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“The health system is already collapsing under the strain of soaring rates of malnutrition, measles, and cholera coupled with the residual impacts of past Ebola and covid-19 outbreaks,” said Greg Ramm, Save the Children’s country director in the DRC. The case fatality rate in the DRC is around 2.4% in people over 15 years of age, but in children, who account for 60% of all cases, it is as high as 8.6%, WHO data show.3 The virus has also been reported in another 16 other countries, the African CDC said. Of 371 hospital patients in the mining town of Kamituga with suspected mpox, 88% reported paying for sex in bars, found a preprint study of cases seen between September 2023 to April 2024.4 The virus can spread through physical contact with mpox lesions, kissing, or face-to-face interactions like talking, which spreads droplets in the air.3 People can also contract mpox from touching contaminated objects such as clothing, bedsheets, or utensils. Around 10 million doses are estimated to be needed, Kesaya said, but so far none have arrived in Africa, following delays in accessing supplies and hurdles getting local regulatory approval.5 Last week the US pledged $414m for humanitarian help in the DRC, $10m to support response efforts, and 50 000 mpox vaccine doses.6 In the meantime, foreign nations must provide funding to increase community access to water, sanitation, and hygiene, said Irene Owusu-Poku, a health policy analyst at the non-governmental organisation Wateraid.

Peru was praised for imposing swift pandemic measures early on, so why are its excess deaths so high, asks Luke Taylor

False beliefs and decades of conflict have left Latin America’s doctors facing death threats when they are already vulnerable, writes Luke Taylor

The country’s relaxation of measures such as masking — especially in England — is showing the limits of relying on vaccines alone. The country’s relaxation of measures such as masking — especially in England — is showing the limits of relying on vaccines alone.

Many thought a second wave was impossible in Brazil’s Amazon because of the severity of the first. A second crisis has stunned the city of Manaus, reports Luke Taylor, and raises questions around a new variant and the likelihood of natural herd immunity

•There was no relationship between vaccination and autism (OR: 0.99; 95% CI: 0.92 to 1.06).•There was no relationship between vaccination and ASD (autism spectrum disorder) (OR: 0.91; 95% CI: 0.68 to 1.20).•There was no relationship between [autism/ASD] and MMR (OR: 0.84; 95% CI: 0.70 to 1.01).•There was no relationship between [autism/ASD] and thimerosal (OR: 1.00; 95% CI: 0.77 to 1.31).•There was no relationship between [autism/ASD] and mercury (Hg) (OR: 1.00; 95% CI: 0.93 to 1.07).•Findings of this meta-analysis suggest that vaccinations are not associated with the development of autism or autism spectrum disorder. There has been enormous debate regarding the possibility of a link between childhood vaccinations and the subsequent development of autism. This has in recent times become a major public health issue with vaccine preventable diseases increasing in the community due to the fear of a ‘link’ between vaccinations and autism. We performed a meta-analysis to summarise available evidence from case-control and cohort studies on this topic (MEDLINE, PubMed, EMBASE, Google Scholar up to April, 2014). Eligible studies assessed the relationship between vaccine administration and the subsequent development of autism or autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Two reviewers extracted data on study characteristics, methods, and outcomes. Disagreement was resolved by consensus with another author. Five cohort studies involving 1,256,407 children, and five case-control studies involving 9,920 children were included in this analysis. The cohort data revealed no relationship between vaccination and autism (OR: 0.99; 95% CI: 0.92 to 1.06) or ASD (OR: 0.91; 95% CI: 0.68 to 1.20), nor was there a relationship between autism and MMR (OR: 0.84; 95% CI: 0.70 to 1.01), or thimerosal (OR: 1.00; 95% CI: 0.77 to 1.31), or mercury (Hg) (OR: 1.00; 95% CI: 0.93 to 1.07). Similarly the case-control data found no evidence for increased risk of developing autism or ASD following MMR, Hg, or thimerosal exposure when grouped by condition (OR: 0.90, 95% CI: 0.83 to 0.98; p=0.02) or grouped by exposure type (OR: 0.85, 95% CI: 0.76 to 0.95; p=0.01). Findings of this meta-analysis suggest that vaccinations are not associated with the development of autism or autism spectrum disorder. Furthermore, the components of the vaccines (thimerosal or mercury) or multiple vaccines (MMR) are not associated with the development of autism or autism spectrum disorder.

The World Health Organization has declared the global monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) as public health measures taken fail to stem the disease’s spread. Monkeypox has been endemic in west Africa for decades, where the illness is usually spread to people by infected wild animals. [...]2022 infections reported in Europe and North America were usually isolated cases linked to travel from Africa or animal trafficking. Countries with recently imported cases of monkeypox and those that are seeing human-to-human transmission are being asked to implement a coordinated response to stop transmission and protect vulnerable groups, increase public health surveillance and measures, and strengthen clinical management and infection prevention and control in hospitals and clinics.

This paper is an empirical and theoretical analysis of buggery charges brought against men in New South Wales in the period 1788—1838. Drawing on a previously unexamined archive, it shows that an irregular pattern of charges in the first forty years of colonization was displaced by a dramatic increase in buggery charges in the period 1828–1838, and a move towards charging accused persons capitally; that the genesis of most complaints was community, rather than official, surveillance; and that throughout the entire period witnesses were far from circumspect in their evidence of unspeakable acts. The paper then argues that the upswing in charges post-1828 was only partly related to the introduction of the Offences Against the Person Act 1828 and its lower evidentiary threshold for proof of buggery. More important, it suggests, was the acute moralism of NSW society in the 1820s and 1830s, generated in part by John Thomas Bigge's 1822 Report into the State of the Colony of New South Wales. The move towards capital charges, however, does appear to bear some relationship to the changes in the Offences Act. The final part of the paper connects social anxiety over buggery to the 1837–38 Molesworth Inquiry into Transportation and the eventual cessation of convict transportation to NSW in 1840.

In nineteenth-century England, legal conceptions of work and family changed in fundamental ways. Notably, significant legal moves came into play that changed the legal understanding of the family.Constructing the Family examines the evolution of the legal-discursive framework governing work and family relations. Luke Taylor considers the intersecting intellectual and institutional forces that contributed to the dissolution of the household, the establishment of separate spheres of work and family, and the emergence of modern legal and social ideas concerning work and family. He shows how specific legal-institutional moves contributed to the creation of the family's categorical status in the social and legal order and a distinct and exceptional body of rules - Family Law - for its governance.Shedding light on the historical processes that contributed to the emergence of English Family Law, Constructing the Family shows how work and family became separate regulatory domains, and in so doing reveals the contingent nature of the modern legal family.

This article traces the emergence of family law as an autonomous legal domain within English scholarly legal thought. It provides a genealogy of conceptual and taxonomical change spanning a nearly two-hundred-year period via close readings of a range of legal texts beginning with Blackstone’s Commentaries. The article shows how the invention of English family law hinged on two interrelated shifts in legal thought. One movement involved the staged extrusion of productive work relations (in the narrow sense of work for pay) from the legal household and the re-characterization of those relations as market-based activities exterior to the family and situated within an increasingly freestanding law of master and servant. Running in parallel with that work-related movement was a new emphasis on the public importance of marriage and a corresponding elevation of the husband–wife relation to the forefront of domestic relations. This latter move involved an effort by scholars to distinguish the emerging law of contract (modelled on commercial relations and ideological notions of individual will) from household-based relations that were seen as not ‘properly’ contractual because of the existence of superadded conditions that did not derive from individual will. In particular, scholars began to reframe marriage in terms of status owing to these non-modifiable terms, though contract remained the legal device by which the status of marriage was created. In the early twentieth century, these processes resulted in the complete separation of work and family into the distinct legal domains of family law and employment law.