💉 The kids are hungry, and obese; Depression burns the pocket; What's in the air tonight?

#576 | Trust the science, ditch that soda; Screw the science, drink that coffee; Don't remember to breathe

Hello, and welcome back to The Kable. Before we begin, apologies for not sending an issue out last week but we have a hefty, hefty issue to make up for it this time around.

In Palestine, medical supplies have run out and Israel is also trying to ensure all taps run dry. It's no surprise that the rate of child malnutrition, which Israel ascribes to fiction, has more than doubled in August.

In Afghanistan, which recently experienced a massive earthquake, the WHO has managed to deliver more than 35 metric tonnes of aid and medical supplies in less than a week. Amazing what's possible when there isn't an Israel-sized roadblock in place.

The WHO last week issued a medical alert for a batch of contaminated fentanyl citrate which was NOT made where you would've first guessed.

This week, the WHO updated its list of essential medicines to include anti-obesity drugs.

Late last week, the WHO announced that mpox is no longer a global emergency. So what if Africa is still struggling? A bleak ray of light for Africa is that CEPI is backing an in-field study for an mpox vaccine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where this present outbreak was first reported more than a year ago. This is the first time an mpox vaccine is actually being studied among a native African population in a native African setting.

Speaking of DRC, you may have noticed Ebola is back in play over there. This new outbreak is of the Zaire strain, for which we do have a working vaccine thankfully. However, cases have already more than doubled in the week since the first report with genomic sequencing indicating this outbreak is from a new zoonotic spillover event.

Over in Ghana, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, the country's first female vice-president, has stated she wants Ghana to become the pharma hub for West Africa.

African leaders convened in Addis Ababa this week for the second Africa Climate Summit. Everybody knows that Africa bears the brunt of climate change while contributing very little to the greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption that are rapidly accelerating climate change. At this year's summit, African leaders have decided to not sit back and be dictated to. Their joint statement after the summit presents Africa as a continent of solutions that will present a unified position to developed nations at COP30 in Brazil later this year. We say yay!

If events of the past couple of years have demonstrated anything, it is how toothless our multilateral agencies are. In no surprise whatsoever, they appear to have buckled on their proposal to tax harmful products to counter NCDs.

In more surprising news (r/sarcasm), the US FDA says a plant of an Indian drug manufacturer is not compliant with FDA manufacturing norms.

AstraZeneca wants to invest $50 billion in the US. Makes sense that it would scale down investments in the global south. Its latest signal? No more manufacturing in India. Profits over people ftw!

Last year, you couldn't go a week without hearing about some life-form or the other being infected with bird flu in the US but it's been crickets for a while. Bird flu never went away though, only the news did. There was an outbreak at a farm in the UK, and at a zoo in India. And in South Korea, they have planned a 19-day mock drill to prep. In China, four more human cases were reported, taking it a total of 19 human infections in the past 6 months.

In the US, apparently, a cow that was tested in March last year tested positive for bird flu. As did turkeys in South Dakota and North Dakota. As for the human child who tested positive in December last year, they still don't know how. Pet cats are still getting bird flu, thanks to raw food. Bird flu is not all that is raging in the US. Stupidity is too with more and more people suffering from chemophobia - a fear of chemicals - which extends to drugs too. And they're making their poor dogs contract rabies because Murica!

And finally, a trio of studies that we're not particularly happy about. First, a study that says spouses share psychiatric disorders. And a study that says sucralose ages the brain a lot. And a study that blames morning coffee for antibiotics becoming less effective. Yeah, that last study almost makes one want to be American. Because you can then indulge in the national, and lately administrative, pastime of denying the science.

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Stories Of The Week

The big spread. For the first time in recorded history, more school-aged children and adolescents worldwide are obese than underweight, UNICEF warns in its report Feeding Profit: How Food Environments are Failing Children. One in five kids is overweight while one in ten obese. Obesity has tripled since 2000, while underweight rates, even though still significant, have declined. Pacific Island nations top the charts, with nearly 40% of children obese, while the US, UAE, and Chile hover around one in five. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are the only regions where underweight still outweighs obesity. Ultra-processed food processors - can't really call them manufacturers - are behind this, well, surge. Not only are they making cheap, salty, sugary and additive-laden junk, they're also leaving no stone unturned in marketing that shit. The so-called “double burden of malnutrition” now haunts many countries, where stunting and obesity co-exist. The economic bill is staggering too: overweight and obesity are projected to cost the world $4 trillion annually by 2035. Funnily enough, the report says that industry lobbying works overtime to delay, dilute, and derail any countermeasures. Which, as you might have noticed in our synopsis above, has been proved in this week itself.
(UNICEF)

Heads, you lose! Do you know 8 people? Does at least one of them have a mental health condition? If none of them do, then, congrats, you have one. Hey, it's not us, it's the WHO saying this. The agency says more than 1 billion people now live with mental health challenges, but governments still spend just 2% of health budgets on the issue, unchanged since 2017. The global economy bleeds $1 trillion annually from depression and anxiety alone, yet median access to specialists is only 13.5 per 100,000 people - just 0.04 cents per head in low-income countries. Disorders cut across ages, sexes, and borders, with suicide claiming 1 in 100 lives and ranking among the top killers of young people.
(WHO)

The war on bugs. The people over at Health Policy Watch consistently bring out the best reporting about how much floundering is afoot at the multilateral agencies tasked with protecting the planet. Here is their scoop about what is going down in the lead up to the next World Health Assembly. TL;DR: it’s about who gets to make the pills and vaccines. As WHO members wrangle over the pandemic agreement’s annex on pathogen access and benefit-sharing (PABS), developing countries want guarantees: share a virus, get a slice of the cure. Their Group for Equity proposal would force manufacturers to grant WHO non-exclusive licenses complete with regulatory dossiers and tech know-how so southern producers can actually make vaccines and drugs in a public health emergency. The EU prefers “voluntary contracts,” China wants access tied to treaty membership. And the US? Well, the US can go where the sun don't shine.
(Health Policy Watch)

No more cholera in Africa? The Africa CDC and the WHO have launched a six-month continental plan to tackle cholera, under the banner of AU Cholera Champion, Zambia's President Hakainde Hichilema. Cholera already accounts for 82% of global cases and 94% of deaths, and Africa faces a projected 200,000 cases and 6,000 deaths in the next six months if nothing changes. The $332 million plan focuses on seven priorities - coordination, surveillance, labs, case management, WASH, vaccination, and community engagement - while building an African cholera task force and scaling local vaccine production. Officials say the model borrows from the successful mpox response: one team, one plan, one budget, one framework.
(Africa CDC)

Take a deep breath. Haha, fooled you. A new study says air pollution isn’t just killing lungs, it’s eating your brains too. A study of 56 million people found that long-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) increases the risk of Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease with dementia, accelerating onset in those already predisposed. Hospitalisation risk rose by 12% in high-pollution areas, and mouse experiments showed that PM2.5 triggers toxic protein clumps, shrinks memory-linked brain regions, and spreads along the gut–brain axis. Scientists warn it’s yet another reason why smog equals fog.
(Science)

Dying slower, but still dying. Death from chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer and diabetes declined in most countries between 2010 and 2019, according to a Lancet study of 185 nations. Women in Japan and men in Singapore had the world’s lowest risk, while Afghanistan and Eswatini topped the other end. Denmark posted the steepest drop, the US the weakest. Gains came from statins, hypertension drugs, vaccines, and tobacco/alcohol restrictions. However, momentum has stalled with many countries underfunding proven, low-cost interventions, while Alzheimer’s and other dementias are pushing mortality back up in richer nations. The UN’s goal of cutting NCD deaths by a third by 2030, like pretty much most of the SDGs - now looks like wishful thinking.
(The Lancet)

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Breakthroughs

Sugar-coating the next pandemic. Scientists may have cracked a path to the holy grail of virology: a broad-spectrum antiviral. By targeting glycans - sugar molecules on the surface of many enveloped viruses - they identified four compounds that blocked infections from Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, Hendra, MERS, SARS, and Covid in lab tests. In mice, one compound saved 90% from otherwise fatal SARS-CoV-2 infections. Unlike today’s highly specialised antivirals, these synthetic carbohydrate receptors could offer a first line of defence against future outbreaks. It’s early days - proof-of-concept, not a cure - but for once, the sugar high might be justified.
(Science Advances)

Eff the flu. Scientists at the Jackson Laboratory have developed a cocktail of non-neutralizing antibodies that protected mice from nearly every tested strain of influenza A, including avian and swine variants with pandemic potential. Unlike current flu drugs, which target viral enzymes and quickly fail as the virus mutates, this therapy tags infected lung cells for the immune system to clear - no viral escape detected even after a month of repeated exposure. In lethal flu challenges, survival rates soared, even when treatment was given days after infection. It’s still years from human trials, but the work suggests a universal, off-the-shelf flu therapy might finally, eventually, be possible.
(Science Advances)

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Bottom line

Goodbye plastic? Recycling’s worst headache - polyolefins, the tough plastics behind milk jugs, trash bags, and fridge clutter - may finally meet its match. A Northwestern University team has created a cationic nickel catalyst that surgically breaks their carbon–carbon bonds at lower temperatures and pressures, without the pricey rare metals usually required. The process even thrives when PVC, long banned from recycling streams, is tossed into the mix. If scalable, this cheap, stable catalyst could end the need for painstaking pre-sorting, slash microplastic pollution, and turn plastic waste into valuable hydrocarbons instead of landfill fodder.
(Nature Chemistry)

Breathing easier, dying slower. The WMO’s latest Air Quality and Climate Bulletin paints a mixed picture: China’s PM2.5 levels fell in 2024 thanks to pollution controls, but India remains a global hotspot and the Amazon saw record surges from drought-fuelled wildfires. Canada, Siberia, and central Africa also saw spikes. Tiny particles like PM2.5 and black carbon not only damage lungs, hearts, and brains but also accelerate climate change, creating what WMO calls a “vicious cycle.” Even shipping fuel sulphur cuts, while improving health, have “unmasked” 0.04°C of hidden warming.
(WMO)

Heatwaves have sponsors too. A Nature study has directly linked hundreds of major heatwaves since 2000 to emissions from the world’s biggest fossil fuel and cement producers. Researchers found that as many as 25% of heatwaves this century would have been “virtually impossible” without emissions from the top 14 carbon majors. Across 213 heatwaves analysed, 53 were made 10,000 times more likely. Collectively, 180 carbon majors are responsible for 57% of historic global emissions. The findings strengthen attribution science - the discipline quantifying climate change’s role in specific events - and, in theory, could bolster lawsuits pushing corporate climate accountability. But if you've read The Kable today, you already know corporate accountability towards anything is a myth. And climate change, as many world "leaders" have said, doesn't even exist.
(Nature)

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Long reads

You are born. You live. You die. Birth rates are dropping around the world. With good reason, we say. SciAm takes a look at the phenomenon, exploring possible solutions. But hold on, why do we want a solution? There has been enough pillaging of the planet, we think. Maybe it's time for Gaia?
(Scientific American)

Buzzfeed. Nature takes you on a trip to the world's largest mosquito factory. Where they're creating mosquitoes that will hopefully end dengue.
(Nature)

Justice for thee, but not for me. We've seen in the last two years alone how much impunity certain rogue states have and how they're exempt from the world that lives on rules and order. This piece explores how the ICC, in particular, seems to harbour an anti-Africa bias. The solution it proposes is one we're on-board with. Because the world order, such as it is today, is based on colonisation and exploitation, not fairness and justice.
(AllAfrica)

Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn't want you to see this.