The Lancet

SK, the lead author of this article, was born with cerebral palsy, is supported by personal assistants for daily living activities, and uses a power wheelchair. Thanks to his family's advocacy and steadfast belief in his capacities, he was educationally mainstreamed with peers, which was atypical at the time in Japan. His application to medical school sparked a debate about whether he could become a doctor. A faculty member visited SK's apartment to assess him and met the group of people who were part of his care community.

Nobel laureate and pioneer in molecular biology and neuroscience. Born on Sept 5, 1939, in Nagoya, Japan, he died on July 11, 2026, in San Mateo, CA, USA, aged 86 years.

The shortage of human kidneys remains a central problem in transplantation, and many candidates die or are removed from the waiting list before an organ becomes available.1 Genetically engineered porcine kidneys have long been proposed to expand the donor pool,2 and over the past 3 years the field has rapidly moved from preclinical models to decedent models to living recipients.3–5 In their Article, Leonardo Riella and colleagues report a porcine kidney xenograft that supported a living human recipient for 271 days—the longest dialysis-free xenograft function described to date—followed by explantation and a subsequent deceased-donor human kidney transplantation.

“Embedding rural voices in research and policy isn’t optional, it is essential to delivering equitable health care”, notes Anna Ugalde, Professor of Health Services Research at Deakin University in Melbourne, VIC, Australia, and lead of the Equitable Cancer Outcomes across Rural and Remote Australia (ECORRA) research programme. “A lot of our policy projects and key research projects are coming from urban health services, sometimes with very little consideration for what they mean for people who live outside of those areas.”

The US Executive Order of Aug 10, 2026, establishing “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations”,1 should be considered not only a domestic policy change but also a potential global health signal. By redefining what childhood vaccines should be routinely recommended, encouraging separation of the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and advocating separate medical visits for different childhood immunisations, the policy risks conflating parental choice with the optimisation of evidence-based vaccination delivery.

Ebola outbreaks place extraordinary demands on the people tasked with containing them. The ongoing Bundibugyo virus disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, following cross-border transmission to Uganda, is occurring amid armed conflict, population displacement, humanitarian pressures, sustained transmission, and infections and deaths among health-care workers, underscoring that outbreak control depends on a diverse workforce operating under exceptional pressure.1 Responders face infection risk, repeated exposure to severe illness and death, fear of transmitting infection to their families, long working hours, exhaustion, isolation, stigma, and sometimes hostility.

Oral administration of OM-85 in early life did not decrease the incidence of wheezing lower respiratory tract illness in this high-risk population. Bacterial lysates are not efficacious for the primary prevention of asthma-like symptoms during the preschool years.

Asthma-related symptoms, such as wheezing, are highly prevalent among preschool children. Asthma is a complex disease and originates from genetic susceptibility combined with different environmental exposures. Early life is a specific critical period for development of later-life asthma.1 Population studies have identified various fetal and early-childhood risk factors for asthma, including early-life respiratory tract infections.1 Early-life respiratory tract infections have not only short-term consequences, but seem also to affect the development of both the respiratory and immune systems, and subsequently predispose individuals to chronic respiratory diseases in later life.

We estimated that SHS remains a substantial driver of global health loss, particularly through cardiovascular and paediatric respiratory diseases. Persistent geographical disparities and growing absolute numbers of exposed individuals in several regions underscore the urgent need for accelerated implementation and enforcement of comprehensive tobacco control measures, particularly to protect women and children in both public and domestic environments.

Alzheimer's disease clinical practice is entering a new era, with advances in diagnosis and therapy raising the possibility of earlier intervention and prevention of cognitive impairment. As access to diagnostic testing and therapy widens, implementation must be based on evidence, ethics, and equity to ensure that testing is both safe and accessible for everyone who stands to benefit.