272 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.
This study in Sokoto State, Nigeria, validates anthropometric indicators like MUAC as strong predictors of biochemical deficiencies in severely malnourished children while highlighting a critical "hidden hunger" burden among those who appear nutritionally normal, thereby advocating for integrated assessment and multi-micronutrient interventions.
The WEMA study protocol outlines a transdisciplinary research initiative in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mozambique, and South Africa that integrates systematic reviews, secondary data analysis, cross-sectional surveys, and participatory qualitative methods to investigate the impact of extreme weather events on common mental disorders among vulnerable African populations and inform climate adaptation policies.
This descriptive qualitative study of 21 students in Bukavu, DRC, reveals that young people's intention to use mobile health applications for comprehensive sex education is driven by a need for reliable information and perceived educational benefits, yet is heavily contingent on overcoming structural and economic barriers through adaptive strategies and social support.
This study evaluating the Wales Sore Throat Test and Treat service found that relying solely on the FeverPAIN clinical scoring system for Group A Streptococcus diagnosis results in significant overtreatment and undertreatment, particularly among children, thereby supporting the integration of point-of-care testing into community pharmacy pathways to enable more targeted antibiotic prescribing.
This qualitative study utilizes multi-agency professional perspectives and interpretive phenomenological analysis to conceptualize the complex needs of older homeless individuals as a gradual, attritional process rooted in childhood socioeconomic factors, arguing that effective solutions require rights-based, sustained legislative and financial strategies to address root causes like poverty and trauma.
This study validates road-traffic-based exposure proxies against personal PM2.5 measurements in The Gambia, Kenya, and Mozambique, revealing that while individual proxies exhibit weak and context-dependent predictive power, combining multiple proxies in a hybrid model significantly improves exposure estimation accuracy across these Sub-Saharan African settings.
This study utilizes Bayesian meta-regression models on updated empirical data to generate standardized, country-level estimates of immunization delivery unit costs for routine childhood, routine adolescent, and campaign vaccination strategies across low- and middle-income countries, providing essential evidence for global vaccination planning and budgeting.
This study characterizes the 2024/2025 Mpox outbreak in Uganda through genomic analysis of 511 samples, revealing substantial viral diversification, multiple cross-border introductions from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the co-circulation of distinct lineages that underscore the critical need for integrated regional surveillance.
This paper introduces Population Life Expectancy (PoLE), a new indicator representing the mean age at death of active cohorts, which reveals that actual population longevity gains over the last 150 years in Switzerland and Norway are approximately 50% higher than suggested by traditional Period Life Expectancy measures.
This study demonstrates that while wastewater surveillance offers broad, population-level viral diversity monitoring, emergency department indoor air sampling provides a complementary, human-focused perspective that yields higher-quality genomic data for characterizing respiratory viruses and detecting antiviral resistance.