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Khabre desk
Recent reporting, analysis and explainers from the Infectious Diseases desk.
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An analysis of US county data from 2011 to 2025 found that measles outbreaks have become more closely associated with local vaccination coverage and have spread more often across county borders. A spatial model identified counties at higher risk, and projected that a five-percentage-point coverage increase in the highest-risk counties could reduce long-term national measles risk by more than 90%.
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A preprint simulation estimates that faster, strategically placed PCR laboratories could avert more future deaths in the modeled 2026 Bundibugyo Ebola epidemic. The projections depend on assumed epidemic-control conditions and are not results from a laboratory deployment.
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A surveillance-based modeling study estimates that a 2020 mass oral cholera vaccination campaign in Uvira, Democratic Republic of the Congo, averted 56% of infections and deaths over the following three years. The preprint estimates that 2,350 facility-attended cases and 44 facility and community deaths were prevented.
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A secondary analysis of Nigeria’s 2023–24 Demographic and Health Survey found that 72% of mothers attended antenatal care, but only 12.3% were tested for hepatitis B there. Infant birth-dose coverage was 55%.
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A medRxiv preprint uses an agent-based model to link mpox clade IIb’s persistence to asynchronous transmission across connected global sexual-contact networks. The model estimates that local extinction became much less likely when transmission continued in other regions and later re-entered Europe.
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A medRxiv preprint reports that none of 7,388 people screened across 12 local government areas in Nigeria’s Osun State tested positive for circulating filarial antigen. The researchers say the result supports progression to the first transmission assessment survey, while chronic elephantiasis cases still showed substantial blood-count abnormalities.
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A longitudinal analysis of 188 countries from 2000 to 2023 found that Hib and pneumococcal conjugate vaccine introduction was associated with lower meningitis disability-adjusted life-year rates. The largest reported association was in the African meningitis belt, although the study describes the results as population-level vaccine-associated changes rather than strictly causal effects.
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A medRxiv preprint finds that Ethiopia’s current meningococcal surveillance cannot determine whether protection from the MenAfriVac campaign is waning or which non-A serogroups are circulating. An indirect model estimates population protection fell from 85% in 2015 to 24% in 2024.