Thread by @kakape

It has been another busy sad interesting infuriating illuminating year in #globalhealth and #infectiousdisease.
Or as @DrMikeRyan told me: “2022 [was] kind of a mixed year, filled with terror and hope in equal measure.”

My colleague @SalmLaura and I asked doctors and researchers to look back at 2022 for an end-of-year episode of our @pandemiapodcast (and another episode to come soon on what 2023 may bring).
Podcast is here (in German) and a few main points to come:
viertausendhertz.de/pan52/

COVID...
of course dominated yet another year. As @DrMikeRyan told me: “I think we’ve all been a little surprised that the pandemic extended so fully through 2022.”

2022 showed the big gaps that remained in terms of immunity Ryan told me.
And "we haven't really integrated the antivirals in a meaningful and effective way into the clinical pathways. I mean,... it's a bit of a lottery, whether you get an antiviral or not in any given country.”

We saw health care systems struggling to recover. "There's a presumption that everything is back to normal", @DrMikeRyan told me. "But we've seen normal healthcare delivery hasn't recovered. The rates of social anxiety and frank PTSD in health care workers is frighteningly high".

And #sarscov2 was joined by other respiratory viruses:
“We're clearly out of the era where COVID just cleared the boards of every other respiratory infection and dominated everything, we are now back into a world where multiple things are circulating", @HelenBranswell told me.

"Everybody is exhausted”, @HelenBranswell told me. “And having all of these other things come back is just adding to the levels of exhaustion in ways that are almost unsustainable here.”

CLIMATE CHANGE...
was on many minds. @EckerleIsabella and @Tuliodna both pointed to the same study in Nature Climate Change as one of the most important papers of the year.

nature.com/articles/s4158…

The authors concluded that #climatechange was making more than half of the infectious diseases they examined worse. "Climate change is bringing animal species into contact that would not normally meet, leading to more cross-species transmissions", says Eckerle.

A case in point: cholera.
"The thing that's kind of struck me most on the epidemic front over the last year and probably has escaped most people's attention is cholera", @DrMikeRyan told me. "I mean, we have 29 ongoing cholera outbreaks around the world"

It is so many outbreaks in fact that a decision had to be made to use the global vaccine stockpile only for first doses and stop administering second doses.
I wrote about that here: science.org/content/articl…)

We all know the rhetoric about a looming climate crisis, @DrMikeRyan told me. "It's not looming. For hundreds of millions of people, the climate crisis is here.”

CONFLICT...
was sadly another common theme in 2022.
The war in Ukraine, for instance, raised some thorny questions around chemical weapons, @_katusche told me.

In the past, the issue had mainly been seen as a question of getting young men treated and back on the battle field, she told me. "No one had really thought about old women and old men and babies ... or how you would manage patients with very high doses of toxic chemicals"

Russia has also run a ruthless misinformation campaign accusing public health laboratories of working on bioweapons (as @Justin_Ling and others explained to us in this episode: viertausendhertz.de/pan48/)

In general, many researchers pointed to the flood of misinformation and disinformation as one of the worst aspects of 2022. “Over the course of this year, I've noticed that the disinformation campaigns have gotten monumentally worse," @angie_rasmussen told me.

"We've really come into an era where … disinformation [is] rampant, which does make it a lot harder to respond effectively to any of these emerging diseases”, @angie_rasmussen told me.

And while the war in Ukraine got a lot of attention conflicts in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Haiti or the terrible situation in Tigray, which personally affected @drTedros, and many other places got very little.

"Places like the Sahel, places like Afghanistan, places like Yemen have almost been forgotten", @DrMikeRyan told me. "There's still 1000s and 1000s of kids starving in Yemen, it didn't change overnight."

COMPLEXITY
I'll end with a point that @Chikwe_I made, when we asked him about 2022:
"To me, what stood out was that there wasn't one thing that stood out. …

…In a way we're coming, I think slowly to terms with the complexity of the world that we live in, the complexity of the influences on infectious diseases, which is my space, and recognising that there's no simple cause, and no simple solution."

"Investing in one without the other, in vaccines without diagnostics, in therapeutics without research, in teaching without learning in social science, without anthropology or without zoonotics" makes no sense @Chikwe_I told us.

“We have to do all of these together. And that's really hard. Because we are not built to do that. We have learned over the last 300 years how to be more and more specialist in narrower and narrower fields. And so we are all struggling, I think,” @Chikwe_I told us.

I'll end here for now. If you speak German you can listen to the entire podcast here: viertausendhertz.de/pan52/
Thanks to the many people who took the time to participate incl. @chngin_the_wrld, @Boghuma and to everyone who is helping us in ways big or small to make this podcast!