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Hello from Nairobi.
The short rainy season has settled over the Kenyan highlands, and the orchids and vanilla vines in my back yard are fully in bloom. (After a decade, I think I’m finally used to “seasons” being marked by precipitation, rather than temperature.)
A little warning here: This week’s report doesn’t shy away from the heavy stuff — a virus on the move, a heating planet, and a worsening war — but it ends with two hopeful breakthroughs in the fight against drug-resistant disease. So stick around.
My name is William Herkewitz, and I’m a journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya. This is the Global Health Checkup, where I highlight five of the week’s most important stories on outbreaks, medicine, science, and survival from around the world.
With that, as we say in Swahili: karibu katika habari — welcome to the news.
Mpox’s next act
The World Health Organization has announced a new tangle of worrying trends for the viral infection mpox. First up, cases are on the rise with over 44,000 detected infections this year. And a new, faster-spreading strain has just been discovered in locations including Malaysia, Namibia, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and my home state of California, The Guardian reports.
To complicate things, all this comes as we are exiting a major outbreak of the disease, which crested and broke in 2022 and 2023. So what exactly do all these new reports mean? Are we moving backward, or seeing something else entirely?
- Disease breakdown: Mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) is a virus first detected in the 1950s in lab monkeys in Denmark. The first known human case occurred in the 1970s in central Africa, and for about 50 years the virus quietly circulated on the continent through contact with infected animals. That changed in this decade, when in 2022 a strain of the virus made an evolutionary leap, and started spreading through physical and sexual contact between people. The mpox illness can cause flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions, and in a minority of cases, death. Luckily, an effective vaccine exists!
I reached out to Dr. Michael Marks, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to understand how to digest this news.
The first thing Marks explained is that the appearance of mpox in new places or new countries isn’t all that unexpected, even with a brand-new strain in the mix. This is partly because close-contact transmission thrives especially well in “sexual networks where there are multiple partners and rapid partner change,” he said. In practice, that’s meant mpox will continue to spread in fits and starts, erupting when it leaps to a new network. (Especially among networks of gay and bisexual men, who remain most at risk purely from behavioral factors.)
While the 2022–23 outbreak largely subsided due to vaccinations and community awareness, Marks says the virus never really went away, and “mpox continued to be transmitted at low levels.” Moving forward, “we’ll likely have ongoing transmission in many countries, with periodic outbreaks when mpox reaches a new susceptible community,” Marks explains.
What should you know about the newest strain?
As Healthbeat has reported, it’s called clade 1b, and it’s a potentially deadlier branch of the virus, which has independently evolved the same trick as the 2022 strain, spreading efficiently from person to person. Scientists say the risk of that combination (higher severity and better transmission) is what has them worried.
The takeaway? For most people, the risk remains low. But if you’re in networks where hookups are frequent and partners change often, there is an increasing risk of catching and spreading the virus.
Looking forward, Marks was blunt about our long-term outlook. “Elimination isn’t meaningfully on the cards,” he said. The virus survives in wild animals, and there’s little appetite or funding for the mass vaccination it would take to entirely stop it. “Mpox isn’t going away [so] we need to move from a mindset of ‘there’s an outbreak’ to ‘this is an ongoing, persistent issue that needs a sustained response.’”
That response, he said, will hinge on vaccination, the best tool by far.
Planet with a fever
The world just logged its first year above 1.5 °C of warming, and the health toll is catching up. That is, according to TIME magazine’s report on The Lancet Countdown, an annual global assessment that tracks how climate change is affecting human health.
How bad is it?
Not great. “Twelve of the 20 indicators for the health risks and impacts of climate change in the report set concerning new records.” For example, last year the average human being experienced 16 more dangerously hot days than would have occurred without climate change.
Most stark: That heat is now driving a 63% rise in annual heat deaths since the 1990s, killing roughly 546,000 people each year. That’s more than one person every minute. “The health impacts caused by our changing climate have reached unprecedented levels that cannot be ignored.”
The research team also warns that the world is tracking toward “2.7°C of heating by the end of the century — if not more — and emissions keep rising,” which would be a catastrophe well past what human systems can adapt to.
But there are bright spots. “One thing that’s often overlooked is just how much progress even limited climate action has already achieved in terms of saving lives,” the report’s lead author, Dr. Marina Romanello, told me. For example, “the shift away from coal in high-income countries between 2010 and 2022 is estimated to have prevented around 160,000 premature deaths each year from air pollution.”
“These stories of success and solutions deserve more attention,” she adds. “They show that climate action is not only possible, but already underway — with enormous health benefits.”
Hospital falls under attack in Sudan’s overlooked war
I’ll level with you, readers. I’m flagging this next story not just for its health angle, but because it deserves far more international attention than it’s getting.
As background: Sudan’s civil war, well into its second year, is pitting the country’s armed forces against a powerful paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces. Throughout the conflict, the fighting has been marked by mass displacement, starvation, and widespread civilian killings and human rights abuses. All of this is happening with no end in sight, and zero international appetite to forcefully intervene on behalf of civilians. But while the conflict has been ongoing for years, several foreign correspondents who cover Sudan have told me this week that even they’re alarmed at how fast things are unraveling, and how sharply the death toll is rising.
This leads us to our story: On Thursday, the WHO announced that “the last functioning hospital in the Sudanese city of al-Fashir was raided, and hundreds are feared to have been killed there after a paramilitary force overran the city,” Reuters reports. The death toll for the hospital has been reported as high as 430 people, with additional medical workers being held for ransom. The destruction has effectively obliterated the region’s final lifeline for trauma care. On Monday, the International Criminal Court announced it is probing these reports.
It’s a horrifying report. If this story leaves you with anything, let it be a reason to pay attention. Sudan’s crisis is deepening while the world effectively looks away. Maybe awareness alone will not be enough, but it’s the smallest act that still matters.
This virus is on our side
On to decidedly cheerier news.
A research team led by Dr. Loren Miller of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center has just shown that bacteria-hunting viruses (known as bacteriophages) can help treat deadly bloodstream infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus, an organism notoriously resistant to antibiotics, Reuters reports.
The trial was on 42 patients, all of whom were given antibiotics. Two-thirds were also “treated intravenously with a ‘cocktail’ of [bacteriophage] viruses.” The study showed that the virally infected patients had fewer relapses, shorter stays in intensive care, and quicker recovery. While this is not the first time bacteriophages have been used in clinical trials, Miller says the trial serves as a “potential paradigm shift in how we treat antibiotic-resistant infections.”
(It’s worth noting that the study was a “phase II clinical trial,” which means it’s still early in the testing process. Phase II trials usually involve a relatively small group of patients and are designed to see if a treatment seems to work and is safe enough to keep studying. It’s a crucial step, but not final proof.)
Still, if this approach succeeds in larger trials, it could meaningfully extend the lifespan of our current antibiotic arsenal and provide a new weapon in the fight against multidrug‐resistant bacteria.
For once, I’m on team virus.
Antibiotics in the dirt
In even stranger multidrug‐resistant bacteria news: Scientists just dug up a new, powerful antibiotic … quite literally.
The journal Nature reports that a research team at the University of Warwick in the UK discovered a breakthrough while studying a soil bacteria called Streptomyces coelicolor (which is famous for churning out a well-known antibiotic.)
When the scientists looked at one of the bacteria’s unfinished chemicals, which is produced midway through making its usual antibiotic, they found something shocking: That new compound obliterated otherwise drug-resistant bacteria at microscopic doses.
The scientists (who could have conceivably unearthed a better name) are calling this novel compound “premethylenomycin C lactone.”
For now, the researchers don’t even know how this stuff works, only that it does. “We still don’t really know where it targets. We think it targets the cell wall in some way,” says Lona Alkhalaf, a chemical biologist with the research team. Next up is tests to see whether it’s safe for human cells and continuing research for how to make it in bulk.
Who knew? The next great medicine might not come from good old-fashioned mud.
See you next week!
William Herkewitz is a reporter covering global public health for Healthbeat. He is based in Nairobi. Contact William at wherkewitz@healthbeat.org.
