, education, sleep, safety, and childhood are all at risk, both due to continually escalating violence and continued unavailability of everything needed to ensure all of these.
In Rajasthan, India, one more mystery illness has taken root, claiming the lives of seven children this past week alone.
India also saw three huge fires near its capital this week. One in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Another in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. And the third at a landfill site not too far from the capital. The visuals look like scenes from the aftermath of a war zone. Were there lives lost? Yes. How many? Who cares? Poor people don’t count for shit here. Case in point: In this same week, there was a boiler explosion at a power plant killed at least 14 people in Chhattisgarh state. The compensation for the families of those who died? Rs 500,000 from the state government and Rs. 200,000 from the central government. That’s it. That’s how much a life is worth, in case you wondered. In this particular case, there might be sentencing and punitive verdicts but we will come to that when it happens because there is some backstory there.
In good news, Indian drug regulators have made it easier, and faster, for drug manufacturers hit the market. Good news for the manufacturers. But since Indian drugmakers are known the world over for being the quality standard to aspire to, we guess this is good news for the end user too.
Bird flu is refusing to fly off anywhere. The newest entrant to the list is Côte D’Ivoire who reported an outbreak of H5N1 no less at a farm, resulting in 95,000 birds crossing over to the other side.
The Global Fund, in partnership with the US, is ramping up access to Gilead’s HIV drug Lenacapavir by a whopping 1 million doses. With the US being involved, it is very likely this delivery might be through the newly-signed bilateral deals, and might even be contingent on the beneficiary nations agreeing to US’ terms on sexual and reproductive health. But 1 million doses is a fantastic number, right? Especially when we have 1.3 million new cases of HIV every year? Oh! Maybe Doctors Without Borders has a point when they call this inadequate. In another timeline, Gilead cares.
After making bank with diabetes and obesity, Novo Nordisk is now looking to cash in on AI in a new partnership with OpenAI to “bring new and better treatment options to patients faster.” Yeah, AI will certainly do that. At least the new part. As for better, well, it’s subjective, ain’t it?
Speaking of AI in healthcare, Amazon too is getting into the game, with Amazon Bio Discovery a research tool to speed up early-stage drug discovery.
And finally, with AI, Amazon won’t have to worry about workers and the clock anymore, we guess. Because human workers sometimes faint. And other workers sometimes show empathy for the ones who’ve fainted. And then, Amazon has to instruct managers to tell workers to ignore their passed out colleagues and continue working coz those packages aren’t gonna pack themselves. Colleagues might die today. It’s okay. You’ll get new ones tomorrow. But delivery? That has to happen today. Coz it’s Prime time, baby!
Stories Of The Week
People without a home. Three years into the conflict, Sudan has become the world’s largest humanitarian and displacement crisis. Nearly 34 million people - two thirds of the population, now need assistance, while close to 14 million have been forced to flee their homes. Around 4.5 million have crossed into neighbouring countries, with Chad, South Sudan, Egypt and Uganda among those bearing the heaviest burden on already fragile systems. Inside Sudan, nearly 9 million remain internally displaced, and those who have returned to areas like Khartoum find homes damaged, services absent, and livelihoods destroyed. Climate shocks - flooding, extreme heat, and disease outbreaks - compound what conflict has already broken.
The human cost to children is staggering. Since the conflict began, over 5.6 million babies have been born into war, many to displaced mothers in under-resourced facilities without electricity or skilled medical staff. Sudan’s maternal mortality rate has risen by more than 11% since 2022, and the infant mortality rate stands at 42.9%. An estimated 70–80% of health facilities in conflict-affected areas are non-functional, and WHO has verified over 200 attacks on healthcare since April 2023, killing nearly 2,000 people. In just the first three months of this year, at least 245 children were killed or maimed, a 50% increase on the same period last year.
“After three devastating years of war, children in Sudan continue to bear the heaviest toll, with drones responsible for nearly 80 per cent of all reported child killings and injuries. As this conflict enters its fourth year, the reality for children in Sudan is growing darker hour by hour.”
Eva Hinds, UNICEF Chief of Communication in Sudan.
Famine, once considered a risk, is now a stark reality. Over 28.9 million people are acutely food insecure, with famine already confirmed in El Fasher and Kadugli and spreading risk across more than 20 localities in Darfur and Kordofan. Families in besieged areas are surviving on one meal a day or less, with some turning to leaves and animal feed. Agriculture, which employed two thirds of the population before the war, has been decimated and supply routes are now controlled by armed actors who extract bribes and food at checkpoints. The approach of the main planting season makes the window for agricultural recovery narrower by the day. Sexual violence has further compounded the food crisis: women and girls face heightened risk of assault in the course of routine activities needed to access food, making female-headed households three times more likely to experience food insecurity.
The third International Conference on Sudan, held in Berlin, brought together foreign ministers and representatives from 55 countries and resulted in pledges totalling €1.5 billion in humanitarian aid. Germany committed €232 million, the EU and its member states €811 million, and Saudi Arabia $145 million. Despite broad agreement on the urgent need for a ceasefire, the conference produced no truce and no cessation of hostilities. Critically, the countries funding and arming the warring parties were not named at the conference, nor were the warring parties themselves invited to attend. Senior UN officials described Sudan as an atrocities laboratory, citing sieges, the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war, sexual violence, and sustained attacks on civilian infrastructure. The overall humanitarian response plan requires $2.9 billion and is currently only 16% funded. Without a ceasefire and sustained international pressure, the pledges made in Berlin risk being absorbed into a crisis that continues to outpace the world’s willingness to confront it.
Despite all this doom though, the human spirit still finds a way to shine through. Away from the headlines and the funding gaps, in a camp on the outskirts of the Ugandan town of Biale, nearly 600,000 Sudanese refugees are quietly rebuilding what war took from them. A civil engineer who once worked with the UN in Darfur now leads his refugee community from inside a tent. A former trader from South Darfur runs one of twenty community kitchens that sprang up after food rations were cut, feeding neighbours he describes as his own flesh and blood. A university professor who fled Khartoum under bombardment now travels regularly from Kampala to the camp to support those who arrived after her. A Sudanese doctor practices medicine in a Ugandan hospital, contributing to a country that received him without discrimination. And a man who arrived in Uganda in 2008, long before this latest wave of displacement, built a hotel he named The White Heart, chosen as an invitation, he says, to overcome the bitterness of repeated wars. In Sudan’s darkest chapter, its people continue to find ways to show up for one another. Bless our collective hearts!
(IOM, ReliefWeb, UNICEF, UNICEF, FAO, NRC, UN, Dabanga Sudan, UN)
Water? We’ve a plan for it! Recently, we all read about how the world is now entering a water bankruptcy phase. The World Bank has a solution. Water Forward. An initiative it is launching with a coalition of multilateral development lenders to deliver water security to one billion people by 2030. How? By mobilising private, public and philanthropic capital across 14 water-stressed countries in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia to target urban leakage and to modernise irrigation and to reuse wastewater and, of course, for data-driven planning.
Global freshwater demand is projected to outstrip supply by up to 40% before the decade is out. Over two billion people currently lack safe drinking water, and water-related shocks are already carving several percentage points off annual economic growth in vulnerable nations. So we can understand coming up with plans to deliver water security in four years. But seriously, how is this anything but a fool’s quest? We didn’t fix anything in 10 years since the SDGs were implemented and in four years, it’ll all be hunky-dory? Especially when the agency that came up with the plan spent over $2 billion on consultants last year alone?
That reminds us: there is a tower in Paris that The Kable owns and we’d like to sell cheap. Maybe, say, $2 million?
(World Bank, Devex)
Bottom line
Here we go, again. Not that we needed reminding but here is a reminder nevertheless that global wildlife trade is the best pipeline for animal pathogens to find their way into human bodies. A new analysis published in Science found that traded mammals are 1.5 times more likely to share pathogens with humans than their untraded counterparts, and that the longer a species spends in trade, the more pathogens it contributes to the exchange: roughly one additional pathogen per decade on the market. Live-animal markets are worse than product trade, illegal trade is worse than legal, and the entire supply chain from poaching to pet shop is essentially an extended networking event between human immune systems and diseases they have never met before. HIV, Ebola and Covid have all been linked to traded wildlife, and researchers are now flagging that as new species enter the trade, new pathogens will follow. Four in five scientists recommend reducing the volume of trade overall. But the fifth fellow... that fellow has historically come down on the supply side when it comes to demand for exotic pets, ivory trinkets, pangolin scales, and donkey balls.
(Science)
Long reads
A resurrection unrivalled. People say media in India is sold out and no longer reliable. Which is true. Except for independent media which is still doing a fantastic job of reporting stories that would otherwise not see the light of the day. Two examples this week are part one and part two of this three-piece investigative series on Indian pharma companies that killed children and suffered no consequences. Reported by News Laundry and The News Minute, with their reporting supported by the Thakur Foundation, incidentally founded by India’s most-famous pharma whistleblower. We’ve linked only to News Laundry because we have issues with the public backing that one of The News Minute‘s founders displayed for one of the aforementioned sold-out media in India and that is something they’ve never addressed adequately enough for us.
(News Laundry, News Laundry)
Yes all men. A new report on CNN found a chat group documenting ways of raping and sexually assaulting their wives and partners, with 62 million visits in one month alone. Don’t let anybody ever say not all men.
(CNN)
Inferius. Inferius. Inferius. And finally, since we began with Israel, it is fitting that we round off this depressing week with Israel and testimony about rape and sexual violence of the worst possible kind inside Israeli prisons. Just when you think Israel can’t sink any lower, they lower the bar even more. If you have the fortitude, EuroMed also has a Twitter thread documenting this abuse.
(EuroMed Monitor)
Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn’t want you to see this.