386 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.
Using a multi-model ensemble approach, this study projects that for the 2025-26 US COVID-19 season, a broad vaccination campaign targeting all eligible individuals and initiated earlier in the year (late June) would avert the most hospitalizations compared to a high-risk-only or later (mid-August) rollout.
This study utilizes objective variable selection via principal component analysis and Bayesian linear mixed-effects models to identify significant social determinants of health and spatial clusters associated with adverse birth outcomes in Louisiana, thereby validating previous findings and informing targeted maternal health interventions.
This cross-sectional study in Bangladesh reveals that while knowledge and positive attitudes toward Caesarean sections vary significantly by residence, income, family structure, and prior delivery history, higher knowledge is strongly linked to more positive attitudes, underscoring the need for targeted antenatal education and counseling to promote informed decision-making.
This paper demonstrates how the COM-B behavior change model was applied to a qualitative study in Osun State, Nigeria, to identify key drivers and barriers and subsequently design targeted social and behavior change messages that enhance the uptake of Perennial Malaria Chemoprevention through the routine immunization platform.
This study provides the first empirical evidence from Lusaka, Zambia, that courier food carriers are significantly contaminated with pathogenic bacteria, identifying infrequent cleaning and carrier design as primary risk factors that necessitate strengthened hygiene protocols within the national food safety framework.
A 2025 pilot study in Bangladesh demonstrates that a cognitive AI system designed to replicate the full clinical workflow, rather than merely providing risk scores, achieved high diagnostic accuracy (94.7%) across 277 patient encounters, suggesting its potential to effectively address physician shortages and enhance primary care delivery.
This study demonstrates that a carefully calibrated stacked ensemble machine learning model, trained on readily available electronic medical record data from the All of Us Research Program, can effectively predict heart failure with high accuracy (ROC-AUC 0.927) and provide clinically actionable risk stratification for early diagnosis and proactive care.
This modeling study projects that bivalent HPV vaccination in 117 low- and middle-income countries could prevent approximately 4.8 million non-cervical cancer cases and 3 million deaths among women by 2100, with the greatest relative benefits expected in the African Region, thereby strengthening the public health case for expanding vaccine access and addressing global health disparities.
This qualitative study of 22 religious leaders in Bauchi State, Nigeria, reveals that while most support childhood immunization as compatible with their faith, persistent misinformation and trust issues remain, suggesting that structured engagement with these leaders and improved health service delivery are crucial strategies for increasing vaccine uptake.
This study analyzes nationally representative BDHS data from 2017-18 and 2022 to reveal a post-pandemic divergence in Bangladesh's non-communicable disease landscape, characterized by a dramatic doubling of diabetes prevalence driven by urban and community-level factors, alongside a decline in hypertension that may reflect survival bias and a weakening of the bidirectional relationship between the two conditions.