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Hello from Nairobi.
Last week was an interesting one for me, as I had the chance to moderate a panel hosted by the French Chamber of Commerce here in Nairobi. I focused on a question I’ve been circling in my reporting for months: As global health aid retreats, who fills the gap? The panel included development experts and health care businesses, all wrestling with how and where the private sector can realistically step in.
On to the news: This week we take a look at an unexpected (and unexplained) benefit of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, a reality check on artificial intelligence tools hunting down antibiotics, and a few other stories on social media bans, the Iran war, and … a drug trial for turkeys?
My name is William Herkewitz, and I’m a journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya. This is the Global Health Checkup, where I highlight some 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.
A shot at fighting addiction
It’s hard to overstate how much GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic have upended weight-loss treatment and sparked an ongoing pharmaceutical gold rush.
Drugmakers are racing to develop ever newer versions of the drugs, and regulators around the world are approving them at an equally rapid clip. (China, for example, just cleared Pfizer’s newest injection Xianweiying last week.) But their explosive popularity aside, what I find most striking about this moment is just how little we actually understand about the ways these drugs affect our bodies and brains.
Take, for example, results from a new study of health records from more than 600,000 patients in the United States. As reported by the Associated Press, patients taking these GLP-1 drugs showed something remarkable and seemingly unrelated to weight loss: lower rates of substance use disorders.
- Background: GLP-1 drugs like Mounjaro, Wegovy, and Ozempic mimic a natural hormone that regulates blood sugar and appetite. In general, they influence the body’s hunger and digestion signals, though researchers are still working to understand exactly how these effects unfold in the brain and body. The “GLP-1” name is an abbreviation for the molecule it mimics, which was originally developed as a treatment for diabetes.
The study found that those on the drugs were less likely to develop addictions “to alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, opioids, and other substances” as compared to patients on other diabetes medications. And for patients already struggling with addiction, the drugs were also “linked to lower risks of [addiction-related] hospitalization, overdose, and death.”
What is going on here? Why would a drug designed to control blood sugar and appetite also seem to affect cravings for alcohol, nicotine, or other drugs? To find out, I reached out to two addiction science researchers not involved in the new study to help me parse the connection.
First, the idea that these drugs might affect addiction did not appear overnight, Dr. Joseph Schacht, an addiction scientist at the University of Colorado told me. Animal studies going back to last decade have found that drugs in this class can reduce alcohol consumption. And as millions of people began taking the drugs this decade, similar reports kept surfacing with doctors. “I became interested in this area when a medical colleague told me that some of her patients [taking GLP-1 drugs] for weight loss had reported they found themselves drinking less alcohol and experiencing less craving for it,” he said.
Still, scientists don’t fully understand the basic biology behind “exactly how these drugs affect the brain’s reward pathways,” he said. What we do know is that the brain contains specific docking points for GLP-1 molecules in several regions involved in motivation and craving. “It is possible that GLP-1 [drugs] cross the blood-brain barrier and bind directly,” to those sites, he said. But that’s not actually been proven yet. Another possibility, he said, is that the drugs act elsewhere in the body and send some other signals that ultimately influence how the brain processes cravings. We simply don’t know yet!
I also reached out to Dr. Anna Lembke, an addiction medicine specialist at Stanford University, who said the research raises the possibility of new, preventative therapies.
After all, if these drugs truly quiet the brain signals tied to craving, they might reduce the risk of the disorder developing in the first place. “But lots of questions remain, including whether short- and long-term benefits outweigh the risks, especially when you’re thinking about giving the drug to people who don’t yet have a disorder,” she said.
Still, “addiction is a massive and growing problem across the globe. We need more tools to help combat it. The GLP-1s hold promise for a novel strategy to combat addiction, and we need all the help we can get,” she said.
AI: An antibiotic breakthrough … or dead end?
One issue I keep returning to is a coming crisis in antibiotic resistance: Essentially, existing antibiotics are failing faster than scientists are discovering new ones.
This is both a “today” and “tomorrow” problem. Already, antibiotic resistance is linked to roughly 5 million deaths a year worldwide as routine infections become harder to treat. And if nothing changes, we will eventually reach a failure point where we no longer stop many common infections … with enormous implications for everything from cancer therapies to simple surgeries.
Now, as we’ve covered before, there are reasons to be optimistic. A big one is artificial intelligence, which is speeding up the earliest stages of antibiotic discovery, as covered in a new essay in STAT News. The authors, an antimicrobial researcher and a drug developer, cite a study from last October in which AI tools discovered “hundreds of [new] molecules with promising anti-bacterial activity.”
That said, this essay is not one of optimism.
As the authors write, even as these early leaps in AI dramatically improve new antibiotic discovery, the economic incentives for actually developing them remain heartbreakingly weak. Put simply: “The antibiotic market does not reward innovation — it often punishes it.”
Why? Because the way we use antibiotics makes it extremely difficult for companies to recoup the enormous costs of clinical trials and later-stage development.
Consider that antibiotics are meant to cure infections over a matter of days instead of, say, lucratively managing a chronic disease for years. And because doctors want to slow resistance, the newest drugs are often used sparingly and held in reserve. It’s “a practice known as stewardship”, which “benefits future patients but crushes commercial prospects. Even a truly novel, lifesaving antibiotic will be used sparingly, priced modestly, and ultimately displaced by generics.”
What’s the takeaway? If “no amount of algorithmic brilliance or predictive learning can overcome a business model that guarantees financial failure downstream … only policymakers are empowered to remedy what ails antibiotic R&D,” the authors argue.
They propose a few solutions, including “subscription-style reimbursement models, in which governments pay for access rather than volume,” or lump-sum government payments “that provide predictable returns for truly innovative antibiotics.”
The alternate solution, they say, is watching helplessly as “world-class laboratories … keep generating promising AI-sourced discoveries that end up in the dustbin of academia.”
Two conflicts with hospitals under fire
We have a few updates on two not-so separate crises, in Iran and Gaza.
First, the World Health Organization says at least 13 hospitals and health facilities in Iran have been hit since the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign began, The Guardian reports. While the WHO has not provided many details (nor attributed blame), Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus has gone on record to say that “under international humanitarian law, health care must be protected and not attacked.”
Meanwhile, in Israeli-occupied Gaza, Reuters is reporting that “medical supplies [are] running critically low despite Israel’s reopening of a key crossing.” How low? “Supplies of some items such as gauze and needles have already run out,” and “fuel shortages continue to limit hospital operations.” Hospitals without needles and gauze? It’s a fairly condemnable state of affairs, especially considering that there has been a ceasefire for two months now.
What’s the connection? As Reuters is also reporting, “key humanitarian air, sea, and land routes are being constricted by disruption from the [Iran war], delaying life-saving shipments to some of the world’s worst crises,” which includes Gaza. As the report puts, quite pointedly: “Aid to Gaza and Sudan is grinding to a halt and costs are soaring for help to the hundreds of millions suffering hunger crises around the world.” And that we should expect care to get even worse.
The takeaway? Honestly, I’m worried. If the past two years in Gaza have shown anything, it is that the Israeli and American-backed bombing campaign displayed a total disregard for humanitarian protections around hospitals and medical infrastructure.
That record should make the world prepared for the possibility of a similar humanitarian crisis unfolding in Iran’s health care system, if this war escalates.
Share, like, and subscribe to social media bans?
India’s state of Karnataka has become the latest government to move against youth social media use. It just announced a ban on social media platforms for children under 16, Reuters reports. (The tech-hub state is home to 61 million people and the capital city of Bengaluru, widely known as the “Silicon Valley of India.”)
The policy follows similar efforts across the world: Australia recently approved a nationwide social media ban for under-16s, and several European and U.S. jurisdictions are likewise debating or testing age restrictions.
What does the most up-to-date research actually say about the effects of limiting social media? Well, let’s look at two separate ways researchers combine results across lots of studies. (Fair warning: We’re about to go full data-nerd.)
We can start with an “umbrella review” of youth social-media research from 2025, organized by researchers in Canada, Ghana, and Ireland. (An umbrella review is basically a review of reviews, looking across dozens of previous research summaries to see what the field as a whole is finding.) In this case, they looked at 43 reviews that covered over 1,000 papers.
What did they find? Broadly, higher social media use among adolescents is linked with worse mental health outcomes, particularly on depression, anxiety, and other “psychological distress.” But the picture is complex. The harms appear strongest with heavy or “problematic” use (like passive scrolling or addictive behavior), and some studies found clear benefits for teens, including social support and reduced isolation.
It’s also worth looking at a recent “meta-analysis,” which is when researchers pull out data from many separate papers, and then crunch it all together. In a 2025 meta-analysis, Australian researchers combined 10 randomized controlled trials to understand what really happens when people (adolescents and adults) reduce or stop using social media.
The results? They found that people who cut back on social media have a small but statistically significant drop in depressive symptoms. The effect was modest, but research shows that limiting social media use can improve mental health … but reduction in use was about as effective as total abstinence.
(Honestly, together it’s less of a slam dunk case against social media than I would have thought!)
Turkeys on trial
We’ll end this week with a funky story. Scientists in the UK have launched what is essentially one of the world’s first clinical trials on turkeys, the BBC reports.
Researchers will vaccinate thousands of turkeys and monitor them for about six months, in an effort to see whether a new bird-flu vaccine can safely protect the poultry from the virus.
It’s big news for birds, but don’t just take it from me. Here’s an incredible quote from Mark Gorton, the founder of Traditional Norfolk Poultry, which is leading the trial:
“This is probably one of the biggest days in my poultry life and I think this is one step for poultry but one giant step for poultry kind."
So … why turkeys?
Well, chickens are already vaccinated against bird flu in many parts of the world, and France has been vaccinating ducks for several years. But British researchers chose turkeys for this study because they are particularly susceptible to the disease. In other words, if a vaccine can protect a turkey, it’s a pretty good sign it could work for other poultry, too.
And there’s significant money on the line. “Annual bird flu outbreaks cost the UK government and industry up to £174m each year,” or about $230 million. And as Gorton told the BBC, “it could be a huge economic cost to [turkey farmers] if we catch this disease and we have to have all of our birds culled.”
I’ll see you next week!
William
William Herkewitz is a reporter covering global public health for Healthbeat. He is based in Nairobi. Contact William at wherkewitz@healthbeat.org.
