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Planetary Health
23rd Dec, 2025
The Lancet
By examining news media discourse surrounding climate change in health contexts, this study provides an assessment of how climate change is being presented as a public health issue to the global public. This study provides an assessment of how and how frequently the public health implications of climate change are being reported to the public by newspapers in the world’s three leading carbon-emitting nations. Although we found cross-national differences in the prevalence and type of reporting, the most striking finding is the relative absence of such reporting in all three countries, although it has increased in the past few years.
Contrary to concerns from politicians and commentators that degrowth is broadly unpopular, the core degrowth proposal received substantial support from UK and US participants in this study, regardless of whether the full proposal was accompanied by the degrowth label. Therefore, negative perceptions of the degrowth label appear surmountable once people learn about the main principles behind degrowth. Fostering proactive engagement with global challenges and awareness of nature’s fragility could further enhance the public’s acceptance of degrowth.
Food production is a leading contributor to biodiversity loss, with land-use change and habitat destruction from terrestrial agriculture being the most damaging mechanisms. Despite this, robust quantification of how different foods and their provenance affect species extinction risks is lacking. In their new study, Thomas S Ball (University of Cambridge, UK) and colleagues address this gap by combining high-resolution biodiversity data with the best-available national data on 140 food types.
We thank Francesco Visioli and colleagues for their Correspondence1 in response to our Article in The Lancet Planetary Health.2 We agree that the primary message of our study is that increased consumption of minimally processed foods (NOVA group 1 foods) is inversely associated with risk of various cancer types. Although the converse was observed for processed and ultra-processed foods (UPF) in relation to some of the cancers, indeed fewer significant associations were observed between UPF and cancer risk than those for processed foods.
We read with great interest an Article in The Lancet Planetary Health by Nathalie Kliemann and colleagues,1 who investigated the association between the intake of foods with different degrees of processing according to the NOVA classification2 and the total and site-specific incidence of cancer in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort. Undoubtedly, diet is a strong contributor to human health, specifically cancer risk, and public health authorities should identify and promote the most effective preventive diet models.
Active travel (walking, cycling, and other non-motorised transport) is an important component of active lifestyles and plays a crucial role in improving physical and mental health, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, and offering social and economic benefits.1 However, despite its well-documented benefits, active travel remains considerably underutilised in many countries. To effectively promote active travel, understanding its determinants across all levels of the social–ecological framework,2 such as individual attitudes and beliefs, social norms, policies, and infrastructure and topography, is important.
In 2025, an estimated 300 million people will require urgent humanitarian assistance.1 Such humanitarian crises disproportionately affect populations in southern and eastern Africa and the Middle East and north Africa—regions that also face disproportionate risks from climate impacts. For example, in 2021, countries considered highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change accounted for 95% of all internal conflict-related displacements.2
Mounting evidence suggests ambient heat negatively impacts mental health. In an Article published in The Lancet Planetary Health,1 Thompson and colleagues showed that increases in average ambient temperatures are associated with higher suicide rates (1·7% increased incidence for 1°C rise in mean daily temperature and 1·5% for 1°C rise in mean monthly temperature) and mental health hospital presentations (9·7% higher incidence during heat waves than during non-heatwave periods). These findings are concerning given that global temperatures have increased by 1·2°C since the 19th century and might increase as much as 4·4°C by 2100,2 producing a higher frequency, duration, and intensity of heatwaves and hot summer days.
Food systems are facing a global crisis. Most countries are falling behind rather than progressing toward achieving the seven global nutrition targets set for 2030,1 while unsustainable food production and consumption patterns have contributed to depletion and pollution of natural resources and climate change, further compromising food security and nutrition.2 Children are disproportionately affected with 1 billion children at high risk of food insecurity.3 Low-income countries will be the most affected by these changes despite having contributed the least.
Food systems represent a key intervention point to improve human health, environmental sustainability, and resilience to climate change. We have increasingly clear evidence of the dietary characteristics and associated agricultural production systems that have the most potential to improve nutrition while reducing environmental harms and maximising food system resilience. However, practical changes aligned with this science-based evidence remain challenging, indeed increases in childhood obesity and diabetes and the targeting of children by junk food producers are particularly concerning trends.
Microbe / Infectious Research
15th Jan, 2026
Tuberculosis encompasses a spectrum of characteristics—including bacillary burden, clinical severity, and access to care—that are relevant to clinical and epidemiological outcomes and the performance of diagnostic assays. The value of diagnostic assays depends not only on their numerical accuracy, which can vary substantially between populations, but also on which individuals with and without tuberculosis the assays identify. Moreover, detectable features of tuberculosis, such as pathogen burden or host responses, are often correlated, making it difficult to predict the accuracy and impact of diagnostic algorithms from the accuracies of individual component tests.
Acid-fast stains (AFS) remain indispensable in modern diagnostic microbiology; they are used for detecting mycobacteria (including Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium leprae), acid-fast parasites, and some acid-variable bacteria as well as in histopathology. Fluorescent AFS surpass brightfield AFS (Ziehl–Neelsen) in sensitivity, particularly when pathogen loads are low. However, latest evidence suggests that these stains target nucleic acids, whereas lipid-rich, intact cell walls merely prevent decolourisation; this evidence corrects the long-held assumption that AFS bind to mycolic acids.
We showed that a single dose of VSV-SUDV protected NHPs from lethal SUDV infection within 1 week. The fast-acting nature highlights VSV-SUDV as an ideal countermeasure for ring vaccination during outbreaks of Sudan virus disease pending further preclinical and clinical assessment. In contrast, VSV-EBOV provided no relevant protection against SUDV infection in NHPs, highlighting the need for species-specific filovirus vaccines.
Despite rising NNRTI resistance among pretreatment people with HIV, overall population prevalence of pretreatment HIV drug-resistant viraemia decreased due to increasing ART uptake and viral suppression. This finding underscores the crucial role of achieving and maintaining high ART coverage in reducing transmission of drug-resistant HIV. The high prevalence of mutations conferring resistance to components of first-line ART regimens among viraemic people with HIV is potentially concerning.
Overall, although specific viral signatures of dysbiosis are likely to be highly disease-specific and condition-specific, we show that existing ecological theory shows promise in predicting the relationship between bacterial and phage diversity and in providing broad signatures of dysbiosis across disease systems. Our observation that the relationship between bacterial and phage diversity breaks down under disturbance suggests that this feature could be a useful signature of dysbiosis and that future studies incorporating the virome could provide opportunity to diagnose, treat, and better understand the causes of microbiome disturbance.
What's New: Drugs
8th Apr, 2026
FDA
Center,
Research
What's New: Vaccines, Blood and Biologics
