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[Personal View] Rift Valley fever epidemiology: shifting the paradigm and rethinking research priorities

Rift Valley fever (RVF), a zoonotic mosquito-borne viral disease with erratic occurrence and complex epidemiology, results in substantial costs to veterinary and public health and national economies. Since 1985, RVF virus (RVFV) epidemiology has focused on epidemics triggered by flood-induced emergence of transovarially infected mosquitoes, following an interepidemic period during which RVFV persists primarily in floodwater Aedes spp mosquito eggs, with potential for low-level interepidemic circulation.

[Personal View] Priority climate and health modelling needs

Climate and health modelling is necessary for improving understanding of the current and future distribution and timing of climate-related health risks. However, underinvestment in this area has limited the understanding required to inform policies that enable multisectoral interventions to safeguard health. We synthesised insights from a survey of 65 global climate and health modelling experts and 36 participants in a hybrid meeting to identify priority strategies for enhancing the validity, utility, and policy relevance of climate and health models.

[Personal View] Reducing the threats of rodent-borne zoonoses requires an understanding and leveraging of three key pillars: disease ecology, synanthropy, and rodentation

Rodents have co-existed with humans for centuries, and frequently exchange pathogens. Historically, rodent-driven plague outbreaks scoured the Old World, resulting in substantial human mortality. Although such pandemics have not occurred for centuries, serious threats from rodent-borne infections, such as the global emergence of mpox, still exist. Moreover, endemic and emerging rodent infections continue to cause substantial human morbidity and mortality in low-income and middle-income countries.

[Articles] Mapping landscape fire-sourced air pollution-related mortality across 2288 local communities in Australia: a nationwide health impact assessment

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the mortality burden and economic loss associated with LFS air pollution, highlighting a clear socioeconomic inequality in health burdens across Australian communities. The results—presented as community-level mortality burden maps—could inform the development of targeted public health interventions and climate policies at both local and national levels.

[Articles] Ageing-related functional and cognitive impairments and cold mortality risk: a longitudinal cohort study in China

Beyond age as a general risk factor, to reduce cold-related mortality in China, interventions should prioritise older adults with impaired activities of daily living (eg, bathing or dressing) and cognitive deficits (eg, attention and calculation or short-term memory), particularly women. Community-based programmes, such as subsidised heating and real-time cold alert systems, combined with targeted caregiver support for functionally dependent individuals, could mitigate risks.

[Correspondence] Queering the framework of women’s food environments: insights from the Philippines

In their Review published in The Lancet Planetary Health, Lydia O’Meara and colleagues introduced a framework designed to understand the dynamics that shape women’s food environments in low-income and middle-income countries.1 This framework can inform programme and policy design by identifying intervention points targeting women’s nutrition.1 Although the framework offers valuable insight into gendered food access, people from the LGBTQ+ community, including lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women, require complementary models that consider sexual orientation, gender identity, and unique inequities encountered.

[Correspondence] Whose descent? Whose design?

An Article by Millward-Hopkins and colleagues, recently published in The Lancet Planetary Health, offers a thought-provoking analysis of declining per capita energy use and a call for structural change.1 However, the study advances a narrative of global “energy descent” that, despite acknowledging inequalities, risks becoming a technocratic and neocolonial discourse. This framing generalises energy contraction as a universal pathway and obscures the historical and structural deprivation that many countries in the Global South have faced.

[Newsdesk] Planetary Health Research digest

Climate change poses a substantial threat to collective food security, intensifying the pressures of a growing global population and escalating food demand. Understanding the precise impacts of climate change on food systems is crucial for developing effective adaptive solutions; however, these sectors remain underexplored. Addressing this gap, Claire Palandri (University of Chicago, IL, USA) and colleagues examine the impacts of humid heat on cow-milk production and the efficacy of adaptation solutions (eg, cooling infrastructure and management adjustments).

[Comment] On the WEIRDo neoliberal policies that protect free markets over the planet and its people

Criticising the idea that “every culture is as good as any other”, Friedrich Hayek observed in an interview from 1978 that if we do not “create and maintain” a “market society” but “destroy” it, “then two-thirds of the present population of the world will be destined to die” (p 173).1 His position is reflective of the intellectual origins of the corporate-backed neoliberal crusade predominantly attached to the creation of The Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.2 One of the goals of the Society was to protect western civilisation against socialism (and later, environmentalism) and to promote economic freedom, individualism, and industrial capitalism.

[Comment] Standardising the measurement of child health indicators within global climate adaptation

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.

[Comment] Climate change and pandemics: a call for action

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.

[Editorial] Evidence with a quiet voice

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.

[Personal View] Pathways to an Intergovernmental Panel on Pandemics: lessons from the IPCC and IPBES

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.

[Review] Identifying genomic surveillance gaps in Africa for the global public health response to West Nile virus: a systematic review

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.

[Articles] Diagnostic accuracy of low-complexity, manual nucleic acid amplification tests for the detection of pulmonary and extrapulmonary tuberculosis in adults and adolescents: a systematic review and meta-analysis∗

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.