Dramatic fall in infant deaths prompts calls for national immunisation programmes to incorporate treatment

A rotavirus vaccine introduced in rural Malawi has reduced deaths from infant diarrhoea by more than a third, proving for the first time that a major intervention in a low-income country can be highly effective.

Read more on the Guardian.

A grassroots education initiative in Lebanon has brought renewed dignity and hope to young Syrians uprooted by war

In a disused hospital in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, three teenage refugees set to work on a robot. Despite intermittent power cuts and blazing summer temperatures, the team buckle down, sweaty and studious, to program the robot to pick up and stack a number of small cones. It is a task requiring skills in coding, engineering, maths and science – an assignment unlike anything they learned back home across the border.

Kate Hodal

Voracious caterpillar that cost Africa billions of pounds in lost crops now threatens food security across Asia, scientists warn

A crop-chomping caterpillar that has devastated food stocks across Africa has now arrived in southern India, and scientists warn the insect could spread throughout Asia to become a major threat to global food security.

Citizens urged to wage all-out battle to preserve food stocks amid ‘unprecedented’ drought

The North Korean government has called on its people to wage an “all-out battle” against a record heatwave as the country’s already fragile crops face drought and the authorities struggle to respond.

One quarter of the world’s population has latent tuberculosis - with 10.4m new cases and 1.7m deaths reported in 2016 alone

A new, shorter and safer drug regime for latent tuberculosis could help curb the global epidemic by increasing the numbers successfully treated and reducing the pool of infection, researchers believe.

Two groundbreaking studies, one in adults and the other in children, have trialled a less toxic drug than the one in current use worldwide for latent TB and cut the treatment time from nine months to four.