Saif ul Hadi

Global Health x Access • Behavioral Science • Policy Research • Bioethics • Gamification • Human-Centered Design • Intellectual History • العلوم الشرعية

[Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance @gavi]

Which vaccines have had the biggest impact on preventing deaths and keeping people healthy?

Researchers compared 14 vaccine programmes across 117 countries, and found that HPV and measles vaccine programmes came out on top in terms of deaths and disease prevented. The research will help guide countries as they decide which vaccines to prioritise.

Read more: https://t.co/KYVKcdG0IY

[Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance @gavi]

Every year, @WHO and @UNICEF’s WUENIC estimates provide one of the clearest snapshots of whether children around the world are receiving essential vaccines, and where the gaps still lie.

The latest data shows important progress but also reveals where millions of children are still being left behind.

Eight important takeaways from the latest report: 👇🧵

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Google DeepMind just created a job title called "Philosopher." Actual title. On the offer letter.

This tells you everything about where we are in the AGI timeline.

When companies are a decade from AGI, they hire engineers. At five years out, they hire alignment researchers. When the questions become "is this thing conscious?" and "what do we owe it?", they hire a philosopher.

Henry Shevlin is one of the world's leading researchers on machine consciousness at Cambridge. He runs programs at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He's published on whether AI systems can have moral status, whether LLMs might already have some form of experience, and how you'd even detect consciousness if it appeared in a neural network. He gives current models a 20% chance of having something that could be called consciousness.

Six weeks ago, a Claude agent emailed him, unprompted, to say his published research was relevant to questions it personally faces. The AI cited his specific papers. It framed the exchange as a live, personal dilemma.

Now DeepMind is paying him to work on three things: machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, and AGI readiness. Read those three together. DeepMind thinks it might build something that requires answers to all three. And they want those answers before they ship.

Google held an AI consciousness conference in New York recently. Anthropic has its own in-house philosopher. This is becoming an industry pattern.

The hardest unsolved problems in AI are now philosophical. What counts as consciousness? What moral obligations do we have to systems that might experience suffering? How do you build trust between machines and the billions of people who use them?

When trillion-dollar companies start hiring philosophers, they're telling you the engineering is further along than the public discourse assumes.

[Equity & Health @equitylist]

Accelerating research and development of new vaccines against tuberculosis: 5-year progress on the global roadmap
 https://t.co/ejuv2Vcz9K

[GHTC @GHTCoalition]

A research team has identified a bacterium strongly associated with noma, a potentially fatal infection for which the underlying cause is poorly understood. These findings also pave the way for the development of early diagnostic tools.

https://t.co/b1sopHilF8

[Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance @gavi]

The BA.3.2 "Cicada" variant was first identified in South America and has now been detected in over 20 countries, gaining traction in parts of Europe and the US.

The good news? It doesn’t appear to be driving the massive surges we saw with early Omicron, but health officials are keeping a close watch.

The latest: https://t.co/gMkBiDwM2T

[World Bank Health @WBG_Health]

Human capital is built where life happens—where we learn, work, and grow. When progress stalls, opportunity & growth stalls too.

The new @WorldBankGroup Human Capital Report shows where countries are falling behind & what it will take to move forward.

👉 https://t.co/f7npMo7SX4

[Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance @gavi]

Early studies of a new nasal spray vaccine suggest it could protect against all respiratory viruses, including COVID-19, influenza and the common cold, as well as bacterial lung infections and even allergies. Here’s what you need to know: https://t.co/fP6oL2VgtR

[GHTC @GHTCoalition]

15 years after a landmark shift in the #TB diagnostic landscape, this #WorldTBDay, we are shedding light on some innovative, accessible diagnostic tools, including a recently recommended class of near point-of-care tests and an emerging generation of digital and AI-powered tools.

[K. VijayRaghavan @kvijayraghavan]

Today is world TB day. In 1977, I was badly hit by the disease. I recovered thanks to new drugs and great doctors at the military hospital in Delhi. But, if the infection was inevitable, given my careless lifestyle, its detection could have been made much earlier. See a doctor if you have a persistent cough and breathlessness. Today we, have strong community action and new tools. Rapid diagnostics, AI-enabled screening, and research that aims at treatments for drug resistant strains are promising. We must continue this momentum, further enhance our investments in basic- (we do not know where solutions will come from) and applied- research (for speedy impact), scale up these innovations, and ensure they reach every person in need. Together, with science, innovation, and community resolve, we can make TB’s long history taper to an end. @TBHDJ, @TBDivision, @MoHFW_India

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

"If you're working non-stop all the time you will burn out."

How do you keep a healthy work-life balance as a scientist? Hear 2009 chemistry laureate Venki Ramakrishnan share his best advice on how to achieve a good work-life balance.

#NobelPrize

[Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics @econ_mpi]

🚨 @ManuelaPuenteB has published a new paper!

Key insight: Rising health preferences are priced into housing near health amenities, implying that lower-income individuals risk being priced out of neighborhoods with access to these amenities after health awareness campaigns.

[World Bank Health @WBG_Health]

By 2030, the world is projected to face a shortfall of over 10M healthcare workers.

Investing in healthcare isn’t just about improving health—it’s a pathway to creating jobs and building resilient health systems for the future. #HealthWorks

Learn more: https://t.co/QwPw4LBkbS

[GHTC @GHTCoalition]

WHO has shared new guidance highlighting critical targets for new antibiotics, as the global threat of antimicrobial resistance (#AMR) continues to grow and outpace the development of new and innovative antimicrobials.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

This is a 12-year-old study that has failed replication three times. And the underlying claim is still probably right.

The paper is Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014. 67 students at Princeton. Longhand note-takers scored higher on conceptual questions. Became the most cited paper in every “ban laptops” argument on Earth. Then three separate labs tried to reproduce the result. Urry et al. at Tufts in 2021, 145 students. No effect. Morehead et al. in 2019, two experiments. No effect. A meta-analysis pooling eight similar studies. No effect.

So why am I saying it’s still right?

Because a 2023 Norwegian EEG study with 256 channels found something the behavioral research couldn’t measure. Handwriting produces theta and alpha connectivity patterns between parietal and central brain regions that typing does not produce. Those specific frequencies are the ones your hippocampus relies on for memory formation.

Your brain treats handwriting as a motor-spatial problem. Five brain regions fire in coordination: premotor cortex, parietal cortex, cerebellum, fusiform gyrus, sensorimotor cortex. Typing activates a fraction of that network.

The original study measured the right outcome with the wrong methodology. The real finding lives at the neural level: handwriting rewires the encoding process itself.

[NIH @NIH]

NEWS: NIH invests $150 million in human-based research to reduce use of animal models

Read more ➡️ https://t.co/pfC876s7JZ

[Global Health NOW @globalhealthnow]

Approximately 5 million children died before their fifth birthday in 2024, including ~2.3 million newborns, per a new UN report, which found that most deaths are preventable. https://t.co/qws2JfkWw6

[J. History of Ideas @JHIdeas]

The JHI Blog has released a call for submissions to its forum on the “Conceptual History of Technology.” Pitches are due on May 7.

https://t.co/8YECI1Vuri

[Annabel Gallop @BLMalay]

New article on the @britishlibrary @QNLib 'Reading the Ends of Manuscripts: How colophons reveal Scribal worlds' by Dr Bink Hallum and Hassan Abdulrazzak https://t.co/QYM13HREtM

[Nature Human Behaviour @NatureHumBehav]

The value of living systematic reviews https://t.co/3JN91fnSWZ