New Preventable-Disease Tracker and GLP-1s for Adolescents

Editors' Note

Around the world, vaccine-preventable diseases are making a comeback. Measles, eliminated across the Americas in 2016 and then again in 2024, has infected thousands of people in the United States, Canada, and Mexico over the past year. Whooping cough has similarly rebounded stateside—though across the Pacific, Japan's outbreak is four times as large, at 81,000 cases as of early October. Those upsurges are driven by stalled progress with immunization campaigns, shifts in vaccine acceptance, and reductions in health funding.

To help the public follow the outbreaks in real time, TGH Data Visuals Editor Allison Krugman has developed a global tracker for nine vaccine-preventable diseases. Updated on a weekly basis, the tracker features alerts from ProMed, a disease surveillance program run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases, as well as historical data from the World Health Organization.

The TGH newsletter then pivots to the obesity epidemic, and how doctors are prescribing Ozempic and other glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) drugs off-label for weight loss. Shreya Sundar, an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Vibha Singhal, associate professor at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, describe how GLP-1 medications are filtering into child and teen groups, but they warn that pediatric-specific evidence remains limited.

To cap off this week's edition, professors Sarah Rendón García, Germán A. Cadenas, and Oswaldo Moreno outline how the U.S. Health and Human Services Department proposed a policy to ban undocumented migrants from federally funded services for early education, mental health, and substance use prevention—and how doing so could affect U.S. citizens.

Until next week!—Nsikan Akpan, Managing Editor, and Caroline Kantis, Associate Editor