💉 The obesity to dementia pathway; Keep 'em kids well-fed; Plastic? Make more, why not!

#590 | Eurodad says aid ain't for the needy; WASH goals aren't gonna happen; The bacteria that sewage trained

Hello, and welcome back to The Kable. It has been a relatively quiet week for us, and you will see that reflected in this week’s issue. However, there is enough doom and gloom to tide you over till February, so no worries on that count.

Some good news first. Ethiopia has officially declared its first-ever Marburg outbreak over, after 42 days with no new cases.

Yet another acronym for the Africa CDC which has gone ahead and set up a new Central Data Repository (CDR) to manage public health data across the continent. One can’t help but think the recent collaboration between the Gates Foundation and Open AI has something to do with this. Why do we think that? Because the agency has also laid down guidance for all clinical trials in Africa, which is an obvious attempt at forestalling any future imperialist “ideological” interventions like was just attempted in Guinea-Bissau.

Elsewhere, the UN says the situation in Gaza continues to be dire (their words), with children being the most affected. Israel responded by promptly bombing and setting fire to UNRWA headquarters in East Jerusalem.

In other news, the US continued its relentless focus on science by insisting that it will fund Gavi only if drops thimerosal from all vaccines it administers because “hurr-durr it causes autism.” The WHO says it doesn’t do so. Heck, the US CDC itself says thimerosal is safe. But what can we expect from a country where the vaccine panel chief now says vaccines for measles and polio, and maybe all diseases, should be optional? Yup. Polio. Only the second-greatest vaccination story of all-time ever. Finally something US and Taliban health officials can agree on.

In a bit of a surprise, an Indian drugmaker has seen drug sales suspended in a country after inspection by a regulator. The surprise is not in the suspension but in the fact that the regulator was from China and the inspection was virtual and that was enough for Sun Pharma to lose the ability to sell their Alzheimer’s drug in China. And boy, the inspection report is seriously damning. This is the same Sun Pharma facility that has several times been at the receiving end of the US FDA’s ire as well. It is refreshing to know that the more things change sometimes, the more they stay the same.

India’s Nipah virus outbreak has now been contained, according to Indian health officials. However, they’ve still not identified how the two nurses who fell ill contracted the illness. We’re pretty sure it’s not because they were in contact with an ill person themselves. Maybe a bat flew into their mouths.

And finally, in bad news for cows everywhere, bird flu antibodies have been detected in cows outside of the US for the first time, in a farm in the Netherlands. Authorities only discovered this because a cat fell ill and died, leading them to the infected feline-killing cow. They don’t know how bird flu reached the farm but it probably has nothing to do with the name.

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Stories Of The Week

Aid for me, but not for thee. So you’re a country in the Global South and you thought the “developed world” has been ramping up aid all this while to help LMICs? Yeah well, you thought wrong. Says who? Says Eurodad. The European Network on Debt and Development released a new report that says foreign aid isn’t actually for helping poor people. After a decade of “technical reforms” to modernise foreign aid, official development assistance has drifted far from its ostensible original purpose of poverty reduction. Instead, rich countries have reshaped what counts as aid to advance their own domestic priorities. Surprise, surprise. Aid increasingly comes as loans rather than grants, gets spent within donor countries themselves, or is used to de-risk private investment. In 2024 alone, least developed countries spent more on debt repayments than they received in aid - a perfect system for keeping poor countries poor. Meanwhile, aid has shifted away from the poorest nations toward middle-income countries where donors have strategic interests. Because nothing says “development” like wealthy nations deciding who deserves help behind closed doors. The only thing we’d like to add to all of this is, if our organisation acronymised to Eurodad, we’d change our name. Wtf!
(Eurodad)

You will want some popcorn for this. Scientists have made a “groundbreaking” discovery: obesity and high blood pressure can cause dementia. Who knew? A Danish study finally confirmed what every health teacher from 1995 could have told you, using fancy genetic analysis that cost millions to prove that clogging your arteries might be bad for your brain. The researchers call this an “unexploited opportunity for dementia prevention” because apparently telling people to not eat junk food and exercise is just too damn obvious for modern medicine. And here’s the kicker. Weight-loss meds have already been tested on early Alzheimer’s patients with zero effect, because treating symptoms after your brain is already turning to mush doesn’t work. But hey, let’s keep funding those “breakthrough” studies while we ignore the basic health advice that could prevent the whole damn thing. Because this is modern medicine where the cure or the prognosis is always more profitable than the prevention.
(The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology)

Catch them early. To emphasise the point we were making in the previous story, the WHO also says prevention is the way to go. In a stunning revelation that has shocked absolutely no one, the agency has finally figured out that feeding children healthy food in schools might actually be good for them. Because apparently decades of childhood obesity, diabetes epidemics, and lifelong health problems weren’t enough of a clue that maybe school lunches shouldn’t consist of pizza fries and mystery meat.

The WHO’s “groundbreaking” guidance comes just as childhood obesity officially surpassed underweight cases globally for the first time in 2025 - with 1 in 10 kids now obese and 1 in 5 overweight. But hey, at least we’ve got guidelines! The recommendations include such revolutionary concepts as “less sugar” and “more whole grains,” while noting that only 48 countries even bother to restrict marketing of unhealthy foods to children. We can’t wait for the processed food lobbies to shred this report to use in their packaging. Or maybe even in their foods.
(WHO)

Duh! Double-duh! The world’s water, sanitation, and hygiene systems are broken, says a new UN-Water GLAAS report. Despite having policies and targets in place, only 13% of countries actually have the resources to make them work, leaving 2.1 billion people without safe drinking water, 3.4 billion without sanitation, and 1.7 billion without basic hygiene. We’re definitely on target for SDG Goal 6. Hey, we have plans, okay? So what if they aren’t implemented? Implementation is lax because, as the report notes, 64% of countries deal with overlapping responsibilities leading to “inefficiencies”, meaning we’re too busy pointing fingers to actually fix anything. Meanwhile, there’s a 46% funding gap between what’s needed and what’s available, while 1.4 million people died in 2019 alone from preventable water-related causes and 560,000 got cholera in 2024. But hey, at least 80% of countries are “addressing climate risks in WASH policies”, which probably means they mentioned climate change in a PowerPoint presentation once. But honestly, all this doom and gloom is only for people with no imagination. If you can stick your fingers in your ears and run around shouting nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah all day, everything will be fine and all manners of things will be fine.
(WHO)

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Bottom line

Stop plastic production? Why? We’re all gonna die anyway! A new study in The Lancet Planetary Health says plastic pollution is about to get a lot worse. Health impacts from plastics could more than double by 2040, with global plastic production potentially not peaking until beyond 2100. Because apparently, the idea that we might want to stop poisoning ourselves and the planet with plastic is just too damn radical for modern civilization. The researchers found that emissions throughout plastic lifecycles contribute to “global warming, air pollution, toxicity-related cancers, and non-communicable diseases”, which is a fancy way of saying plastic is killing us slowly. The study also notes that “non-disclosure of the chemical composition of plastics is severely limiting lifecycle assessments in informing effective policy.” In other words, plastic companies won’t tell us what’s in their products, making it kinda hard to regulate them. Who could have seen that coming?
(The Lancet Planetary Health)

My bacci strongest! Researchers in India have found that sewage in Indian cities has become a breeding ground for dangerous bacteria that are “training” themselves to resist antibiotics. The study traces antibiotic residues from hospitals, households, and agricultural sources that are helping bacteria share drug-resistant traits, making them stronger and more dangerous. The findings are predictably grim: resistance genes were found to be 50% more prevalent in sewage than in hospital samples, with bacteria in wastewater sharing genetic sequences with pathogens causing global hospital infections. Scientists detected traces of 11 different antibiotics in sewage, including kanamycin in 67% of samples and azimycin in 56%. Clearly the best place to dispose of unused antibiotics is down the drain where they can create superbugs. With 94% of bacterial isolates resistant to more than 10 antibiotics, sewage has become the perfect incubator for the next pandemic. Can’t wait for statements from quasi-government officials about how drug resistance might actually be good for you.
(Nature Communications)

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Long reads

Future-forward. Not a read at all but a peek into what the future portends, climate-wise. An interactive map, developed by a team from the University of Maryland that shows you how the climate will be over the next fifty years at home and around the world. Hint: there won’t be a lot of ice-cream.
(CityApp)

Wither pandemic agreement? An excellent read from Health Policy Watch. A brilliant dissection of the incongruence between what the rich countries want and what LMICs need.
(Health Policy Watch)

Can’t teach an old dog new tricks. If you needed more convincing that signing any bilateral deal with the US is bad, here is Health Policy Watch again with the tea, revealing how the US is making aid conditional on countries accepting its bullying.
(Health Policy Watch)

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