For how we live.
Health regulation, reform, and investment across the Gulf and beyond.
Linking exome data to electronic medical records solved 15% of unexplained hearing-loss cases and flagged new candidate genes — while showing what the records could not supply.
Severe dehydration from diarrhoeal disease and sepsis can shut down the kidneys. In a health system with little dialysis, a review argues this is a preventable driver of death that surveillance is missing.
WHO recorded serogroup W135 disease in pilgrims returning from Saudi Arabia in early 2025. A modelling study estimates high vaccination coverage would cut expected cases by more than 80%.
A self-reported cross-sectional study of 599 residents found sharp deterioration across every measured dimension of oral health during the war — a neglected corner of the humanitarian-health picture.
A review by the country's Public Health Authority credits enforcement and awareness campaigns for falls in crashes, deaths and injuries from 2013 to 2023 — while naming what still holds the Vision 2030 target back.
A facility-based study of 5,053 infants finds undernutrition begins earlier than the age group nutrition programmes usually screen — and that weight-for-age caught far more of it than arm-circumference tape.
A 14-year hourly analysis of the heat index finds a rising trend and a 2025 that set records, with a 'feels-like' temperature reaching 52C as early as 7am on some days.
The country's blood-spot programme has run since 2003 and reaches nearly every baby. A pilot adds genomic sequencing — where a study of Qatari genomes suggests the biggest gains lie.
A study of 806 suspected cases found nearly a quarter were confirmed Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, all the main risk factors tied to livestock handling — as warming expands the range of the ticks that carry it.
Before October 2023, Palestinian health authorities had documented 50 people living with HIV in Gaza. A viewpoint argues the collapse of testing and treatment has since erased that count entirely.
A mandatory citywide programme sequenced 782 genes in 1,000 prospective couples. The at-risk rate was double that of a comparable Australian study, and most flagged couples still chose to marry.
A registry analysis of Abyan Governorate from 2020 to 2024 puts numbers on a vaccine-preventable disease that returned as immunisation coverage fell — with the heaviest toll among children aged 5 to 9.
The tool reads vital signs, lab results, and history the way clinicians already do — just faster and continuously. Its accuracy tops out around 90%, which means it's also still wrong a meaningful share of the time.
The emergency funding is meant to keep trauma care, disease surveillance and maternal care running in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Jordan, atop a regional appeal only 37% funded.
Twenty hospital and health-facility projects, worth $462 million, are meant to reduce how often Kuwaitis have to travel overseas for specialized care. Thirteen are already under construction.
The country became the first in its region to receive shipments through a WHO-backed platform supplying 46 essential cancer drugs — refugees included, at no cost.
The reform followed an investigation into training quality at some foreign schools. It is also projected to disproportionately affect Arab professionals, a large share of those graduates.
The committee that decides what Israel's national insurance covers added new cancer and depression drugs to the 2026 list — and turned down an early Alzheimer's treatment because of what it would have cost.
Coverage access rose from 86% to 96.4% of the population in four years. The government's own target — 80 years by 2030 — is now less than a year of progress away.
An analysis of a decade of surveillance data shows the system leans heavily on hospitals and misses cases in the community — the weakness that lets measles circulate undetected between outbreaks.
The Dubai Longevity Authority will oversee everything from lab research to the clinics selling anti-aging treatments — a regulatory structure that doesn't really exist yet anywhere else.
A review pooling prevalence across the region ties the projection to modifiable risks that are unusually common there — smoking, inactivity, diabetes — layered on rapid ageing.
A systematic review of the Syrian crisis and infectious disease in Lebanon names overcrowding, poor sanitation and blocked healthcare access — not the presence of refugees themselves — as the reported drivers.
Chronic granulomatous disease is usually X-linked in Western cohorts. A multicentre Middle East and North Africa registry found the opposite pattern, alongside late diagnosis and a median survival of 8.5 years.
A narrative review synthesising WHO, UNRWA and Gaza health-ministry field data reports the re-emergence of hepatitis A and poliovirus, over 200,000 diarrhoeal cases, and drug-resistant hospital pathogens.
New GBD analysis across 21 countries finds one group whose burden fell — children — while incidence rose 92% overall and the sex pattern inverted.
A study of 1,331 physicians put violence ahead of pay. Of 32 doctors who had already emigrated, two were considering coming back — and none of the women were.
A twelve-athlete study tested morning, late-afternoon and late-evening sessions across the fasting month — and found the deficit was specific to time of day, not spread evenly across it.
Stress peaked during the fasting month and fell afterwards, but depression and anxiety stayed flat. The consistent finding across every phase was that sleep quality tracked mental health.
Maccabi Healthcare Services studied 626 of its own physicians to work out who follows algorithmic prescribing advice — and found the pattern was about practice structure, not just attitude.
A scoping review of 171 studies found output peaked in 2019, fell during COVID, and left the genomic surveillance of a coronavirus with pandemic potential thinly covered.
A Qatar Biobank analysis derived local cut-points and found WHO's standard numbers misclassified more than half of men and nearly half of women in the sample.
A study across nine facilities in Makkah recorded 1,576 cases of heat exhaustion or heatstroke and a 4.9% mortality rate — in a region where heat-health research remains remarkably thin.
Two 2026 reviews describe the same handover: as the virus recedes, obesity-driven fatty liver disease is moving into the space it occupied — in a population where roughly 40% of screened adults met obesity criteria.
The barriers parents named most often were cost and the absence of any nearby service — not stigma, which the field has spent years treating as the main obstacle.
The elevated risk showed up even in babies with no detectable malformation — which is not what the standard recessive-disease explanation predicts.
Sequencing 6,141 people turned high consanguinity into a research advantage: it produced natural human knockouts that population studies elsewhere almost never see.
The first independent population-representative mortality survey in the Gaza Strip estimates 75,200 violent deaths through early January 2025 — and finds fewer non-violent excess deaths than some models predicted.
A January study forecasts particulate pollution across six Gulf states and reports Qatar highest at 87.90 µg/m³. The modelling is careful; the input data is annual, national and thirty-one points long.
Large taxed beverage sales fell 24 to 31 percent under the tax. In the period after repeal they remained 13 to 24 percent below pre-tax levels — and prices stayed elevated too.
Nineteen MERS cases were reported worldwide in 2025, seventeen of them in Saudi Arabia. The two in France are the first infections detected outside the region in six years.
The first nationally representative analysis of the 2024 conflict in Lebanon draws on hospital and ministry records. Its most consequential number is how many of the dead arrived already dead.
WHO validated Egypt as the 27th country to eliminate trachoma as a public health problem. Its programme began in 2002; the disease still blinds or impairs about 1.9 million people elsewhere.
A UNRWA surveillance dataset of 265,974 arm-circumference measurements shows wasting rising during blockade, falling during ceasefire, then rising again — an unusually direct record of cause and effect.
Nine genetically linked virus isolates from seven environmental sites triggered the declaration. Sequencing traced the lineage back to a paralysis case reported in December 2024.