Category: Health
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A new systematic review estimates 402 to 433 million cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning among farmers and farmworkers every year — around 46 per cent of the world’s farming population. The figure is large, the method involves substantial extrapolation, and both facts matter.
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More than 6,300 confirmed cases and over 3,000 deaths in DR Congo since May. It is the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record, and the strain circulating is the one the vaccines were not built for.
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Catholic health providers are suing Illinois over its assisted-dying law. The fight is not over whether a doctor can refuse — it is over what an institution owes a patient after it has refused.
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Uruguay declared a nationwide health emergency on Friday after highly pathogenic H5 avian influenza was confirmed in backyard birds in Colonia. One flock triggered a country-wide response — and the reason is in how the virus travels, not in how bad this outbreak is yet.
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California growers are ploughing lettuce back into the ground and laying off pickers because shoppers are wary of illness. The measure that would settle whether the food safety system is failing is not the outbreak count.
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A UNICEF-led nutrition survey in Gaza found acute malnutrition low and stunting at 12.2 per cent, ten months after a ceasefire. Some read it as evidence the 2025 famine declaration was wrong. The survey itself says something narrower.
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Millions of Congolese children returned to class on Tuesday, in the middle of what authorities call the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record. The teachers’ union in Ituri asked for a postponement. In the epicentre itself, some classrooms were nearly empty.
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Haiti’s new national nutrition survey found acute malnutrition in young children has risen from 5.1 to 7.4 per cent since 2023 — while stunting fell sharply over the same period. Both findings are in the same document, and both are probably right.
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Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan are reporting the same thing: more severely malnourished children, arriving later. A funding cut never says “treat fewer children” — it removes the layer that finds them early.
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MSF screened 21,000 children in Baidoa and found acute malnutrition around 50 per cent among the displaced. The number that matters more is the readmission rate: over 60 per cent.