384 papers
Public and global health examines how we protect communities from disease, manage outbreaks, and improve well-being across the world. This vital field connects diverse research on everything from infectious disease control and vaccination strategies to the social factors that shape our collective health. Because these studies often impact policy and daily life, understanding them quickly is more important than ever.
At Gist.Science, we track every new preprint published in this category on medRxiv to ensure you never miss a breakthrough. We process each submission to provide both plain-language explanations for general readers and detailed technical summaries for experts, making complex findings accessible to everyone.
Below are the latest papers in public and global health, freshly summarized from the most recent medRxiv releases.
A mixed-methods evaluation in Rwanda demonstrates that integrated Early Childhood Development centres located in market and cross-border settings significantly improved child nutrition, developmental outcomes, and household income, despite a noted increase in reports of physical punishment.
This interdisciplinary implementation study demonstrates that the ECAIL childhood obesity prevention trial successfully maintained its reach and acceptability among socially disadvantaged families in France despite the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, thanks to adaptive strategies like the rapid resumption of home-based visits and flexible implementation approaches.
A sex-stratified analysis of the 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey reveals that despite nearly half of diagnosed adults with hypertension or diabetes having health insurance, substantial treatment gaps persist across all wealth and sex groups, suggesting that expanding insurance enrollment alone is insufficient to improve chronic care access without addressing deeper systemic barriers like medicine availability and affordability.
This study estimates that targeted vaccination of *Mycobacterium tuberculosis*-infected high-risk individuals in the United States with an M72/AS01E-like vaccine would require between 217 and 2,486 vaccinations to prevent a single tuberculosis case, a range comparable to established adult vaccines.
This qualitative study in Mali reveals that while patient associations possess strong experiential legitimacy, their ability to effectively serve as knowledge intermediaries in breast cancer governance is currently constrained by fragmented institutional structures, limited access to data, and epistemic biases favoring biomedical evidence, necessitating coordinated strategies to build structured interfaces and address gendered barriers for sustainable knowledge translation.
A modeling study demonstrates that targeted vaccination strategies focusing on high-risk groups in the United States, particularly non-U.S.-born persons and people living with HIV, could substantially reduce tuberculosis incidence, preventing up to 51.8% of annual cases under optimistic scenarios.
This retrospective study of 385 patients at Zambia's University Teaching Hospital identifies lower Glasgow Coma Scale scores, reduced pulse rates, and out-of-hours (00:00–07:59) admission as independent predictors of in-hospital mortality within 48 hours, highlighting critical areas for improving emergency care protocols in resource-limited settings.
This study estimates that while prenatal alcohol exposure and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) incidence in Finland have declined from the 1990s to the 2020s due to public health interventions, exposure remains common and the burden of FASD substantial, highlighting the need for continued biomarker-based research and strengthened prevention efforts targeting pre-pregnancy recognition.
This study demonstrates that a multiplex pan-filovirus immunoassay yields highly reproducible and precise results across diverse laboratory settings in the US and DRC, validating its utility for serosurveillance, vaccine response assessment, and comparative serologic investigations.
An analysis of the 2021-22 Cambodia Demographic and Health Survey reveals that child undernutrition remains highly prevalent, with stunting, wasting, and underweight significantly driven by socioeconomic inequalities, poor environmental conditions, and specific child characteristics, underscoring the need for multisectoral interventions targeting complementary feeding, poverty reduction, and improved sanitation.