A qualitative analysis of two decades of policy documents from 200 countries and interviews with 46 key informants found that adoption of policies to promote physical activity has increased since 2004, but implementation remains weak because physical activity is still a low, albeit gradually increasing, political priority in most countries.

This Perspective describes the Colombo Call to Action, a roadmap for countries in South-East Asia to accelerate diabetes prevention and care, aiming to close treatment gaps and meet 2030 coverage targets by setting urgent and actionable priorities.

Following a privacy-preserving framework, an open-source platform allows for continuous monitoring of a wide range of smartphone-based signals, including moment-by-moment capture of screenshots, application usage logs, interaction histories and phone sensor readings.

Online harms are an urgent societal challenge, but governments should prepare teenagers to responsibly use digital technology.

Using an integrative spatial Bayesian framework that merges high-resolution environmental pesticide risk modelling with comprehensive cancer registry data, this analysis reveals spatial patterns of pesticide exposure and liver tissue-derived molecular signatures across Peru, establishing links between pesticide usage and cancer insurgence at the national scale.

Shoukat et al. use an agent-based model parameterized with the demographics and contact patterns of a high-risk poultry-farming region in Canada to evaluate how self-isolation of symptomatic cases and targeted vaccination of poultry farmers and their households affect transmission dynamics following a spillover event.

A scenario-based health impact framework and meta-analysis of exposure-responses estimates that 11.7% of global hypertension is preventable through increasing urban greenness.

Nationwide analysis of 30,086 confirmed Oropouche virus cases in Brazil between 2014 and 2025 shows that rural municipalities had over 11-fold-higher incidence than urban areas and identifies demographic, ecological and climatic factors influencing transmission, offering insights for targeted surveillance and control.

Using efficacy estimates from a previous cluster randomized trial in Senegal and accounting for differences in weather, vegetation and population density between trial and non-trial areas, a machine learning-enabled method estimates intervention efficacy for mass drug administration against malaria at a granular scale and beyond the trial period.

In a quasi-experimental study, referral to community-based, non-medical resources, commonly known as ‘social prescribing’, improved scores related to life satisfaction and decreased symptoms of anxiety in a nationally comprehensive sample of 19,627 patients from the UK.

Health underpins defence planning, demographic strategy and economic reform

Twenty-five years after its first public repository was established, the PhysioNet resource for biomedical and clinical data has enabled tens of thousands of research papers. Further efforts are ongoing to advance secure data sharing, community engagement and scalable research infrastructure.

Removing race and ethnicity from clinical algorithms is feasible, but it requires careful evaluation of algorithmic changes and systemic efforts to address underlying disparities.

Human cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) have declined in recent years, but continued surveillance and research is needed to understand this trend and mitigate future zoonotic threats.

Locally relevant use cases can maximize national support for genomic sequencing in low- and middle-income countries.