From disease eradication efforts to advances in vaccination and maternal health, this archive tracks real progress in public health. Stories here focus on what’s working — policies, interventions, and research that are improving and extending lives around the world.
New research published by The Lancet and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the China National Key Research and Development Program has found that annual deaths from air pollution in China are now below 1990 levels, having peaked in 2013.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have developed an algorithm capable of spotting signs of decidual vasculopathy in placenta tissue. The algorithm has correctly identified damaged vessels 94% of the time and healthy vessels 96% of the time.
The team from Australia’s Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research found that a certain concentration of honeybee venom could be used to induce death in 100 percent of the cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells largely unharmed
Africa is now certified free of wild poliovirus, a milestone reached after more than 95% of the continent’s population was immunized. The campaign began in 1996 when Nelson Mandela launched “Kick Polio Out of Africa,” and since then an estimated 1.8 million cases of paralysis have been prevented. Reaching the last children took extraordinary courage — frontline workers, 95% of them women, crossed Lake Chad by boat and walked through conflict zones, while polio survivors themselves traveled to hesitant communities to make the case in person. The work isn’t quite done, but a disease that once paralyzed tens of thousands of African children each year has been driven from the wild — a reminder that patient, village-by-village trust-building can defeat what once seemed unstoppable.
Campaigners celebrated the first “dramatic” results from Middlesbrough’s scheme, which found a vast reduction in re-offending rates and use of street drugs, and significant improvements in participants’ health and quality of life, including seeing those homeless at the outset placed in accommodation.
More than one million people in the U.K. have given up smoking since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new study by the nonprofit Action on Smoking and Health. Almost half (41%) said it was a direct response to heightened health concerns due to COVID-19.
A team of researchers from Michigan State University, University of Michigan and Dartmouth College is the first to demonstrate that placebos reduce brain markers of emotional distress even when people know they are taking one.
Oaxaca is the first state to take the measure in Mexico, which has one of the world’s highest rates of childhood obesity. About 73% of the Mexican population is overweight, compared to one-fifth of the population in 1996, according to a study by OCED.
Voters made Missouri the 38th state to approve expanding Medicaid health care coverage to thousands more low-income adults. As many as 250,000 more adults could choose to be covered by government health insurance beginning in July 2021.
Four terminally ill cancer patients in Canada have now been approved to use psilocybin to treat end-of-life distress. These patients will be the first to legally use the psychedelic in Canada for almost half a century.
