Photo: Zyanya Citlalli/Unsplash (CC0)
In today’s edition: fatalities from malaria are plummeting in Papua New Guinea thanks to a comprehensive national strategy, the United States sees its adult smoking rate reach its lowest-ever level, and an experimental cancer jab eradicates entire tumours in patients within the confines of a new trial.
Thanks to a new expanded rapid diagnostics test and Artemesinin Combination Therapies programme – alongside the distribution of nets, medicines, and test kits – the country’s total case count is falling quickly. The national strategy hopes to reduce malaria cases by 63% and deaths by 95%, with 95% of residents sleeping under insecticide-treated nets.
Source: The National
Only 1 in 11 adults in the United States identifies as a current smoker, according to new data released this week. For comparison, in the mid-1960s, 42% of US adults were smokers. The rate has been gradually dropping for decades, largely due to cigarette taxes, tobacco product price hikes, smoking bans and public education campaigns.
Source: AP News
In a trial spanning 11 countries, the injection was offered to patients whose cancer had spread or come back, or had failed to respond to other treatments. The jab, called amivantamab, shrank the tumours of more than a third of patients, with dramatic changes seen within weeks. In 15 of them, doctors found the drug had melted away their tumours altogether.
Source: The Guardian
While immunotherapy treatments have improved survival rates for many patients, their effectiveness can stall or fail when tumour cells hide and then spread. Researchers in Oxford have developed a drug designed to stop cancer cells concealing themselves from the immune system, allowing immunotherapy treatments to identify and destroy them.
Source: The Guardian
Using wind and sun to generate power meant significantly less reliance on imported oil and gas. The bloc’s continued investment in renewables has offered residents energy security at a time where geopolitical uncertainty has raised the prices of fuel across the globe.
Source: Euronews
The inter-European train services will offer one of the continent’s longest direct routes, connecting major urban centres across Germany, Czechia and Poland. The carbon-friendly alternative will travel all the way to the Ukrainian border with one daily service operating in each direction.
Source: Euronews
Bereaved children often are at higher risk than their peers of experiencing a lack of emotional and financial stability, and fewer than half receive the Social Security survivor benefits – averaging $1,100 per month – that they are eligible for. In Utah, a new initiative is changing this.
Source: Reasons To Be Cheerful
The surfaces of car parks often get very hot when in direct sunlight, and can’t cope well with storm runoff. Now, groups across the US are looking to more sustainable options, such as porous concrete panels and native plants to make the areas cooler and less prone to flooding.
Source: AP News
The Long Table in Stroud is a restaurant built on what it calls “radical hospitality”. The concept is straightforward: there are just one or two dishes on the menu, you sit wherever there is space, and you pay what you can afford.
Source: Positive News
Across India, an estimated 30,000 children age out of childcare institutions to become “nobody’s responsibility”, as one person who works to support such teens put it. The Careleavers Inner Circle is a social impact, tech-enabled startup that is “led by care leavers, for care leavers” to make this transition easier.
Source: Reasons To Be Cheerful
