For how we live.
Outbreaks, health systems, and policy across South, Southeast, and East Asia.
WHO validated Bhutan's elimination of dog-transmitted human rabies, a disease almost always fatal once symptoms appear. The country has recorded zero such deaths since June 2023.
WHO validated Timor-Leste's elimination of trachoma, the last suspected focus in its South-East Asia Region. A 2025 survey of 4,949 young children found no transmission requiring intervention.
Among 3,032 couples sampled before conception, higher maternal and paternal vitamin B12 both tracked with lower predicted birth-defect prevalence. The paternal pattern was weaker, and this is observational.
A Shanghai study of 3,032 couples measured nutrients before conception. Predicted birth-defect prevalence fell across maternal B12 levels — and, more weakly, across paternal ones.
The association was strongest where the air was worst — which is the tell. A parallel US survey finds the indoor facilities are the ones vanishing from low-income neighbourhoods.
In 4,868 clozapine users followed to 2023, excess neutropenia risk concentrated in the first 18 weeks and converged with other antipsychotics by around two years.
In 2,292 hip fractures across six cities in Nagano, snowfall raised the odds of admission — until the models adjusted for how cold it was, at which point the association disappeared.
In 555,904 matched adults, screening endoscopy cut gastric cancer mortality in the 50s and 60s. Past 80, or with heavy comorbidity, the association reversed.
Two national survey analyses find schedule unpredictability — not shift work itself — associated with insomnia symptoms, with a dose-response by how much advance notice a worker gets.
A comparison of 2020–2025 approvals finds 94 novel oncology drugs from the NMPA against 87 from the FDA, with China's volume overtaking from 2023. The speed and first-in-class figures run the other way.
Two 2026 papers describe the same shift: rural incidence now exceeds urban in some years, the peak has slid to October and November, and one in six hospitalised patients progressed to severe disease.
A quasi-experimental analysis of 23 hospitals finds about 95 additional self-harm and suicide-related emergency visits a month after the law changed, alongside fewer psychiatric admissions.
A single patient is on ventilatory support in Kozhikode. WHO says 104 contacts are being monitored and the source of infection has not been identified.
Guangdong recorded 25,335 local cases in 2025 — 98% of everything China has ever reported. Genomic analysis finds every Chinese outbreak lineage matching a recent import.
Extremely dense breasts on a routine screening mammogram were linked to a 20% lower likelihood of menopause over the following years, a possible marker of reproductive aging.
Twenty-two years of national data show income-related inequities in care use narrowing, and copayment increases for higher earners not reversing that. Services carrying extra user charges are the outlier.
A national case-crossover study of 236,260 chronic kidney disease deaths finds women, over-65s and people in cooler regions most affected — and projects the burden nearly quadrupling by the 2090s.
An 8-year-old boy had brain inflammation with no respiratory symptoms. Every respiratory, blood and rectal sample tested negative; the virus was in his cerebrospinal fluid alone.
An age-period-cohort analysis across five registries finds annual increases of 5.3% in Korea and 3.8% in Japan, against 1.6% among Japanese Americans and flat or falling rates in US White women.
WHO's latest mpox report shows global case counts holding steady, but flags a Sindh province cluster where nearly all deaths were in babies under six months old.
WHO reports 19,161 suspected cases and 166 deaths in a single month, most in children under five. The country had been close to eliminating the disease.
A six-year cohort study using Japan's long-term care records found a roughly 25% lower risk. The design cannot separate cooking from the ability to cook.
A new audit of China's regulatory record finds a market concentrated in radiology, dominated by deep learning, and clustered in four cities. It also finds the approval curve flattening.
A cluster-randomised trial across 15 population clusters found mosquito abundance collapsed in intervention areas and protective efficacy of 71–72% against symptomatic dengue.
The patient drank raw date palm sap through most of January. Thirty-five contacts are under monitoring, and the six who developed symptoms have tested negative.
A trial across five Chinese hospitals found remote robotic urological surgery non-inferior to local surgery. The sample is small, the surgeons were experts, and the network never failed.
WHO was notified on January 26 of the third Nipah outbreak recorded in West Bengal. There is no licensed vaccine or drug, and the source of exposure is still under investigation.
Emergency restrictions came into force on 13 December when the index passed 450. The more telling number is how many days the city has now spent in a category that was meant to be exceptional.
Floods and landslides in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand have killed more people in a fortnight than most single climate events on record. The second wave — water, food, medicine — is the part that lasts.
A 43-year analysis at hourly resolution finds a 3.3% rise in average heat stress exposure duration across districts, with the change varying by time of day, season and region.
SURPASS-CN-INS randomised 257 adults at 26 Chinese hospitals. The 10 mg and 15 mg doses performed almost identically against placebo, and diarrhoea affected roughly a third of those on the higher doses.
Physicians editing AI drafts wrote better notes than they did unaided, and worse notes than the AI produced alone. Both directions of that result matter.
A national insurance-claims analysis found long-term adherence far below what trial populations suggest, despite universal coverage and strict usage monitoring. The monitoring may be part of the problem.
Two Nature papers describe the Taiwan Precision Medicine Initiative and the risk scores built from it. The genetic effects identified explained up to 10.3% of health variation in the cohort.
A 47-prefecture analysis of a decade of heatstroke mortality finds the alert level set at 33C misses almost all of the deaths a warning could plausibly prevent. About 31C would halve them.
BCG and oral polio vaccine given within 48 hours to 5,420 babies under 2,000 g reduced deaths from infections other than tuberculosis. The effect is off-target, and the mechanism is unresolved.
Twenty untrained women cycled at four fixed workloads wearing four popular low-cost bands, checked against indirect calorimetry. Every device drifted further from the truth as effort rose.
A pooled analysis of 72,776 Korean adults found an 11% higher type 2 diabetes risk in the top intake quartile. An updated meta-analysis of 17 cohorts put the dose-response at 10% per 10% of intake.
Three of the four cases drank raw date palm sap in the usual December-April window. The fourth, a child who fell ill in August, did not — and the source remains under investigation.
Kerala's ninth Nipah outbreak since 2018 produced four unlinked cases between April and July, suggesting separate spillovers from bats rather than a chain of human transmission.
Singapore General Hospital randomised residents to work with and without an LLM assistant. Documentation time fell by 1.82 minutes, which was not significant. The economic model used the point estimates anyway.
WHO has logged 11 laboratory-confirmed human A(H5N1) infections in Cambodia between 1 January and 1 July, including six deaths. Every case had handled or culled sick poultry.
Deaths during combined heat and ozone days in Hong Kong, preterm births projected across Chinese cities to 2100, and a seasonal flip in Japan's ambulance demand from winter to summer.