433 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 systematic review and meta-analysis of ten randomized controlled trials suggests that ultra-processed foods may increase energy intake and body weight, though these effects appear to be largely driven by differences in energy density rather than the level of food processing itself.
This study presents a reproducible Poisson importation framework using publicly available data to estimate infectious disease risks for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, revealing that dengue fever poses the highest importation threat to most US host cities while background tourism, rather than the event itself, drives the majority of overall risk.
This study uses air travel data to demonstrate that while localized Bundibugyo Ebola outbreaks in eastern DRC pose limited importation risk to Europe, the virus's spread to major regional hubs like Kampala, Kigali, and Kinshasa would substantially increase and reshape the exposure landscape, with France, Italy, and the UK remaining the most vulnerable nations.
This study demonstrates that while artisanal fermentation reduces microbial diversity in Puerto Rican embutidos, it fails to eliminate multidrug-resistant Salmonella and Enterobacter isolates found in imported beef and local pork, respectively, underscoring the urgent need for enhanced microbiological oversight of these products.
This study reveals that contrary to the perception of isolated crises, pre-pandemic mortality increases among working-age populations in high-income countries were geographically widespread and driven by a recurring mix of external causes, chronic conditions, and poorly characterized ill-defined causes, indicating a systemic challenge to health progress across many societies.
This mixed-methods intersectoral mapping study protocol aims to comprehensively analyze and visualize the preventive psychosocial support system and collaboration networks across health, education, and social sectors for children aged 4 to 10 in two socioeconomically disadvantaged German city districts, with the goal of identifying service gaps and informing targeted interventions to improve child mental health prevention.
The CHERISH study is a randomized mixed factorial protocol designed to assess the acute effects of short-term air pollution exposure on lung function and airway inflammation in 330 primary school-aged children exercising in London school playgrounds.
This study demonstrates that explicitly accounting for local geographic context using multilevel models is crucial in UK Biobank analyses, as it reveals that traditional single-level models adjusted only for genetic principal components can produce biased associations between polygenic scores for mental health and environmental exposures like greenspace due to unaddressed geographic confounding.
This study introduces a comprehensive infoveillance framework to analyze the dynamic alignment and sentiment between CDC communications and public discourse on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing that increased topic alignment correlates with heightened negative emotional responses rather than public agreement.
This study employs Bayesian Evidence Synthesis to integrate historical data with recent UK population and clinic attendance records, producing a robust estimate of approximately 84,000 sex workers in the United Kingdom (95% credible interval: 49,000–130,000) to address critical data gaps for targeted public health support.