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Planetary Health
29th Oct, 2025
The Lancet
Successful climate adaptation requires strengthening infrastructure and economic, health, and social systems to withstand climate threats.1 In 2023, global leaders adopted the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Framework for Global Climate Resilience, which identified 11 target areas to guide implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement and included a workplan for selecting indicators to monitor climate adaptation (UAE–Belém Work Programme, Decision 2/CMA.5, Paragraph 39;). Health is one of the target areas, with indicators designed to measure vulnerable ecosystems, communities, and age groups, including children.
Climate change is expected to impact macroecological processes and adaptive responses of wildlife, thereby increasing cross-species viral transmission and elevating the risks of zoonotic pathogen spillover to humans.1 More than 1000 pathogen transmission pathways are exacerbated by climatic hazards, accounting for approximately half of all known human diseases.2 The increasing risk of zoonotic outbreaks—from spillover to viral epidemics and pandemics—driven by climate change, poses a significant concern.
Important aspects of this moment in history are typified by two developments during the last week of September. On the one hand an annual report from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research released during New York Climate Week revealed, for the first time, that a seventh planetary boundary - related to ocean acidification - has now been breached. That is seven out of nine planetary boundaries exceeded. Planetary boundaries are scientifically defined guardrails intended to establish a safe operating space for humans that ensure the Earth's health, so such sweeping exceedances are very serious.
Microbe / Infectious Research
5th Nov, 2025
Pandemics pose a global threat to human wellbeing, justice, economies, and ecosystems and are comparable with other planetary crises such as climate change and biodiversity loss in terms of urgency and impact. The global community would benefit from a dedicated scientific synthesis body to assess pandemic risks and solutions. In this Personal View, we explore proposals for an Intergovernmental Panel on Pandemics and assess potential pathways to its creation. Learning lessons from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) might help national governments and international organisations to chart a course through important decisions about format, governance, operations, scientific scope and process, and ability to recommend policies that make the world safer.
West Nile virus (WNV) is a priority pathogen that poses a high risk for public health emergencies of global concern. Although WNV is endemic to Africa, only few (n=63) whole genomic sequences are available from the continent. In this Review, we examined the status of the molecular testing and genomic sequencing of WNV across Africa and mapped its global spatiotemporal spread. WNV has been detected in 39 African countries, the Canary Islands, and Réunion Island. Although publications, including those with molecular data, originated from 24 of these countries, genomic sequences were available from only 16 countries.
TB-LAMP has satisfactory performance for detecting pulmonary tuberculosis in adolescents and adults and is a potential alternative to molecular tests that require more advanced infrastructure. However, the inability to detect rifampicin resistance is an important limitation of TB-LAMP. Future research should focus on well powered studies to establish the diagnostic accuracy of TB-LAMP for extrapulmonary tuberculosis sites.
The data indicate that mpox epidemiology in the Central African Republic is primarily driven by short-lived outbreaks resulting from many independent zoonotic spillover events, particularly in rural areas. Although evidence remains limited, in Bangui additional factors such as movement of people and importation of bushmeat from other regions might be introducing the virus into urban settings. Similar spillover patterns have been observed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The poorly understood nature of monkeypox virus reservoirs in both countries is a regional concern, as frequent spillovers increase the risk of outbreaks leading to sustained human transmission.
Our results provide potential mechanisms leading to the heterogeneous cholera RDT performance estimates in previous studies, including the use of culture as a reference assay. Across various patient and sampling characteristics, CholKit RDT had high performance in this cholera-endemic setting, supporting its use for cholera surveillance and control. Accounting for epidemiologic context is crucial both for individual-level clinical test interpretation, and for the future evaluation of diagnostics such as RDTs.
Immune women with intrauterine human CMV transmission have distinct immunological parameters (different from immune women without CMV transmission, but similar to women with primary infection) and might be those who had a primary human CMV infection within a few years earlier before maternal immunity development was completed. A vaccine able to elicit a fully developed maternal immunity to human CMV is likely to be protective for the fetus.
Global AMR surveillance conducted by WHO is expanding and, in selected countries, improving through standardisation and quality assurance, as well as implementation of extragenital sampling, test of cure, and whole-genome sequencing. This approach provides evidence-based data for management guidelines and public health policies. Improvements in prevention, early diagnosis, treatment of patients and their contacts, surveillance (of infection rates, AMR, treatment failures, and antimicrobial use), and antimicrobial stewardship are essential.
We identified a substantial burden of invasive SDSE, dominated by the emergent stG62647 lineage. The contrasting epidemiology between species in the different Australian regions, during COVID-19 NPIs, and genomic infection patterns indicates transmission dynamic, pathogen population, and host–pathogen interaction differences between SDSE and S pyogenes and indicates implications for disease control measures.
Therapeutic assessments in Chagas disease must account probabilistically for qPCR test performance and low post-treatment parasite densities. In chronic Chagas disease in Bolivia, once-weekly benznidazole dosing for 8 weeks or daily dosing over 4 weeks have similar efficacies as the current 8 weeks daily regimen. These results suggest that the total benznidazole dose in the standard of care regimen is excessive.
In May 2025, the WHO Regional Office for Europe published a report summarising recent advances in the evidence relating to the use of bacteriophages in tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Bacteriophages, commonly known as phages, are viruses that exclusively infect and replicate within bacterial cells, and can be used to target harmful bacteria while preserving beneficial microbes. These viruses can enhance the effectiveness of existing antibiotic therapies, particularly against resistant bacterial strains, and some have been shown to be safe for human use.
Millions of people in the USA are estimated to be affected by long COVID (also termed post-COVID-19-condition), a complex, chronic, debilitating, heterogenous, and poorly-understood condition that begins a short time after infection with SARS-CoV-2 and can last for several months or years. Despite this health burden, the US Trump administration has cut funding for research into COVID-19 sequelae, and is closing the Office for Long COVID Research and Practice.
Karmisholt Grosen A, Mikkelsen S, Aas Hindhede L, et al. Effects of clinical donor characteristics on the success of faecal microbiota transplantation for patients in Denmark with Clostridioides difficile infection: a single-centre, prospective cohort study. Lancet Microbe 2025; 6: 101034—In figure 1 of this Article, the final box in the flowchart should have read “90 faeces donors provided faeces for FMTs administered through capsules, colonoscopy, or nasojejunal tube”. This correction has been made as of Sept 16, 2025.
Medical News
15th Jan, 2026
phys.org
Medical Journal
Wiley
What's New: Drugs
FDA
