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Had lower-income and lower middle–income countries rolled out the COVID-19 vaccine at the same rate as their wealthy counterparts, they might have prevented up to half of deaths related to the virus by fall 2021, according to a model-based policy brief from Canada’s United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) and international partners. And rolling out the vaccine 100 days after the virus was sequenced could have saved more than 8 million lives around the world by 2022, mostly in poorer countries, the authors said. (Van Beusekom, 10/27)

During the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games—which the COVID-19 pandemic delayed until 2021—stronger surveillance and mitigation efforts protected most athletes and team officials from contracting COVID-19, a study published last week in Eurosurveillance finds. (Holohan, 10/27)

The first person has been inoculated in a clinical trial for a vaccine that could help protect against the viral strain behind the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDBV), a rare variant of Ebola, is behind the DRC outbreak that has led to more than 10,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths, the World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa posted Tuesday. There are no currently no vaccines or treatments available to treat Bundibugyo virus. (Kekatos, 10/27)

A new study shows a person’s gut microbiome, specifically levels of inflammation in the intestine, may be behind post-vaccination fevers. The study was published earlier this month in Science. Fever is a common reaction to a number of vaccines but can be a factor in vaccine hesitancy, the authors wrote, especially for vaccines against seasonal influenza and COVID-19. The study was based on 171 healthy adults whose fecal microbiomes, body temperature, and blood-based immune markers were measured before and after receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccination. (Soucheray, 10/27)

Community pharmacies may be key to preventing people exposed to the rabies virus from developing the fatal neurologic disease. Spread through the bites and scratches of mammals, rabies is preventable if people get the post-exposure vaccine before clinical symptoms appear. (Boden, 10/27)

An estimated 18.9 million people worldwide developed pertussis (whooping cough), and 115,000 died from the disease in 2023, with infants and people in sub-Saharan Africa bearing a disproportionate burden, according to a study published last week in Nature Medicine. “This burden remains profoundly inequitable and inversely correlated with the sociodemographic index,” write the researchers, who were led by a team at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle. (Bergeson, 10/27)

Antibiotics have long been used to treat common bacterial infections from strep throat to pneumonia. But some germs develop the ability to survive the medications designed to kill them, and they're an increasing risk to public health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned. In a report published Tuesday, the federal health agency said drug-resistant germs are a "growing threat to Americans." (Tsapatsaris and Howard, 10/27)

Though the rate of colorectal cancer in US adults dropped substantially from 2000 to 2022, it ticked up in 2023, according to an assessment of nationwide data published today in a Public Health Alerts report. The increase is probably not due to post–COVID pandemic catch-up in diagnosis, write the authors, who hail from four universities across the country and the Veteran Affairs Healthcare System. (Wappes, 10/27)

The legalization of marijuana is linked to a rise in heart-related hospitalizations in the United States, a new study finds. The research, published in BMJ Open, examined hospitalization rates following ballot measures legalizing cannabis in Western states. An analysis of more than 50 million hospital discharge records found that hospitalizations for serious heart conditions rose faster after legalization. The research examined hospital discharge diagnosis data from 2012 to 2018. (Azem, 10/27)

Women with autism experience more severe menopause symptoms than women without the neurodevelopmental condition, a new study has found. Researchers at Bournemouth University monitored around 900 participants for five weeks and found that those with autism faced stark differences in their experience of menopause—the physiological stage of life when a woman has not had a menstrual period for 12 consecutive months. (Laws, 10/27)