This week, we bring the latest climate health news, wide-ranging global health updates, a focus on the wellbeing of children and young people, and an urgent call to ban the use of spit hoods in all custodial settings.
Scroll to the end for news of forthcoming events not to miss.
The quotable?
It is time to inform consumers about adverse effects of ultra-processed foods consumption and to urge governments to take ambitious and decisive structural measures to enable healthy, less processed foods to be the easiest choice.”
Climate health
From Argentina to Bangladesh, Mexico and beyond, the climate crisis is undermining communities’ capacity for health and wellbeing. The rights of women and girls must be prioritised in climate responses, according to a new report. The importance of transport systems for climate health is also highlighted.
Read: Bangladesh is facing the consequences of the climate emergency. “It is evident that vulnerable populations in developing countries will bear the brunt of current and projected climate emergency related events. A maximum loss of human lives will be caused by extreme, frequent, and long weather conditions. Urgent and aggressive actions are needed to limit the climate emergency by mitigating greenhouse gas emissions; by creating sustainable climate resilient agricultural production; by environmental engineering; and by improved preparedness of the health sector.”
Read the WHO story: Following the devastation wrought by Storm Daniel, hundreds of thousands of people in eastern Libya are mourning the loss of loved ones, homes, possessions and livelihoods. Tens of thousands more are desperately hoping for news of the nearly 9000 people who remain missing.
WHO estimates that at least 1 in 5 people will suffer from mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of a major emergency like Storm Daniel. Mental health services were one of the top 3 priorities – along with safe water and primary healthcare services – identified by an interagency assessment team that visited eastern Libya in the early days of the disaster. The need for mental healthcare is becoming even more acute in the aftermath of the crisis.
Read: How Climate Change Threatens Mental Health & Well-Being – A Case Study from Mexico 
Read the Reuters article: Global warming was the main driver of the heat wave that scorched South America for most of August and September and raised temperatures by as much as 4.3 degrees Celsius. 
See the report, Taking Stock: Sexual and Reproductive and Health and Rights in Climate Commitments: A Global Review. In partnership with Queen Mary University of London, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) conducted a global review of the integration of sexual and reproductive health and rights and rights-based approaches in 119 countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (national-level documents outlining the climate commitments of signatories to the Paris Agreement”. The findings underscore the importance of addressing the structural drivers of inequality and discrimination that intersect with climate change impacts.
This includes strengthening anticipatory actions for disasters, ensuring sexual and reproductive health and rights and gender-based violence services provision, and prioritising vulnerable groups. The report also underscores the critical need for disaggregated data on climate impacts, encompassing both slow and sudden onset events, to understand better the differential effects on various population sectors and guide targeted interventions.
Read the study in The Lancet
See the petition for a healthy transport system. 
Read: Why Australia urgently needs a climate plan and a Net Zero National Cabinet Committee to implement it. “What’s to be done? We should begin with leadership across the Federal Government, coordinated with the states and territories. The best structure might be a Net Zero National Cabinet Committee with two clear objectives – to develop and begin implementing a national net zero transformation plan by the end of 2024.”
Global health matters
Read: Why cities matter for adolescent mental health and wellbeing, in The Lancet: “Being an adolescent in a rapidly urbanising world, however, is challenging. Urban living, as compared with rural living, is associated with a higher risk of poor mental health outcomes, such as depression, anxiety, and some psychotic disorders, along with an increased risk of concentrated poverty, low social capital, social segregation, and other social and environmental adversities.” 
Read: Equitable representation of American Indians and Alaska Natives in the physician workforce will take over 100 years without systemic change, in The Lancet: “Since American Indian and Alaska Native [AI/AN] physicians practice medicine with a worldview informed by their cultural values and often serve areas with critical physician shortages, the under-representation of AI/AN physicians exacerbates AI/AN health and social inequities. These inequities are downstream consequences of centuries of settler-colonial genocide and disruption of Indigenous knowledge systems. To close the gap in AI/AN physician under-representation in far less than a century, systemic policy solutions must be embraced.” 
Read WHO statement: Egypt becomes the first country to achieve WHO validation on the path to elimination of hepatitis C 
Read: Ultra-processed foods and cardiometabolic health: public health policies to reduce consumption cannot wait, in the BMJ: “Food processing, including at the industrial scale, has enabled humans for millennia to produce safer, more nutritious, and palatable foods. It is essential to healthy and sustainable food systems, and to food security. However, the rise of ultra-processing is leading to serious health harms. It is time to inform consumers about adverse effects of ultra-processed foods consumption and to urge governments to take ambitious and decisive structural measures to enable healthy, less processed foods to be the easiest choice.”
Read: So-Called Sovereign Settlers: Settler Conspirituality and Nativism in the Australian Anti-Vax Movement, by Madi Day and Professor Bronwyn Carlson. The abstract states: “The COVID-19 pandemic, and the social and economic instability that followed, has given new life to conspirituality and far-right ideology in so-called Australia. This article discusses how politico-spiritual communities invested in both conspiracy theories and New Age spirituality have pieced together settler narratives about a New World Order and external threats to Western society from far-right and white supremacist Christian ideology circulated via new media. Using anti-colonial discourse analysis, we elucidate the undercurrent of white supremacist ideology in the Australian anti-vax movement, and highlight the misuse of Indigeneity in far-right and anti-vax narratives. We discuss how these narratives are settler-colonial and how conspiritualists co-opt and perform Indigeneity as a form of settler nativism. As a case study, we analyse the use of the term sovereignty by settlers attached to Muckadda Camp – a camp of ‘Original Sovereigns’ occupying the lawn outside Old Parliament house from December 2021 to February 2022. Using Indigenous critique from both new media and academia, we argue that although settlers may perform Indigeneity, they are exercising white supremacist settler narratives, and not Indigenous sovereignty.”
Read the Reuters article: In the United States, Utah has followed Indiana and Arkansas in suing Chinese-owned app TikTok, accusing it of harming children by intentionally keeping young users spending unhealthy amounts of time on the short-video sharing platform.
Ban spit hoods
Media news
Read the article about media job cuts 
Read more from The Examination, a new nonprofit newsroom in the United States which focuses on the commercial determinants of health and promises “fearless journalism for a healthy world”. It launches with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, a grant from the Pulitzer Center, and fiscal sponsor is Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The Examination partners with The Knight Lab at Medill School of Journalism, which has provided office space and other support. Here is one of its latest stories: Philip Morris ‘smoke-free’ and online campaigns are propaganda, lawsuit alleges.
#AusPol
Read: The impact of changes in a physician fee schedule on medical expenditures, fees, and volume of services. Evidence from a national fee schedule reform in Australia. The abstract states: “We examine the impact of changes to a national physician fee schedule on total medical expenditures, the volume of services, and fees charged. In our context, changes to the fee schedule were designed to promote value-based health care, and so included different types of changes to subsidised medical services, including changes to fees. Using claims data from a sample of doctors linked to a physician survey, we use difference-in-difference methods with a staggered adoption design to compare medical services which were affected with those which were not. We show that medical expenditures and the volume of affected services fell, though there is uncertainty about the magnitude of the fall. For GPs, we find evidence of increases in expenditures and fees and an increase in fees for some services provided by specialists.”
Events
