Global Health & Wellbeing: Summary of June's Top Stories
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Some bite-sized chunks of health and wellbeing good news from around the world.
East Africa School Meals: The largest ever private sector funded school meals commitment will feed 366,000 children across Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, providing them with nutritious, locally sourced meals, while creating stable and predictable markets for more than 57,500 smallholder farmers over the next 5 years.
Free Education: Zambia has passed its first law guaranteeing free public education. It bars schools from denying learners a place because they can’t pay fees. And over 41,000 teachers have been recruited.
World's First Vaccine Designed by AI: Whilst artificial intelligence gets a fair amount of bad press, its use in medicine is demonstrating some remarkably positive potential - including this clever new vaccine that even protects against mutation.
Catalyst For Change: Japan’s youngest female mayor will become the nation’s first elected official to take maternity leave. Shoko Kawata, who plans to take 16 weeks, hopes her decision will be a “catalyst for changing the system.”
Daraxonrasib: Headlines have been circulating with “hope” and “pancreatic cancer” in the same sentence. It's a good sign of progress for the deadliest and hardest to detect cancers. In a new study, daraxonrasib was shown to roughly double the survival time for participants who received the treatment.
Cancer Treatment Exciting Scientists: 'Jurassic Park' actor Sam Neill put the emerging new treatment in the spotlight, revealing his stage three cancer was in remission after undergoing CAR T-cell therapy as part of a clinical trial in Sydney.
‘Miracle Tree’: Outperforming their chemical counterparts, researchers found that seeds from the moringa tree reliably removed over 98 percent of microplastic particles from water. Moringa was used by Ancient Egyptians to sterilise water and the millennia-old purification technique could be the cure for microplastic-riddled drinking water today.
Mexican Farmers: Mexico is wiping out farm debts for tens of thousands of small producers that had become impossible to pay and were being used by lawyers to extort farmers and small producers. Liabilities have now been cleared for 99.5 percent of debtors.
Good Progress in Benin: In 2017, approximately one fifth of the population was unrecorded - no birth certificate, no National ID, no anything. This was bad because, in Benin as elsewhere, legal identity is necessary to open a bank account, register a business, take school exams, apply for jobs, or use mobile money. Now, the World Bank says that nearly 99 percent of Benin’s population is in the system.