Global News Podcast - First malaria treatment for babies approved

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

A new malaria treatment designed for babies is expected to be rolled out in Africa within weeks. Also: Fresh warnings of the dangers linked to aid distribution sites in Gaza, and a look at the rise of e-sports.

This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson and at 1300hrs GMT on Tuesday the 8th of July, these are our main stories. The first ever malaria treatment for babies and under fives has been approved with a rollout in African countries in weeks. The Red Cross says Gaza's overwhelmed health system has seen a huge rise in injuries and deaths linked to controversial aid distribution sites backed by Israel. At least 50 people have been killed in an attack by gunmen in central Nigeria.

Also in this podcast... This divided opinion, some support her decision, other think it's just a step too far. She shouldn't have done it without the approval of her husband. The internet piles in after a South Korean actress becomes pregnant against her ex-husband's wishes using an embryo created with him during the marriage. We don't often begin this podcast with good news, but today is an exception because the first malaria treatment that can be given to babies and to very young children has been approved and could be rolled out in African countries within weeks. Until now, the only option for under-5s was to give them versions formulated for older children which came with

the risk of overdosing. And even so, an estimated 450,000 babies and toddlers die in Africa every year from malaria-related illnesses. Dr Caroline Bolton, Global Malaria Programme Head at Novartis, gave us a sense of the scale of the problem. It is the first ever malaria treatment for newborns and young infants less than five kilograms who have malaria. There are potentially 30 million births across African areas where malaria is prevalent. The best evidence we have is from West Africa, which suggests that we have a prevalence somewhere between 3% and 18% of the babies that are born there have malaria. Dr Caroline Bolton, our Africa health correspondent,

Makiuchi Okofar is in Lagos in Nigeria and told me more about this drug. It's the first ever malaria treatment specifically designed for newborns and infants weighing about less than 4.5 kg. Now, this is really interesting and it's coming at a great time because it will be filling a treatment gap which is the fact that babies and infants have had to be given drugs meant for older children and doctors have had concerns that this might, you know, lead to overdose and it might not be so suitable for them because babies have really delicate and vulnerable bodies like the liver which processes drugs might not be able to

process the drug meant for older people. So this is a great and interesting news. I have a colleague who just gave birth and earlier this morning we were speaking, as he said he was greatly excited because malaria is a disease we face here in Nigeria in great numbers. And a number of African nations were involved in the trials for this drug, weren't they? Yes, you're right. There are about eight African countries that took part in clinical trials of this drug,

including Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania. There are about eight of them. And these countries are said to be the first in the coming weeks that will approve these drugs and to have stat distribution them to mothers and for their new babies. And how quickly do you think this could be ruled out? From the statement the company that produced this drug put out, it did say it would be approved within weeks and considering that the clinicals are all done, I think that this might be quite speedy in the rollout. So in a couple of weeks, maybe mothers would have this available for their

newborns. Makochi Okofar in Nigeria. Next to Gaza and as people there wait for a ceasefire, the suffering goes on. At the time of recording this podcast, the International Red Cross has just issued a statement saying there's been a huge rise in injuries and deaths linked to aid distribution sites which are now being run by the heavily criticised US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. I'm Elisa Analyst, Sebastian Usher, who's in Jerusalem, Tomi Moore.

The ICRC is speaking out about this because it's the ICRC's field hospital in the south of Gaza, which is where many of those who have been wounded or killed in these incidents near the new aid distribution sites, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, have been taken. This is a 60-bed hospital which is under, as the ICRC says, extraordinary pressure both from the numbers of wounded who are coming in on an almost daily basis, which the ICRC describes as unprecedented, that the numbers are more in the past month than have been seen for a year in that area, but also the lack of supplies,

the great difficulty that a field hospital like that has in managing that number of casualties. And it essentially is saying, as we've heard, and as has become clear over the past five weeks since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began to operate, the way that it's operating, the fact that Gazans are having to go to these areas often in darkness, in chaos, in very very difficult conditions have led to countless incidents now where Israeli troops have opened fire, other armed

groups have also opened fire and the result has been 20, 30, 40, 50 people at a time being killed and many more wounded. So it's really a warning and a cry of desperation from the ICRC about the situation but it just can't continue as it has been doing. Sebastien Asher in Jerusalem. China has a tight grip on the supply of a group of rare earth minerals essential for modern life. Without them, factories making smartphones, TV screens, wind turbines

and electric cars could all grind to a halt. It's given Beijing huge leverage over Washington and in trade negotiations with President Donald Trump. But the BBC has discovered that this dominance has come at a huge environmental cost. Our China correspondent Laura Booker has travelled to the country's two biggest mining regions where she found a toxic legacy of polluted water and contaminated soil. Farmer Huang is guiding us uphill to his forestry land, which is surrounded by rare earth mines. We are filing complaints to force them to operate legally. Right now, their land use

is illegal. The mountains of Ganzhou and southern China's Jiangxi province are dotted with bright turquoise chemical ponds, which help separate the valuable minerals from the soil. We arrive to the site of a landslide. The mining company has planted small trees, but the damage is still clear. The authorities' inaction is the main reason these landslides keep happening. Farmers like us, we are the vulnerable ones. To put it simply, we were born at a disadvantage.

It's pretty tragic. Our interview is interrupted by men wearing uniforms with the Rare Earth company logo. Even as we walked downhill, we found our car blocked in and at least 12 men waiting for us. You blocked the car in? One told us he was a manager at the mining company before confronting our interviewee. It's not a secret. It's their land.

He refused to let us leave for around three hours. We asked the China Rare Earth Jiangxi Company to comment, but they declined. There were once more than a thousand mines in this one county, an indication of the chokehold China has on the world's supply of a group of metals needed for nearly everything that we switch on every day, from smartphones to Bluetooth speakers, computers to TV screens. But the country was in such a rush for Rare Earths that it developed first and hoped to clean up later, says Professor Julie Klinger, author of Rare Earth Frontiers. That was a strategy that was implemented despite the carefully documented social and environmental impacts. And although there's a lot of research, there's a lot of data on those impacts to

water, to land, to air quality and the impacts on human mortality, I think actually it's very difficult to know the true human and environmental cost of that sort of development model. Some of the worst health effects have been found in the north of the country in Inner Mongolia near the world's largest rare earth mine. I'm walking beside the Yellow River, the second largest river in China, staring at a skyline of the city of Baotou, which has become famous in this country because of rare earths. The toxic chemicals used to separate rare earths from the soil have created a huge tailings pond which is slowly leeching towards

this mother river. We drove around the man-made lake full of grey, radioactive sludge. The villagers who once lived here have been moved after investigations into cancer clusters and birth defects. Laura Bicca. Gunmen have attacked a village in central Nigeria killing at least 50 people. The victims were from a volunteer force set up to protect villages from raids. Our Africa regional editor, Will Ross, told me more about what had happened. A large group of this sort of self-defence militia, as it were, so these are vigilante groups set up in the different villages to try and protect the population from attacks by armed gangs because they say the police and the army just aren't protecting them. These people set off into a nearby forest near the village of Kukawa or the town of

Kukawa and they tried to then target a base belonging to an armed group and were then ambushed and that's how dozens of people were killed. It's quite chaotic the information coming in. It's thought that many more bodies could still be in the forest but there have been funerals held already but it's clear that this is kind of completely out of control, the insecurity in this particular part of Plateau State. I mean what do we know about the armed groups who are there? So what's been going on for a long time has been a lot of rivalry between

cattle herding communities and then settled farmers. That's often to do with land, access to water, but also to do with access to jobs etc. But the big problem now in Nigeria is that this is just one of a number of security challenges and the problem in north central Nigeria, this area here, has reached a kind of peak. Amnesty International says during the first two years of the current government's time in power, President Tinubu's time in power, well over 8,000 people have been killed in Benue and Plateau states. So that's central Nigeria. Then you head up to the northeast and you look at the rise of the jihadist groups.

They are carrying out more and more attacks. They had been subdued but those Islamist militant groups are again carrying out more attacks. There are other states in the northwest where criminal gangs are extorting money, basically ringing people up, forcing them to pay and killing families if they don't pay up. And it's as though, you know, you've also got the the southeast Nigeria, a secessionist group there, so there are just too many huge security challenges for the state to cope with and right now the the central north central Nigeria, this plateau state is where that's most evident. Will Ross, South Korean actress Lisa Hong, star of the Netflix horror series Sweet Home,

has revealed she's expecting her second child, news that would traditionally be greeted with congratulations all round. But the way she became pregnant has caused controversy. The 43-year-old used an embryo created with her ex-husband before they were divorced, and he didn't consent to it being used by her to have a child. Our Asia Pacific editor Michael Bristow is following the story. Actress Lisi Hung, she got married to a businessman in 2017. They had a son, they wanted a second child, they had difficulty conceiving so they went through IVF treatment. That resulted in several embryos which were frozen. Now subsequently the relationship has ended, they got divorced earlier this year but these embryos still existed.

Now the actress has told her fans on social media that she's pregnant with one of the embryos. The ex-husband didn't want this to happen so of course this raises all kinds of moral and ethical questions. And how did she explain her decision? Essentially it came down to motherhood. She's spoken a little bit over recent years about becoming a mother, how she's enjoyed it, spending time with her son and she wanted a second child and it just so happened that these eggs could be preserved for five years. That term was coming to an end, so she had to make a decision whether or not she wanted to use them or not. She decided to use them despite the husband's objections.

She said she's been through all the scenarios, all the difficulties looking forward, and she kind of came to the decision that she just had to do this. She couldn't bear to waste these embryos. And how's it being viewed in South Korea? What are fans saying? It's divided opinions. Some support her decision, other think it's just a step too far. She shouldn't have done it without the approval of her husband. Interestingly, since she announced this, the husband has come out and said, OK, I didn't want it to happen, but it has happened, so now I'm going to take responsibility as a father so he seems

okay with it so perhaps everything will be all right. Michael Bristow speaking there to Katie Watson. Still to come in this podcast. We are working with mental coaches, performance coaches, everything. We are managing vitamins, food, everything before tournaments. The new generation of video gamers taking over the world of e-sport. America's top medical organizations are suing Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Health Secretary, over the agency's COVID-19 vaccine recommendations

for children and pregnant women. On May 27, Mr. Kennedy said the shot would no longer be included in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recommendations for those groups. Dr. Susan Kresley is president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, one of the organizations behind the lawsuit. And she told us this is not just about COVID. It is true that the secretary is responsible for making US policy. But what is upsetting to the medical community

and to the pediatric leaders in America is that the process that we have had in place to use the science to guide recommendations and have experts and the appropriate expertise around the table collaborating to come up with science-based recommendations has been dismantled and replaced. And a unilateral decision by the secretary

without the transparency or science-based conversation was made and the experts were not in the room to help guide the recommendations. For us, this isn't really about COVID. This is about eroding the trust and the infrastructure of vaccine recommendations and delivery across the country, which has led to further questioning and unnecessary anxiety in families trying to make decisions for their children in all the vaccine groups, not just the COVID vaccine.

We had a very robust collaborative, expert-based, science-based process, which is also embedded in the vaccine delivery infrastructure in our country. And so 17 members of that committee were fired and replaced by eight people who were not vetted in the usual process way in order to promote an agenda that was not in keeping with the trusted process that had been counted on by many for decades. Dr Susan Kresley. So far Robert F. Kennedy's department hasn't commented. Despite concerns from many sectors, experts say artificial intelligence can be a force for good.

The question is how? What can encourage friendly use of AI by humans? Well that question is a central one at the AI for Good summit which a group of UN agencies are hosting in Geneva. There is one major sticking point, the big tech companies aren't there. Dame Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton here in England and a UN advisor on AI policy. She told the BBC's Justin Webb what needs to be done. We need leadership around the world on this. There's less and less Americans here of course these days because of what the Trump saying they're not going to regulate. I mean just to be really

blunt about it, if they follow through and say we're going to let AI companies, particularly in the United States, do what follow through and say, we're going to let AI companies, particularly in the United States, do what they want to do, we're going to take all the shackles off them, we're not going to regulate them, it doesn't really matter about a UN conference, does it? Because the work will be done and there's nothing the UN or any of these bodies can do about it. Yeah, I'm afraid, Justin, I do agree with you. And that's what my call is for the governments of the world to actually talk about, bring this, bring together what we can use AI for.

That's, I mean, it's not something we want to say, we don't ever want to use AI because it's so dangerous. It isn't, it's really, it's gonna be a powerful good and it's gonna really help us do things that we couldn't do before. But we do need to bring together what the tech companies are doing. And they're of course all in the West Coast of America and we've got to have leadership that's doing that and that's what I'm calling for all the time now.

How hopeful are you that your call will be heard? Well, just at this moment in time I think it's really difficult and that's why I've come here to try and talk to people of a like mind to see where we can put the pressure point. Dame Wendy Hall speaking there to Justin Webb. A court in Slovakia has begun trying a 72-year-old man over the attempted murder of the country's Prime Minister Robert Fico last year. Juraj Sintela is accused of firing five shots at the Prime Minister after a government meeting.

The defendant admits firing the gun but insists he was only trying to wound Mr Fico not to kill him. But if he's found guilty he could face life imprisonment as our Prague correspondent Rob Cameron explains. Juraj Sintula shouted long-lived democracy as he was led by heavily armed police into court in the city of Banska Bistritsa. Cintula faces life in prison after prosecutors upgraded the premeditated murder charge to terrorism. But that may be difficult to prove.

There's no evidence he acted as part of a conspiracy and the Supreme Court has cast doubt on the reclassification. Mr Fyto himself says he bears no personal animus towards the gunman, instead blaming the liberal opposition and the media for creating an atmosphere of hatred in Slovakia. Rob Cameron, Wednesday the 9th July could be the shortest day in history and it's all down to the Earth's rotation unexpectedly speeding up. That's according to the astrophysicist Graham Jones from the University of London who's predicted that time will drop by up

to 1.3 milliseconds. So why is this happening and how do humans perceive the passing of time? Emma Barnett spoke to the philosopher Julian Julian Bergini and first to Dr Hannah Frye, Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. For almost all of history we set our time by the Earth. The Earth is an absolutely rubbish timekeeper. It's this wobbly rock floating around in space and so it's not consistent. And the thing is, is that the spin on its axis changes over time. So we know, for example, that actually it used to spin much faster, and you can tell this by cutting

into ancient coral and counting up the rings like you would on a tree. And you can see sort of summer and winter and day and night. And we know that 430 million years ago, there were like 420 days in a year, right? So, you know, way more sleeps between birthdays. So we know that Earth is sort of slowing down on its axis. But this thing is that it looks like there's some shift inside the Earth's core. It's a bit like an ice skater spinning really, really fast when they bring their arms in, which is just ever

so, ever so slightly speeding the Earth up. Julian, let me bring you in. The way that we think about it passing is what do you think? How can we explain that? First of all if you think about all human beings the physics of time doesn't really tell us anything about that. There's no kind of past, present or future in physics and also there's no real sense of the direction of time. It could be going backwards or forwards for all physics cares. So the way human beings experience time is kind of very sort of different from a scientific understanding of time. But then also you've then got the possibility of like cultural

variation. But if you think about it, it's quite remarkable that human beings are able to both experience the moment as we think all animals do, but also have that sense of the future and the past and to plan and to have memories and so forth. And it does seem that in different cultures in different times, we've also kind of fashioned that in different ways. So in our contemporary Western culture, we very much have an idea of time having a direction,

a purpose, you know, in Christian times, it was heading towards a salvation, in secular times it was about progress going forwards. Whereas in most traditional societies people think about time much more about the cycles of time you know the seasons the sun rising the sun sets there's a sense in which everything always comes back to where it was I think quite a lot of physicists would say that physics does really care about time and these numbers that we're talking about for tomorrow I mean mean they are so tiny. We're talking about sort of one and a half milliseconds and by the way it takes five

milliseconds for a bee to flap its wings. So you're probably not going to notice a big difference on the sort of the scale of your own human life. Dr Hannah Fry and Julian Begini, if you were asked about one of the world's biggest professional sporting events that's underway in Saudi Arabia, in an industry worth billions of dollars, would you know what it's about? It's not tennis, cricket or football, it's e-sports, short for electronic sports, also known as competitive video gaming. Well, thousands are expected to cheer on their favourite players in arenas across Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh for the 2025 Esports World Cup, with even more watching live online. Leif Etiviert is a top professional EA FC player with Team Liquid, based in the Netherlands, and he says it's very hard work.

I think there is like a kind of stereotype of a gamer, Maybe someone who is going to bed at 6, 7 a.m., eats pizza a lot and doesn't really take care of his health. I think that's completely wrong. As you can see, we are working with mental coaches, performance coaches, everything. We are managing vitamins, food, everything before tournaments. And let's get more from our reporter, Andrew Rogers. The tournament attracts the biggest prize pot in competitive gaming, with more than

£50 million up for grabs over the next seven weeks across 25 games, including Call of Duty, Street Fighter and even online chess. Now in its second year, the event has encouraged some eSports teams to scale up and take part in as many events as possible. That's because the club with the most individual wins gets an extra £5 million sorely needed as some investment in the industry has dried up and clubs need to do more to compete for the best global talent. The Esports World Cup hasn't been without controversy though. Some fans and

players aren't happy it's hosted and largely funded by Saudi Arabia, a country where women have fewer rights than men and it's illegal to be gay. Victor Husins is the founder and CEO of one of the world's most successful esports clubs, I mentioned earlier Team Liquid, who are based in the Netherlands. He says taking part in a competition based in Saudi Arabia was a tough decision. We believe in esports for all. For almost the last 15 years, we've really done our best to empower the LGBTQ community within esports as well. And so that's been difficult to navigate.

At the same time, we are also certain that if we want to be around five years from now, 10 years from now, we need to be playing in the Esports World Cup. We need to be playing in the eSports World Cup, we need to be playing in the biggest events. Victor Husins. And that's it from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, send us an email. The address is globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag globalnewspod.

This edition was mixed by Charlotte Hadroy-Torzimska, the producers were Stephanie Prentice and Stephen Jensen. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Valerie Sanderson. Until next time, bye bye.