273 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 rural Kenya demonstrates that while cash incentives and revisits significantly increase participation in door-to-door COVID-19 testing and help reduce nonresponse bias, offering a lower incentive of KSh 200 proved more cost-effective than higher amounts despite slightly lower detection rates among the hardest-to-reach individuals.
This descriptive analysis of 17 free physical activity apps reveals that while they are generally well-rated and frequently employ basic behavior change techniques like goal setting and feedback, they often lack comprehensive evidence-based strategies, suggesting a need for developers to incorporate more robust behavior change methods to better improve user health outcomes.
This cross-sectional study of 563 Indonesian high school students reveals that high cotinine levels, indicating significant nicotine exposure and chronic disease risk, are primarily driven by daily cigarette consumption, male gender, having smoking family members, and low physical activity, though these factors did not significantly correlate with a willingness to join smoking cessation programs.
This multi-country cohort analysis in Nigeria, Cameroon, and South Africa demonstrates that while Hepatitis C self-testing effectively identifies infected individuals, including those with severe disease, treatment uptake and retention vary significantly across settings, with South Africa showing notably lower engagement rates driven by HIV status compared to higher success in Cameroon and Nigeria, highlighting the urgent need to strengthen decentralized care pathways to ensure treatment access.
This manuscript, which investigated the association between Life's Crucial 9 and chronic kidney disease risk using NHANES 2005–2018 data, has been withdrawn by medRxiv because it was published without the full consent of all authors.
This paper analyzes a global panel of disease-specific publications and burdens from 1990 to 2021 to demonstrate that while research systems increasingly reallocate effort toward endemic health needs and respond rapidly to outbreak alerts, this responsiveness remains uneven across regions and is disproportionately driven by philanthropic and government funding in lower-income settings.
The Legionella International Typing (LIT) workgroup developed and validated a high-resolution cg/wgMLST schema based on 9000 genomes to enhance the discriminatory power and harmonization of *Legionella pneumophila* genomic surveillance for outbreak detection and source identification.
This multi-country study of over 3,000 adults in Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania reveals that higher COVID-19 symptom burdens and chronic disease loads are significantly associated with poorer executive function, with notable cross-country variations and education emerging as a consistent protective factor.
This study compares three rule-based algorithms designed to retrieve pregnancy-related adverse event reports from pharmacovigilance databases, revealing that differences in their flagged reports stem primarily from varying scopes regarding age restrictions, normal pregnancies, and paternal exposure, thereby highlighting the need for professionals to select the most appropriate tool based on their specific research needs.
This paper argues that current age-based adult vaccine policies in Europe exacerbate health inequalities by excluding vulnerable populations with shorter life expectancies, and proposes adopting place-based eligibility models that account for local deprivation to ensure earlier access for those most in need.