344 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 demonstrates that locally produced bleach in Kenyan healthcare facilities remains effective for disinfection when alkalinized for stability, whereas non-stabilized versions degrade significantly within three weeks, highlighting the feasibility and necessity of stabilization for on-site production.
This hospital-based cross-sectional study conducted at Gulu Regional Referral Hospital in Uganda reveals a high Hepatitis B virus seroprevalence of 8.3% among antenatal couples, with significantly higher rates in male partners and strong associations with daily alcohol consumption and lack of prior vaccination, underscoring the urgent need for routine couple screening and premarital sensitization.
A retrospective study of rural public health facilities in Tanzania reveals that essential commodities for treating animal-related injuries, particularly anti-rabies biologicals and snake antivenom, suffer from inadequate availability, frequent stockouts, and unaffordability, highlighting an urgent need for strengthened supply chain systems and financial risk protection to ensure equitable access to life-saving treatments.
By analyzing 3.6 million patient trajectories from the Norwegian Patient Registry, this study maps a robust, hierarchical network of hospital movements that identifies central wards as key hubs for potential nosocomial infection spread, thereby providing a structural foundation for prioritizing surveillance and improving predictive modeling.
This cross-sectional study at a tertiary cancer hospital in Nepal reveals that while anticancer drugs are almost universally prescribed as generics, their actual costs vary widely among patients and are not reliably predicted by demographic or prescribing factors, highlighting a need for improved adherence to the national essential medicines list and closer monitoring of drug pricing.
This modeling study demonstrates that in moderate and high malaria transmission settings, maximizing coverage of both insecticide-treated nets and intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy—particularly for pregnancies overlapping seasonal epidemic peaks—is critical for significantly reducing clinical malaria cases and low birth weight outcomes.
This qualitative study of international healthcare workers in Gaza reveals that since October 2023, deconfliction has functioned not as a neutral protection mechanism but as a conditional regime of control that Israel uses to restrict humanitarian access, erode Palestinian healthcare autonomy, and shift responsibility for civilian safety onto aid organizations, thereby facilitating the systematic undermining of life-sustaining medical infrastructure.
This reanalysis of Singaporean adolescents reveals that the drivers of problematic gaming symptoms differ by baseline usage habits, with changes in gaming consumption primarily affecting occasional gamers and changes in impulsivity affecting heavy gamers, underscoring the need for tailored preventive strategies.
This paper presents a framework that bridges routine surveillance data and computationally expensive agent-based models via a surrogate ODE model to evaluate region-specific infectious disease interventions while explicitly propagating parameter uncertainty, demonstrating through a Michigan COVID-19 case study that intervention effectiveness varies significantly across counties and cannot be reliably predicted by simple demographics.
This study estimates that the BNT162b2 LP.8.1-adapted COVID-19 vaccine demonstrated 48% effectiveness against emergency department and urgent care encounters among non-immunocompromised adults aged 65 and older in California and Louisiana between August and December 2025.