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Khabre desk
Recent reporting, analysis and explainers from the epidemiology desk.
science
A global analysis of 58,319 outbreak events across 32 diseases found shared landscape associations for several vector-borne infections, but less consistent patterns for directly transmitted zoonoses. The study also found that outbreak reporting was strongly associated with access to healthcare.
health
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.
health
Pennsylvania has reported a fourth measles-associated death, involving an 18-year-old, according to a 16 September 2026 report in The BMJ. The deaths are not included in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s national measles mortality tally.
health
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.
health
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.
health
A medRxiv preprint links the timing of early-life exposure to mixtures of nine metals with risk-taking, reward sensitivity and task-related brain activity in adolescents from a Mexico City birth cohort. The observational findings come from tooth biomarkers and functional MRI data.
health
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.
health
A UK analysis of around 980,000 adults found that people reporting six or more cups of tea or coffee at “very hot” temperatures had three times the risk of oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma compared with those reporting warm drinks. The result came from more than 10 years of health-record follow-up and describes an association.