💉 The WHO bets on herbs; Heat kills kidneys; Cars kill kids
#564 | Climate: still bad; Disasters: still pricey; Diagnostics: now on paper
Hello, and welcome back to The Kable. Apologies for not being able to send an issue last week but we had medieval problems, such as faltering internet. Now, we know why Merlin chose to cast spells instead of doom-scrolling. Speaking of, while we did apologise for not putting out an issue of The Kable last week, you should actually be happy we didn't. Because there was so much doom last week, especially on the climate front and the medium- and long-term implications thereof. But don't worry, we've got a teeny-tiny bit of doom this week too in what is an otherwise short read. Yay!
First some good news. The African Medicines Agency became one giant step closer to becoming operational with the appointment of its first-ever Director-General. The head of Ghana's Food and Drug Authority, Dr. Delese Mimi Darko is the person chosen to steer the fledgling agency through some seriously interesting times.
In what could be a twin-edged sword, Bill Gates has announced that the $200 billion he pledged to give away over the next 20 years... the bulk of it will go to Africa. Adages are fine but if the people of Troy had looked a certain gift horse in the mouth, the Iliad might have had a different ending.
The mpox outbreak in Africa, which briefly seemed to be on the wane, is still raging and raging quite fiercely. Cases have now been reported from Ethiopia as well while Sierra Leone continues to struggle. The Africa CDC has asked for more mpox vaccines as it seeks to hopefully, finally, firmly get on top of this perennial outbreak. The agency's latest weekly situation report also paints a grim picture when it comes to cholera on the continent too.
Bird flu hasn't gone anywhere either. In the US, where testing and reporting is now mandatorily lax, a farm in Arizona has reported the third outbreak of May alone with collectively nearly 5 million egg-laying birds not laying eggs anymore.
In its continued hand-wringing when it comes to Gaza and Palestine, the UN issued another statement about the lack of food in the region and how daily food intake has "fallen well below ‘survival’ level." In the same week, the UN ushered in a new President for its 80th General Assembly in the form of a person who has found ample justification in the past for Israel's deliberate and continuous targeting of children and civilians. Unsurprisingly, this person, Germany’s Annalena Baerbock, was elected by secret ballot.
Another UN agency, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), released a report this week that says indirect carbon emissions from the operations of Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, and Meta/Facebook went up by 150% from 2020-2023, all thanks to AI.
And finally, some potentially good news. Scientists in Japan have developed a new kind of plastic that dissolves in seawater within hours. Sure, this is still early days but it's obvious that the world is not ready to quit on its codependent love affair with plastic. If this Japanese tech can help turn the tide on plastic pollution everywhere, we're all for it.
Stories Of The Week
Herbs, hopes, and hypocrisy. If there is only one thing we've absolutely learnt from the Covid pandemic, it is that the WHO is woeful, at best, when it comes to public health messaging. Another unfortunate consequence/side-effect of medical supply gaps that we witnessed during the pandemic is the WHO's increasing tilt towards traditional medicine. Last week's World Health Assembly approved a new decade-long strategy to integrate traditional, complementary, and indigenous medicine into formal health systems - so long as it’s backed by scientific evidence. That’s the catch. The strategy praises centuries of healing wisdom, but insists on “evidence-based” integration, which may take decades for many practices. And that is, if the practitioners of these "traditional healing methods" are even okay with adopting evidence-based practises. No surprise that the WHO quietly avoided putting its own money on the table. There are no funding commitments from Geneva, and member states are left holding the research bag. All this while unregulated “natural cures” run wild in global markets. Sure, it’s a landmark moment. Is it a forward one though? Eh!
(WHO)
The trillion-dollar wake-up call. Disasters are 10 times more expensive than we thought. And counting. According to a new UNDRR report, the world has been drastically undercounting the cost of catastrophes. The official annual damage tag is only $200 billion. But when you factor in long-term impacts on well-being and development, it goes all the way up to $2.3 trillion. And sure, maybe rich nations can absorb the shock, but vulnerable countries pay in GDP percentages: Micronesia lost 46% of its GDP to disasters in 2023. That same year, nearly 240 million people were displaced by floods, storms, and fires - most of them in Asia. The solution, according to UN experts, is not reactive humanitarian aid but more proactive investment in resilience, including early warning systems and smarter financing. So far, however, those investments remain as elusive as the climate stability we keep promising ourselves.
(UNDRR)
Hotter. Longer. Louder. Okay, this is one of the doom-y stories from last week but it definitely merits inclusion this week too. The world isn’t just warming - it’s locked into it. The WMO now says there’s an 80% chance that at least one of the next five years will dethrone 2024 as the hottest year ever recorded. Worse, there’s a 70% chance the entire 2025–2029 period will exceed the 1.5°C threshold set in the Paris Agreement, turning a climate red line into a baseline. Arctic warming is projected to hit 2.4°C above recent averages, driving sea level rise. The Sahel will get wetter, the Amazon drier, and NOAA’s shrinking budget may gut our ability to even track it all. The future forecast is more of the same, but louder.
(WMO)
Breakthroughs
No lab? No power? No problem. While billion-dollar diagnostics companies chase marginal gains in smart devices and subscription models, a team at NYU Abu Dhabi has quietly engineered a marvel of field science: the RCP-Chip. This radially compartmentalized paper chip can detect Covid and other pathogens in under 10 minutes using just a droplet of fluid and warm water. No lab, no electricity, no trained personnel required. Designed for low-resource settings, the chip is made from a single sheet of paper, preloaded with reagents that trigger visible colour changes. It’s multiplexed, modular, cheap to produce, and reportedly effective across sample types from saliva to blood to environmental fluids. With plans for smartphone integration and outbreak tracking, the RCP-Chip is what pandemic preparedness was supposed to look like. Maybe the future isn’t high-tech. Maybe it’s just smart.
(Advanced Sensor Research)
Bottom line
Cars? They're killing kids. Fossil-fuel vehicles aren’t just cooking the climate, they’re choking children and killing the elderly. A major new study shows that aggressive action on vehicle emissions could prevent 1.9 million premature deaths and 1.4 million new paediatric asthma cases by 2040. That’s 310 lives and 230 asthma diagnoses avoided. Every. Single. Day. The hotspots? China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and the U.S. But it’s poorer countries that bear the brunt, especially as rich nations offload their dirtiest diesel fleets. Researchers say the best-case outcome comes from combining EV adoption, clean energy, modern emissions standards, and scrapping old vehicles. Cities matter most: they’re home to just 33% of the global under-20 population but account for 68% of avoidable asthma cases. And unless things change, expect a 21% rise in people exposed to deadly PM2.5 pollution by 2040.
(Health Policy Watch)
Long reads
Kidney bye-bye. A silent epidemic is crippling workers before they turn 40, and climate change is making it worse. In the cane fields of El Salvador, men are collapsing from kidney failure before their 40th birthday. A mysterious epidemic of chronic kidney disease of unknown cause (CKDu) has been ravaging agricultural workers for decades, and now it’s spreading across Central America, South Asia, and beyond. The cause? Still debated. But the science increasingly points to one brutal trigger: extreme, repeated heat. This piece in Nature has lots more to say about it.
(Nature)
Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn't want you to see this.