For those who need a break from doomscrolling, here are some points of good news:

1. Cystic Fibrosis
The Cystic-Fibrosis Breakthrough That Changed Everything

The disease once guaranteed an early death—but a new treatment has given many patients a chance to live decades longer than expected. What do they do now?

Imagine, though, that you had never been able to simply breathe. Imagine that mucus—thick, copious, dark—had been accumulating since the moment you were born, thwarting air and trapping microbes to fester inside your lungs. That you spent an hour each day physically pounding the mucus out of your airways, but even then, your lung function would spiral only downward, in what amounted to a long, slow asphyxiation. This was what it once meant to be born with cystic fibrosis.

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Cystic fibrosis once all but guaranteed an early death. When the disease was first identified, in the 1930s, most babies born with CF died in infancy. The next decades were a grind of incremental medical progress: A child born with CF in the ’50s could expect to live until age 5. In the ’70s, age 10. In the early 2000s, age 35. With Trikafta came a quantum leap. Today, those who begin taking the drug in early adolescence, a recent study projected, can expect to survive to age 82.5—an essentially normal life span.

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2. Food Allergies

‘Breakthrough’ allergy drug: injection protects against severe food reactions

A study suggests that the asthma treatment omalizumab can reduce the risk of dangerous allergic reactions to peanuts and other foods.
For people with food allergies, accidentally eating the wrong thing could prove deadly. Now, for the first time, an asthma drug has been shown to protect people from severe reactions if they ingest a small amount of a food they’re allergic to.

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3. Malaria Vaccine

Nearly 10 000 children vaccinated as malaria vaccine rollout in Africa expands

Brazzaville - Nearly 10 000 children in Burkina Faso and Cameroon have now received the RTS,S malaria vaccine since being introduced this year. A wider malaria vaccine rollout is underway this year in several African countries, with Cameroon being the first outside the malaria vaccine pilot programme to do so.

Cameroon launched the vaccine on 22 January 2024. It is being integrated into its national routine immunization programme in more than 500 public and private health facilities across 42 health districts in the country’s 10 regions.

Burkina Faso introduced the vaccine on 5 February, becoming the latest country in the region to kick off the immunization. The game-changing vaccine complements the existing range of malaria control measures to prevent the disease and lower its burden.

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