(it's been a while since I did this, so this will be a long one)
Are you feeling unattached to the world? Adrift in the cosmos? Rudderless, and headed for a shoal? Read this Hashtag, and let go.
As usual filter this out if you wish.
Respiratory diseases are the third-biggest cause of death worldwide, after heart disease and cancer. So it's good news that a new study in The Lancet shows that globally, the age-standardized death rate due to chronic respiratory diseases fell by 41.7% between 1990 to 2019, and prevalence fell by 16.9% during the same period. Although the pandemic has set back some of this progress, it's still an extraordinary achievement.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(23)00113-X/fulltext
Have you ever heard of the LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India? We hadn't either, and were pretty impressed to discover that since being started by Dr Gullapalli Rao in 1987, it's served 16 million people free of cost, in over 12,000 villages across India, and trained almost 60,000 healthcare professionals.
The World Bank says that global poverty reduction efforts are back on track. After the severe setbacks of 2020, a majority of low and middle income countries have seen poverty decline again, and more than half are now on course to reach a lower poverty rate in 2023 than in 2019.
Dengue cases have fallen to their lowest level in 20 years after mosquitoes infected with virus-blocking bacteria were released across Colombia’s Aburrá Valley. It's the largest release of Wolbachia mosquitos ever, causing incidence to fall by 94% across the cities of Medellín, Bello and Itagüí, home to more than three million people.
