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.
This mixed-methods study demonstrates that a low-cost, point-of-care microscopy toolkit enables community health workers in rural Nigeria to accurately diagnose urogenital schistosomiasis with rapidly improving accuracy over time, validating a feasible community-led strategy for disease elimination.
This multi-country cohort analysis of 1,438 tuberculosis patients across five Southern African sites reveals that while 80% achieved successful treatment outcomes, the overall 15% rate of unsuccessful outcomes (death, loss to follow-up, or failure) exceeds WHO targets and is significantly predicted by multidrug-resistant TB, lack of formal education, and low BMI, highlighting an urgent need for improved retention and management strategies.
This paper presents a unified modeling platform and workflow developed by IARC/WHO that enables cervical cancer prevention policy modeling across 132 low- and middle-income countries by clustering nations based on sexual behavior and HPV transmission patterns to overcome data limitations and support efficient elimination strategies.
A study of over 10,000 women in Bristol found that while individual built environment features showed weak associations with depressive symptoms over an 18-year period, a combined factor of these features was significantly linked to depressive outcomes at baseline and short-term follow-up, though this association diminished over the long term.
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.