Anoopc79/Shutterstock A holy grail of environmental policy is an economy that delivers prosperity without requiring the ever-increasing consumption of raw materials. Increasing incomes while reducing environmental pressures hinges on the “decoupling” of energy emissions from economic growth.

Some countries in the global economy are moving in the right direction. But this good news can be misleading. Our new study takes a long-term (50 years) look at the economy in over 100 countries, and an even longer-term look at the UK’s economy (over 150 years).

Our findings are much less reassuring. We used the most recent data for a measure called the material footprint. This counts everything a country actually consumes – including the resources extracted abroad to make its imports.

To begin with the results were positive: 25 countries appear to have pulled off decoupled growth – the UK among them. Their GDP keeps climbing while their material use drifts downward. But certain claims were being inflated in three ways.

This is not to say green growth is impossible – only that the evidence claims too much. 1. Resource use isn’t falling enough Economies are not getting to the safe limits we need to operate in.

Imagine you owe £50,000 on credit cards. Last year your debt grew by £5,000; this year it grew by only £4,000. You’re improving. But you’re still going further into the hole every month, and the hole is already deep.

Researchers have estimated that a fair per-person share of the world’s materials would be somewhere between six and eight tonnes a year. The UK currently sits at more than double that range. Spain, Germany, Belgium are in similar territory.

Their lines on the chart are bending downward, but from a level so high that it is premature to call them success stories. By contrast, Cuba and Somalia – alongside many other low- and middle-income country-years – fall within the sustainable-limit corridor, although at much lower income levels.

Read more: Why ‘decoupling’ energy emissions from economic growth underpins the green transition 2. No global turning point The overall picture across all 105 countries shows no turning point. As countries grow richer over time, resource use accelerates, especially at the very top of the income ladder.

Repeat the exercise year by year, from 1970 to today, and the same upward-bending shape comes back. The promised downturn never arrives. This suggests that the 25 success stories are exceptions rather than signs of a pattern other countries can follow as they grow.

They are not being used as guides on the path we need to travel. They are outliers other countries may be avoiding. The successes also have multiple origin stories. The European declines mostly track the 2008 financial crash and the housing bust that followed, not a quiet technological revolution.

Some commodity exporters look greener because high prices lifted their GDP while their domestic construction stayed flat. Cuba kept material use modest while GDP per person rose, through decades of agroecology and urban farming. Taken together, these cases do not show the kind of smooth technological improvement imagined in green-growth narratives.

The declines come from different historical processes: crisis, housing busts, price effects, and specific political choices, rather than a general global shift toward cleaner production. 3. The dip is just a blip The third problem is time.

Direct material footprint records only go back to 1970. Britain has rich historical data on material use but also on trade, household spending and investment, and we used those to reconstruct the UK’s material footprint all the way back to 1875.

The neat downward bend you see if you start in 1990 vanishes. Across nearly a century and a half, the relationship between British incomes and resource use is essentially a straight line going up. The current dip has happened before.

It may just be a prelude to further coupled growth: a blip on a long upward climb. It’s not that rich countries have done nothing. Real efforts have been made, and recent lines on the chart do go in the right direction.

But what if they are wobbles, not turns. What if they do not bring countries below safe limits? What if they are not effective models for other countries to follow? To make real progress, countries consuming above a fair, sustainable share of the world’s materials – the UK among them – need to cut consumption in absolute terms, not just slow its rise.

And it is possible: a few countries, including Cuba and Somalia, have reduced material use while incomes rose, within those limits. Quite how they manage it varies and deserves closer study, but it shows the goal is real.

The way forward is to measure growth and resource use honestly – over long horizons and against real limits.

Marina Requena-i-Mora is affiliated with The University of Sheffield and a postdoctoral researcher at ICTA-UAB.

Marina receives funding from the European Union (ERC, CONDJUST, 101054259). Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency.

Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

This work contributes to ICTA-UAB “María de Maeztu” Programme for Units of Excellence of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (CEX2024-001506-M/funded by MICIU/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033).

Dan Brockington receives funding from the ERC and the Spanish government.

This article is based on work supported by an Advanced ERC grant, CONDJUST (101054259). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency.

Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. This work also contributes to ICTA-UAB “María de Maeztu” Programme for Units of Excellence of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (CEX2024-001506-M/funded by MICIU/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/green-growth-claims-are-overstated-our-study-shows-three-reasons-why/

Morocco had more foreign-born players than any other nation at the 2022 Fifa World Cup. Abdelrahman Emam / Shutterstock Few would have predicted Morocco’s success at the 2022 Fifa World Cup. Heading into the tournament, they were ranked 22nd in the world and had never progressed beyond the round of 16.

Yet they beat Belgium, Spain and Portugal – countries that both then and now rank inside the world’s top ten – on their way to becoming the first African nation ever to reach the semi-final. Morocco’s run was not only remarkable (and thoroughly deserved).

It also sparked debate beyond football because 14 of the players in their 26-man squad were foreign-born, more than any other nation in the tournament. The 2026 World Cup will feature more foreign-born players than any previous edition.

Nearly a quarter of the 1,248 players selected for national teams were born in a different country from the one they will represent. In some squads, the proportions are far higher than this – 96% of Curaçao’s players were born abroad, as were 85% of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s and 73% of Morocco’s.

Overall, foreign-born players make up the majority of footballers in eight of the tournament’s 48 squads. CC BY-NC-ND Migration has been part of the World Cup story since its inception. At the tournament’s third edition in 1938, for example, 12% of players represented a country other than the one in which they were born.

This was in part because Fifa didn’t introduce regulations governing football players’ eligibility for national teams until 1962, meaning it was not uncommon for players to represent multiple countries throughout their careers. Some players represent countries other than those in which they were born because they are eligible through a parent or grandparent.

These players often emerge from diaspora communities created by earlier waves of migration. One example is 2018 World Cup finalist Ivan Rakitić, who was born and raised in Switzerland but chose to represent Croatia. In a 2025 interview, Rakitić explained that when he had to choose between the two countries, his heart told him he should play for Croatia.

Other players qualify through residency requirements. Pepe, for example, was born in Brazil but played in four World Cups for Portugal between 2010 and 2022 after becoming a Portuguese citizen at the age of 24. Yet foreign-born players are only part of the story.

World Cup squads also contain many second-generation migrants. France’s 2018 World Cup-winning squad is perhaps the best-known example: 12 of their 23 players had African parents. Such patterns are not random. France’s squad reflected the country’s colonial and postcolonial links with north and west Africa.

Similarly, since the mid-2000s, Switzerland’s national team has increasingly been shaped by migration from the former Yugoslavia following the conflicts and displacement that accompanied its breakup in the 1990s. England’s 2026 squad also tells a story about the country’s migration history.

Alongside Marc Guéhi, who was born in Ivory Coast, at least nine players had a parent born overseas. Most have family roots in former British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, reflecting patterns of post-second world war migration to the UK.

At the same time, 24 players born in England have been selected by other World Cup teams. This includes five representing Scotland and 19 playing for countries beyond the British Isles (including the US, New Zealand and Ghana).

Does this matter on the pitch? Relatively little research has examined whether national teams with more migrant players perform better on the pitch. But the available evidence suggests they do. One study from 2022 analysed every World Cup between 1970 and 2018 and found that teams with more foreign-born players generally progressed further in the tournament.

On average, each additional foreign-born player was associated with roughly 0.15 additional matches played. The relationship remained even after accounting for broader differences between countries, suggesting that migration may provide advantages beyond those associated with wealth or footballing tradition alone.

Another study from 2023 examined European national teams competing in World Cups and European Championships between 1970 and 2018. Using players’ surnames to estimate their ancestral origins, it measured the diversity of backgrounds within each squad and found that more diverse teams tended to perform better on average.

Specifically, the research found that a one standard deviation increase in diversity led to an increase in goal difference (the number of goals a team scores minus the number of goals they concede) of around 1.3 per match on average.

There are at least two factors that might explain these results. First, migration can expand the pool of players available to a national team. Ghana’s squad for the 2026 tournament draws heavily on diaspora communities in western Europe.

This allows it to recruit players developed in some of the world’s strongest football systems. Second, migration may increase the diversity of skills available within a squad. Football players need specific physical traits and technical skills to succeed on the pitch.

Central defenders, for example, are usually tall and physically strong. More attacking players, on the other hand, often require speed. A more diverse population will probably provide a larger pool of potential players for each position, resulting in better complementarity at the team level.

This does not mean that migration wins World Cups. Argentina won the 2022 World Cup without a single foreign-born player in their squad. Success also depends on population size, economic wealth and coaching. Lionel Messi playing for your team helps, too.

Nonetheless, the limited evidence available indicates that migration may influence international football beyond simply changing the make-up of the teams competing. If Morocco’s 2022 squad had been limited to players born and raised in Morocco, would they still have reached the semi-finals?

We’ll never know for sure.

But if Curaçao do so this time around, the role of migration in footballing success may become harder to ignore.

The 2022 and 2026 data on the share of foreign-born players selected in World Cup squads was compiled and analysed by Adam Sawyer, co-founder and director of research at Relevant Research, which provides technical and logistical support to immigration researchers.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/how-migration-became-a-key-to-world-cup-success/

The Beach at Trouville by Claude Monet (1870). The National Gallery, London Burnout feels like a thoroughly modern concept – one borne from our age of global digital communication and long office hours. But the Victorians also had an idea of burnout, one they termed “overwork”.

The Victorian doctor, C.H.F. Routh, for example, published On Overwork and Premature Mental Decay: Its Treatment, which ran to four editions between 1873 and 1888. Although the language differs, the underlying concerns are similar. Victorian overwork was a new development in their era of empire and industrialisation, with its railways and telegraphs which enabled rapid global communication and an ever-quickening speed of life.

The Victorians were undoubtedly followers of what the philosopher Thomas Carlyle described as the “Gospel of Work”. But they were also acutely aware of the health problems which could come from devotion to this new religion.

In America, neurologist George Beard had introduced the concept of neurasthenia, a condition linked to the overstrain of nerves. But in Britain, overwork was viewed as altogether more manly – and indeed almost a badge of pride.

As now, with our concepts of executive burnout, overwork was very much associated with mental activity and the professional classes. It therefore excluded the overburdened working classes from consideration. Doctors were a particular cause for concern.

Routh cites the case of Dr Golding Bird, a successful physician, who advised him to ease off in his work. He told him to take an annual six weeks holiday: “otherwise you will find yourself, at my age, a prosperous practitioner, but a dying old man”.

Bird was still practising, but died a few weeks later at the age of 39. Travel for health For those suffering from overwork and other forms of illness or malaise, the primary prescription (for the professional classes) was travel to a health resort, preferably in Europe.

In 1870 the Scottish publisher William Chambers printed Wintering at Menton, an account of his own breakdown of health from overwork, following his time as Lord Provost of Edinburgh and his subsequent recovery. He writes in amazement of the beauties of the landscape in this spot on the French Riviera, its blue skies and caressing climate, and asks his contemporaries to reconsider their lives.

Too many were dropping into their graves, having “succumbed in the feverish, and we might almost say, insane, battle of life. Too long and too diligently have they stuck to their professional pursuits.” Menton became the favoured spot for the British to recuperate from overwork and other forms of breakdown of health.

This was due in large part to the publication by Dr James Henry Bennet of a series of works, including Menton and the Riviera as a Winter Climate (1861), and the numerous editions of Winter and Spring on the Shores of the Mediterranean (1865-75).

The latter offered a guide to health travel, sampling all the resorts around the Mediterranean coast, but concluded that Menton offered the best climate and conditions for recovery. An illustration of Menton from Bennet, Winter and Spring on the Shores of the Mediterranean.

Gutenberg The reasons for the extraordinary influence of Bennet’s work can be traced to his narrative of his own recovery, which formed a preface to all his books: Five and twenty years devoted to a laborious profession and the harassing cares which pursue a hard-worked London physician, broke down vital powers.

In 1859 I became consumptive, and strove in vain to arrest the progress of the disease. Believing himself to be dying, Bennet headed for the Riviera. But finding himself under the “genial sky” of Menton, and “freed from the labours and anxieties of former life”, he found to his great surprise that his health improved.

He decided to spend winter there every year, and set up a practice. Menton, as a consequence, grew from a small village to a major health resort, complete with its own English quarter. The medical climatology revolution Bennet was a leading figure in the development of what was termed “medical climatology”.

This was the belief that many conditions (including consumption, or tuberculosis), could actually be cured, or at least arrested, by moving to a resort with the right climate. In part this movement was in response to the choking smog of industrial cities.

“Diseases of the chest”, as they were known, inevitably fared better amid the pure air and blue skies of the Riviera in winter. Bennet’s form of treatment was viewed as almost revolutionary at the time.

Invalids were to escape the hot, close confines of an English sickroom and stride out into the hills, absorbing the rays of the sun and the pure air, while feasting their senses on the wonders of nature around them.

No medicine required. It was also a prescription for the elderly, or infirm.

They could be driven out each day to a different, sheltered and sunny spot: “The range of observation is thus increased without fatigue, the glorious scenery of the district is seen and enjoyed in its ever-varying phases, and the mind is refreshed by change.” It is an inspiriting vision of what might be possible in late-life care today.

For those suffering from overwork, Bennet recommended a minimum of three full winters spent in the resort. This was a far cry from the short stays in spas in the 18th century, or our own quick “wellness” breaks.

What he offered was a concept of “legitimate idleness”, where the hardworking professional could lead a “quiet, contemplative life”, basking in the sun “like an ‘invalided’ lizard on his wall”. Queen Victoria brought her son Leopold, a haemophiliac, to “beloved and beautiful Mentone” and writers and artists, from Robert Louis Stevenson and Aubrey Beardsley to Katherine Mansfield, flocked to the resort.

They left extraordinary records of the pleasures and pains of their times in medical exile. My own book, In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort, explores many of these lives – in Menton, Davos and elsewhere – and the changing patterns of treatment.

For cases of overwork, and other conditions, time was of the essence: in place of the hurry and worry and snatched time of Victorian city life, time was to be extended, as invalids relaxed into a state of “legitimate idleness” amid the healing powers of nature.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org.

If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Sally Shuttleworth’s research for this article was funded by an Advanced Investigator Grant, ‘Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives’ from the European Research Council (Seventh Framework, grant number 340121).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/victorians-called-burnout-overwork-and-they-cured-it-by-holidaying-in-france/

Marjane Satrapi, best known for her memoir and film Persepolis, has died, aged 56. The death of this much loved Iranian–French artist, graphic novelist, film-maker and activist has been met with widespread celebration of her life – and its dedication to resistance, freedom and humanity.

French president Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to “a great artist who transformed an Iranian childhood into a universal fable”. Satrapi was born in Rasht (like my own mother) in 1969, then raised in Tehran. She came of age during the Iranian Revolution and the turbulent years that followed.

As political repression intensified, members of her family and wider social circle were arrested, persecuted – and in some cases, executed, like her uncle Anoosh, a former political prisoner and exile, executed by the Islamic Republic.

First published in 2000, Persepolis created a transformative shift in comics, memoir and political storytelling. Eventually extended into four volumes, it follows Satrapi’s childhood, her adolescence in Vienna (where her parents sent her to study in 1983) and her later struggle to navigate belonging between Iran and Europe.

Satrapi returned to Tehran to attend university in 1989. In 1994, she moved back to Europe. Satrapi finished her studies in France, where she settled, gaining French nationality in 2006. Last year, she refused France’s prestigious legion d’honneur, over its “hypocrisy” in its dealings with Iran.

Satrapi illustrated the dislocations of revolution, migration, adolescence and return in such a way that her memoir travelled far beyond her home country. Through its deceptively simple black-and-white illustrations, Persepolis became globally influential because it offered an intimate account of revolutionary Iran and exile that challenged dominant stereotypes.

For many readers, Satrapi is still the woman who explained Iran in the simplest, yet most powerful way.

Growing up between worlds with Marjane Today, reading Persepolis with a cup of tea and a candle lit in Satrapi’s memory, I am struck by how little my reaction has changed since first watching the film at a university screening in France in 2019.

Like Marjane, I grew up between worlds: the child of returnees in the early days of the revolution, a girl who wore the compulsory hijab, listened to Western music, argued with authority, fell in love, had her heart broken and dreamed of lives beyond the horizon.

Later, I welcomed political activism, harassment, migration and multiple exiles into my life. Yet what made Persepolis so powerful was not that it reflected my experiences of repression, but that it captured everything beyond. Satrapi reminded the world that Iranians are not merely subjects of geopolitics or victims of authoritarianism.

We have families, friendships, humour, terrible fashion choices, impossible romances and complicated identities. Like all great memoirs, Persepolis made the particular universal. It allowed readers to see themselves in an Iranian girl from Tehran. In doing so, it made it harder to deny our shared humanity.

Her art has the kind of charm that allows everyone to see themselves in one corner of it or another. In Satrapi’s hands, exile was neither heroic nor tragic. It was disorienting, lonely, creative and politically productive.

Her enduring legacy, however, lies not simply in what she told the world about the country she left behind, but in what she revealed about the experience of living between worlds as a human being.

“I was a Westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity.” Few lines from Persepolis capture the condition of exile more powerfully than this one.

Reading Persepolis at different times of one’s life offers a language for contradictions that often feel impossible to explain: loving one’s country while criticising it, belonging to multiple places while feeling fully accepted by none, and carrying memories across borders that others struggle to understand.

In telling her own story, Satrapi captured something far larger than herself. In her 56 years of life, she stayed true to herself and never forgot where she came from.

Iran: misunderstood and dehumanised After the Islamic Revolution, the hostage crisis in the United States, the wars with Iraq and the emergence of a new world order after 9/11, Iran became a misunderstood country, its population dehumanised.

Satrapi’s memoir restored its complexities and nuances to the imaginations of readers from different backgrounds. The power of Persepolis comes precisely from its ordinariness. Readers follow the life of a rebellious teenager. They learn about her family, grandparents, friends, teenage crushes, a failed marriage and the arguments that liven up any dinner table.

Marjane’s story – garnished with music, humour and grief – reveals how extraordinary historical events are experienced through the mundane rhythms of everyday life. Yet Persepolis is equally about leaving behind familiarity and home. Throughout, family becomes both refuge and history.

In one of the book’s most moving sections, Satrapi’s beloved Uncle Anoosh tells her, “Our family memory must not be lost.” Decades later, those words resonate for me. Reading them, I often think of my own uncle, Kambiz, whom I lost long before my birth, when he was executed by the Islamic Republic aged 23.

But the significance of this moment extends beyond the boundaries of any single household. In authoritarian contexts, where states often seek to monopolise history and memory, families become custodians of alternative narratives. In stories passed down by parents, grandparents and relatives, Satrapi preserves memories of political imprisonment, resistance – and hope that official accounts might prefer to erase.

Nominated for an Oscar Satrapi returned to Iran before eventually settling in France, where she built the artistic career that would make her one of the most influential voices of the Iranian diaspora. She created several graphic storytelling books.

She co-wrote and co-directed the animated 2007 film adaptation of Persepolis, and was nominated for an Oscar, becoming the first woman nominated in the category of best animated feature. She went on to direct feature films.

Satrapi’s alternative view of Iran is so compelling because she refuses to romanticise her own country, or to idealise Europe or the West. She rejects both nostalgic nationalism and complete assimilation. Instead, she inhabits the uncomfortable space in between.

For many Iranian migrants and exiles who came after her, this condition feels deeply familiar. Loving a country while criticising it. Belonging to multiple places while feeling fully accepted by none. Carrying memories that others cannot quite understand.

Satrapi transformed these contradictions into a language that could be shared. She critiqued the repression of the Islamic Republic while remaining critical of Western hypocrisy. She condemned fanaticism without embracing cultural superiority. “Between one’s fanaticism and the other’s disdain, it’s hard to know which side to choose,” she wrote in Persepolis.

Importantly, Satrapi never positioned herself as the sole voice of Iran. Rather, she understood her work as a form of translation.

As Iran enters yet another period of uncertainty, marked by regional conflict, repression and deepening social fractures at home and in the diaspora, Satrapi continued to insist on the humanity and complexity of Iranian lives.

Her activism included supporting the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, following the death of Mahsa Jina Amini: a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman detained for allegedly not properly wearing the Islamic headscarf in 2022.

Her final years were spent challenging both the authoritarianism of the Iranian state and what she saw as the West’s persistent tendency to reduce Iranians to geopolitical abstractions, rather than people with histories, aspirations and agency.

A gift for generations of exiles For many Iranian exiles, Persepolis remains more than a memoir. It is a map. A guide to memory, identity, belonging and survival. It reminds me that exile is not simply a matter of geography, but of consciousness.

It has taught me that dignity can be an act of resistance and that memory itself can become a political act in times of political amnesia. Her characters rarely find liberation through departure alone; instead, they grapple with loneliness, reinvention and the persistent question of belonging.

Yet Satrapi approached these themes with humour, tenderness and an insistence on complexity. Marjane Satrapi spent her life ensuring that humanity, resistance and the memory of Iran is never forgotten.

In doing so, she gave generations of readers – and generations of exiles – a more sophisticated language for understanding home, freedom and what it means to remain human between worlds.

Shadi Rouhshahbaz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/marjane-satrapis-masterpiece-persepolis-transformed-the-worlds-understanding-of-iran/

Nomi2626/Shutterstock The Fifa men’s football World Cup is one of the most powerful brands in sport, attracting global attention with a simple formula of rarity, intensity and consequence. Every four years, this high-stakes tournament feels distinct from everything else in the football calendar.

So changing the format is a gamble. But the 2026 World Cup, held in the US, Canada and Mexico, will be the biggest yet, featuring lots more teams – 48, up from 32 in 2022 (and just 24 back in 1994). And this means a lot more matches – a jump from 64 at Qatar 2022 to 104 in this year’s event.

This level of expansion reflects a broader shift across elite football. Several big tournaments (the Champions League, the Euros, the Club World Cup) are all played with more teams than they used to be. And there are clear benefits.

A larger World Cup for example, allows more nations to participate, extending the tournament’s reach and audience. For smaller football nations, it increases the likelihood of qualification and the opportunity to appear on the sport’s biggest stage for the first time.

More matches and more countries participating also means the potential for even greater revenue generation in new markets. But aside from making Fifa more money, or football more inclusive, expansion could also damage the World Cup’s strength as an event.

This strength has traditionally come from the rarity and jeopardy of the occasion. Qualification has always mattered because it was a difficult thing to achieve. Reaching the tournament at all was a show of footballing prowess, and once a team was there, the structure of the competition ensured that early matches carried real consequence.

In terms of successful branding, this intensity concentrates fans’ collective competitive and emotional investment in the event. But dramatically expanding that event risks damaging this setup. More teams means that qualification becomes less selective, while staging more matches reduces the importance of individual games (and demands a level of viewing time that could test even the most committed football fan).

In marketing terms, this weakens what’s known as “perceived consequence”, the extent to which individual matches are seen to meaningfully shape outcomes and command fans’ attention. As the tournament grows (and there are some who want 66 teams to qualify for 2030), it can lose intensity.

There is more football, but less at stake with every kick. Different goals Expansion is often justified on economic and political grounds. The cost pressures on host counties has pushed governing bodies towards larger and more widely dispersed formats (hence this tournament being held across three countries).

But recent research I carried out with a colleague suggests that staging a tournament across multiple countries can be a complicated business too. Different places operate in different ways, with different resources and goals, so alignment can prove tricky.

That said, co-hosted events can work, but only when spectators manage to perceive the tournament as one coherent event, rather than a fragmented set of parts. As scale and complexity increase, sustaining that perception becomes more difficult.

With more teams, more matches and football stadiums in three large countries, the 2026 World Cup brings these challenges into sharper focus. It also has to deal with a broader shift which has seen elite football become an almost constant, never-ending series of tournaments and fixtures throughout the year.

Competitions seem to exist as part of an ongoing, always-available media flow rather than isolated events. In this context, the World Cup risks becoming just another part of high-value extended media property designed to maximise engagement across time rather than concentrate it.

But dilution can lead to the weakening of a brand as its defining elements become less clear or less exclusive. The qualities that once made the World Cup brand so distinctive risk becoming less sharply defined.

As more teams qualify, entry may feel less exclusive, and as more matches are played, individual fixtures become less decisive. As tournaments grow longer and more complex, the sense of a single, shared global moment becomes more diffused.

The World Cup will almost certainly remain football’s most valuable commodity for the foreseeable future. But its long-term health depends on maintaining the qualities that make it feel exceptional rather than routine.

If expansion continues to prioritise availability over intensity, the risk is not that the World Cup will fail – but that it will gradually lose its value as a global event that transcends the sport itself.

David Cook does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/the-fifa-mens-world-cup-2026-could-be-too-big-for-its-own-good/

Sophrosyne is a constellation of characteristics that includes moderation, reflectiveness and self-knowledge. PM Images/DigitalVision via Getty Images Texting while driving. Bullying people on social media. Buying into the latest conspiracy theory. Passing off AI-generated work as your own.

That may seem like a random list of 21st-century vices. But I’d argue they’re all examples of the loss of one particular virtue: sophrosyne. An ancient Greek concept, sophrosyne – pronounced “suh-fros-uh-nee” – is what we might call “sound-mindedness” today.

It’s a constellation of characteristics, including moderation, reflectiveness and self-knowledge. They’re found in the kind of person who can respect and trust herself, and be respected and trusted by others. As a philosopher and philosophical counselor, I research the connection between virtue and happiness.

In particular, I’ve noticed a connection between sophrosyne and eudaimonia, the Greek philosophical concept for happiness, or living well. Harmony of the soul For the Greeks, sophrosyne represented excellence of character, moderation and self-control.

It was connected to phronesis, or practical wisdom, and stood in marked contrast with hubris: excessive pride, dangerous overconfidence and lack of self-insight. Heraclitus, a philosopher who lived around 500 B.C.E., taught that sophrosyne was the most important virtue of all.

Plato, who taught a century later, discussed sophrosyne as the ability to know oneself – and to know when you don’t know something. In “Republic,” he likened sophrosyne to a harmony or friendship between the three parts of the soul: reason, spirit and bodily desires.

At the center of ‘The School of Athens,’ by Raphael, stand Plato and his student, Aristotle.

Wikimedia Commons Plato’s student Aristotle argued that sophrosyne allows people to strike a balance between self-indulgence and self-denial – like someone who tries to get the right amount of physical exercise, neither too much nor too little.

Aristotle taught that it was a virtue developed through practice, just like training for a sport or learning to play a musical instrument. Sound-mindedness, in short, is not inborn but must be learned. Discipline and discernment I believe sophrosyne is still essential for the good life, the life of eudaimonia – happiness and human flourishing.

It’s not a transitory feeling, but a sense of being your best self. This involves a kind of satisfaction that is not possible without self-knowledge and self-control. What’s more, it requires the ability to discriminate between the good and the bad, the true and the false – capacities that are not inborn, but learned through steady practice.

Without sophrosyne, it may not be possible to discern what is good for yourself or others. And even if you could, without sophrosyne you might lack the will to follow through. If anything, these qualities might be even more important with the rise of artificial intelligence and social media.

In my counseling practice, I’ve worked with people like “Brian,” an idealist who wanted truth and justice to win out over evil and oppression. The problem was that he didn’t know how to vet his sources.

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, Brian fell down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole.

He was certain that the condensation left in airplanes’ wake were “chemtrails,” a government brainwashing plot, and fumed against the “New World Order.” Thinking he knew it all, he was no longer open to reasoned dialogue.

Sound-mindedness helps us keep perspective in the sea of information online. Artur Debat/Moment Mobile via Getty Images But if Brian is an example of the loss of sophrosyne, another person I worked with, “Lee,” shows how we can develop it.

Lee spent quite a bit of time on social media, but she began to wonder how it was affecting her. She slowed down, took more breaks and started paying more attention to what her mind was doing and to how she was feeling.

As Lee became more self-aware, she realized she was wasting her time. She no longer connected to the reasons she had used social media in the first place. “Consuming social media was making me uneasy.

It was like pigging out on junk food,” she told me. “Now I read more books, prepare food and walk during the time I had been spending on social media.” Ripple effect For the Greeks, sophrosyne was an ideal second to none.

In the 1960s, though, Plato scholars Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns lamented that it was no longer “among our ideals.” That seems all the more true today – and the wider consequences are easy to see.

First, there’s the increase in incivility, in all its 21st-century forms – from road rage to cyberbullying.

After the isolation of the pandemic, there’s even a new term for general social incivility: “social jet lag.” The decline of sophrosyne can also lead to screen addiction, diminished attention span and ability to focus – factors that can, in turn, undermine civility.

Civility takes sustained awareness of oneself and others. The consequences go beyond our friends, families and co-workers to democracy itself. If sound-mindedness suffers, excessive pride and overconfidence hurt our ability to engage in reasoned dialogue and to respect other people’s differences.

Timeless virtue There are a number of factors, I’d argue, that have led to the loss of sophrosyne, including a decrease in funding for education, more teaching to the test and greater economic inequality, which leaves less time and energy for things like personal development.

Another is the decline of mentoring relationships, which the ancient Greeks considered central to intellectual and moral development. A true mentoring relationship involves both instruction and leading by example. It’s about character, not success defined by wealth and status.

Today, it appears that mentors have largely been replaced by celebrities and hero culture, with the rich and famous held up as examples worthy of emulation. I believe the first step toward recovering sophrosyne is to recognize its importance in the good life.

The second is to acknowledge its decline. The third is to understand the factors that have led to this decline. Temperance, moderation, self-control, discernment – qualities such as these add up to a timeless excellence of character that cannot be faked.

Becoming such a person requires guidance, practice and consistency.

Ross Channing Reed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/why-sophrosyne-an-ancient-greek-virtue-matters-more-than-ever-in-the-age-of-ai/

Beyond the well-known names, Jeffrey Epstein’s network of contacts had infiltrated the boardrooms of hundreds of major U.S. companies, with clear consequences for corporate conduct. Martin BUREAU/AFP via Getty Images The release of the Jeffrey Epstein files in early 2026 wasn’t just a scandal about one man.

It was an unexpected window into the hidden architecture of American corporate power. When the U.S. Department of Justice published more than 3 million pages of documents on Jan. 30, 2026, most of the media focused on the famous names.

But the files also revealed something broader and more troubling. Epstein’s network had infiltrated the boardrooms of hundreds of major U.S. companies, with clear consequences for corporate misconduct affecting employees and the broader business culture.

I’m a scholar of corporate finance and governance who has studied the vast reaches of Epstein’s business connections. Fellow economists Marina Gertsberg, Ekaterina Volkova and I found that the disgraced financier effectively wired corporate America into a denser, more tightly interconnected network.

Companies with more Epstein-connected directors registered measurably worse governance failures over time, regardless of their size or the prominence of their executives. There’s a bigger point as well. Networks that appear valuable because they provide access and connectivity can also encourage a social environment with serious governance problems.

The Epstein files revealed a network that was hidden, vast and tied to clearly disqualifying conduct. A hidden architecture of elite connections The vast majority of corporate connections to Epstein went unreported by the media.

Following the files’ release, journalists understandably focused on the most prominent and sensational cases. In the two weeks after the news broke, my colleagues and I found that fewer than 1 in 4 companies with Epstein-connected directors were mentioned in the news.

Our research went much further. We searched the entire document load for the names of every CEO and board member who served at a publicly listed U.S. company between 2006 and 2026, which totaled 92,698 individuals. We then used artificial intelligence to classify each document match, distinguishing meaningful contact with Epstein from accidental mentions.

What we discovered was striking. More than 2,000 public-company directors had direct contact with Epstein, either through emails or in-person meetings. Of these, about 1,000 were part of five or more communications, the threshold we used to identify the most tightly connected individuals.

And we found that companies with more Epstein-connected directors experienced much worse governance over time – measured through negative media attention about executive misconduct, fraud and corruption.

Using data from RepRisk – a company that systematically tracks corporate misconduct across media, regulatory and NGO sources – we discovered that every time a board added a director who had meaningful Epstein contact, it was associated with about 1.7 more governance failures per year.

In addition, there were 3.4 more incidents that breached the environmental, sustainability and governance pledges of the director’s company. Some of the best-known cases underscore this finding.

Jes Staley, who privately described Epstein as one of his closest friends, resigned as CEO of Barclays in November 2021 after the bank disclosed a regulatory probe into that relationship and found he had misled investigators.

Barclays then clawed back 17.8 million British pounds in awards, or about US$24 million, and the U.K. watchdog Financial Conduct Authority fined and banned him from working in financial services. Former Barclays CEO Jes Staley was fined and banned from the U.K. financial service industry over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Tayfun Salci/Anadolu via Getty Images Another example is Leon Black, who stepped down as chairman and CEO of Apollo Global Management in 2021 after an independent review found he had paid Epstein 0 million for tax and estate-planning advice, far more than initially disclosed.

Apollo restructured its governance in the process.

There are also instances at the company level where connections to Epstein were followed by governance failures: Deutsche Bank paid a 0 million regulatory penalty for compliance issues tied to Epstein’s accounts, while JPMorgan Chase settled survivor claims for $290 million.

The effects were strongest for the most intensive connections. Directors who had documented in-person meetings with Epstein were 2.5 times more likely to be accused of misconduct, with 5.2 total incidents a year per connected director. These aren’t just correlations.

When an Epstein-connected director died during the period we studied – an event outside any firm’s control – their company subsequently saw a big drop in misconduct incidents in the years that followed. In short, this relationship reflected something real and causal, not just that badly governed firms were more likely to tolerate such connections in the first place.

These connections weren’t just associated with greater governance problems.

In the cases where CEOs or board members were mentioned in Epstein-related news in the two weeks after the files’ January release, we found that their companies’ share prices also took a hit, falling about 3%.

This tells us that investors considered Epstein contacts to be relevant for company valuations. Too close for comfort? Beyond individual firms, Epstein’s network reshaped the structure of corporate America itself. We found that board members in his network tended to cluster more tightly than nonconnected members.

When we mapped connections among board members, adding Epstein-mediated links increased the network’s density by 353%. In other words, it sharply reduced the degrees of separation among major companies by more than a factor of three.

This increase in density is similar to what might be seen in other elite networks, such as graduating from an Ivy League school. Before accounting for Epstein ties, the average connection between two businesses required more than two jumps between boards.

Including the ties, they were typically separated by fewer than two. The effect was especially pronounced in finance and technology, including giants such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. In this sector, 32 of 50 companies had at least one Epstein-connected director, while network density increased by 550%.

In tech, Epstein’s ties actually bridged two previously disconnected clusters of firms, joining Microsoft, Apple, Cisco and IBM into a single connected network. Manufacturing and healthcare, by contrast, were less affected. It’s about norms, not just networks A natural question is whether talking to Epstein simply suggests that person was well connected – and that firms try to put well-connected people on their boards.

To test this, we considered two scenarios. Under one, Epstein expanded executives’ access to elite contacts and opportunities, potentially benefiting their firms. Under the other, exposure to Epstein’s network spread a culture of boundary-crossing behavior, making questionable conduct seem more normal.

Our research points to the second explanation. If a company became more embedded and better connected within the Epstein network, it wasn’t associated with worse governance outcomes. But when boards outside that network had members who served on other boards with Epstein-connected directors, those indirect ties consistently predicted more misconduct incidents.

A full reckoning for many of these business, in terms of governance and reputation, may still lie ahead.

But investors, board-nominating committees and regulators now have the data to ask harder questions about who sits in corporate boardrooms – and whose company they kept.

Michaela Pagel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/how-businesses-with-ties-to-jeffrey-epstein-saw-norms-and-even-share-prices-suffer/

“Today, everyone recognises that trade is as much a security issue as an economic one.”

European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde made this comment in February 2026, while addressing the Munich Security Conference.
Although she was speaking about Europe, her words matter profoundly for Africa.
The continent’s 54 economies face a three-way tension that has no easy resolution.
Firstly, they must stay integrated enough with the world economy to grow. Secondly, they must pull back enough to protect themselves economically against the deliberate weaponisation of external dependencies. Weaponised interdependence is the use of a country’s position within global economic and technological networks as a tool of political influence or coercion against other countries. And thirdly they must remain open enough to diversify beyond commodities – which account for more than 60% of total merchandise exports in 45 African countries – if they are to build lasting prosperity and reduce their vulnerability to commodity price shocks.
As an economist who studies African trade and development, I don’t believe the answer to weaponised interdependence is retreating from the global economy. The real challenge for Africa is navigating this tension between interdependence, economic security, and diversification rather than simply choosing one objective and abandoning the rest. This will be one of the continent’s most important policy tests in the years ahead.
How interdependence became a weapon
To see why this tension is so difficult to navigate, it helps to understand what has changed. When the world economy was governed by shared rules and norms from the 1990s to the 2010s, deeper economic integration had some benefits. Countries that plugged into global supply chains and attracted foreign capital grew faster. Interdependence was an asset.
That is no longer the case. We have entered a new era that is being shaped by the deliberate use of chokepoints – economic and geographic areas that underpin the interdependent global economy – as instruments of coercion. In 2025, China imposed sweeping export controls on rare-earth elements, inflicting pain on importing countries deeply integrated with its mineral supply chains. The United States has repeatedly deployed the dollar and advanced semiconductor technology as weapons against adversaries.
The consequences can be sudden and severe. In early 2026, Iran disrupted tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz – the world’s most important geographic chokepoint, carrying roughly 20% of global oil and liquefied natural gas on any given day, with no alternative routes.
African countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda – each sourcing more than half their petroleum imports from the Middle East – faced an immediate and unexpected surge in energy costs. Their fiscal positions were ill-equipped to absorb it.
Fertilizer and food prices followed. Financial markets roiled and remittances from diaspora workers in the Gulf region to highly dependent economies such as the Comoros, Gambia, Lesotho and Liberia fell sharply.
The timing was particularly painful. Africa had just achieved its fastest growth in a decade – 4.5% in 2025, according to the IMF. The World Bank has revised this down to projected regional growth of 4.1% in 2026.
Today, the world that made integration so attractive is now vulnerable to deliberate weaponisation by external actors pursuing geopolitical objectives.
The three-way tension, unpacked
The tempting response to weaponised interdependence is to reduce it. Yet history shows that retreating from economic integration can be costly. The protectionist wave of the 1930s – when countries raised trade barriers and turned inward – contributed to the collapse of global trade and deepened the Great Depression.
Integration is not merely a risk. It is a source of the prosperity that makes resilience worth building in the first place.
The World Bank projects that non-resource-rich African countries will have per capita incomes nearly 20% above their 2014 levels by 2026. Abandoning engagement to reduce vulnerability would mean sacrificing the growth needed for long term stability and economic security.
Worse, if African countries attempt to reduce their vulnerability independently, their exits from shared global markets lower the value of these markets for those who remain. That encourages further exits, in a self-reinforcing spiral. This dynamic is already playing out in other countries. US “Buy American” policies have prompted the EU to advance similar “Buy European” measures. Economists call this the “fragmentation doom loop”.
In addition, building alternative supply chains domestically is costly for exiting countries. Replacing established international production networks requires significant investment and can raise costs for businesses and consumers. The IMF has warned fragmentation would reduce incomes and everyone ends up worse off.
Diversification and economic security also pull against each other. Economic diversification would involve shifting African economies away from commodity extraction towards a broader private sector, and spreading trade relationships across multiple partners. It is essential both for long-term prosperity and for reducing exposure to commodity price shocks.
For example, Rwanda and Côte d’Ivoire, which diversified away from commodity dependence, are projected to have per capita incomes more than 45% above their 2014 levels by 2026.
By contrast, Angola and the Republic of Congo, which remained heavily dependent on oil exports, are projected to have per capita incomes more than 25% below their 2014 levels. They have still not recovered a decade after oil prices collapsed.
Natural resources alone generate around 62% of Africa’s GDP, according to the African Development Bank. Moving beyond that concentration requires both diversification and deeper integration which provides access to foreign investment, technology transfer and larger markets.
But deeper integration is precisely what creates the vulnerabilities that great powers have learned to exploit. The US-China rivalry and the Iran crisis have made this plain. The goal of diversification cannot be pursued without the openness that creates security risks. This is a genuine structural tension that policy must navigate.
Strategies for managing the three-way tension
The resolution of these tensions does not lie in choosing one objective and abandoning the others. Three strategies, pursued in combination, can advance all three goals at once.
Pursue security collectively, not unilaterally. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is the continent’s most important instrument for avoiding the fragmentation doom loop. An integrated continental market of 1.4 billion people:

creates the scale needed to attract diversified foreign investment

gives African countries the collective bargaining power to negotiate with great powers from a position of greater strength

enables the development of intra-African supply chains that reduce dependence on external actors, without sacrificing the gains of integration.

In the current environment, the AfCFTA is no longer primarily a trade liberalisation project. It is a security strategy.
Make partner diversification targeted. Not all trade relationships carry equal risk. The goal is to engage more strategically in the global economy by expanding trade and investment ties across a broader range of partners, particularly in sectors where multiple suppliers and markets exist. This reduces dependence on any single country and limits the ability of one partner to use economic ties as a source of leverage.
Build indispensability in critical supply chains. The most durable form of economic security is not reducing dependence on others – it is ensuring that others depend on you. Africa holds genuine chokepoint positions in several minerals critical to clean energy technology. Here are some examples.
The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for roughly 65% of global cobalt production. South Africa dominates platinum-group metals. Guinea holds the world’s largest bauxite reserves. Zambia is a major copper producer and Zimbabwe is one of the world’s largest lithium producers.
The indispensability strategy means building on this: processing cobalt in the DRC rather than exporting raw ore, developing platinum beneficiation in South Africa, and building battery supply chain infrastructure around existing mineral wealth.
Done well, this simultaneously advances diversification (moving up the value chain, away from raw commodity exports), strengthens security (creating dependencies that deter coercion), and deepens integration on Africa’s own terms.
The Hormuz disruption of early 2026 was a warning. It demonstrated that the vulnerabilities created by decades of open integration are real, that external actors are willing to exploit them, and that the consequences for African economies can be swift and severe. But the answer is not withdrawal. Africa’s growth story has been built, in part, on engagement with the world economy. The task is to make that engagement more resilient.

Jonathan Munemo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/when-global-trade-becomes-a-weapon-how-can-african-economies-protect-themselves/

People protesting for abortion rights in Ireland in 2017. Briley/Shutterstock I moved to Ireland in 2019, a year after abortion had become legal. As a woman born and raised in Germany, reproductive rights had never been a concern for me.

I knew that if needed it, I had the option of termination. I wasn’t aware of my privilege at the time. But when I made Ireland my home, I realised the weight of choosing to live in a country with such a conflicted relationship with reproductive rights.

Legalisation only marks the beginning of processing historical trauma, as well as ensuring that abortion services are accessible to all women living in Ireland. For most of Irish history, women’s bodies were treated as, in legal terms, the property of religious and nationalist ideologies.

Savita Halappanavar, a dentist who passed away in a Galway hospital in 2012 after being denied a life-saving abortion, became the face of the fight for legalisation. Her death followed the devastating cases of Sheila Hodgers, Miss Y and many others, where the lack of necessary abortion care led to women’s decline in physical or mental health, or death.

As a writer, I turn to literature to seek answers. Despite the burst of activist poetry leading up to the 2018 referendum, there is very little literary engagement with the realities of post-repeal Ireland. But legalisation hasn’t drawn a line under the conversation.

The shame and silence around abortion are still palpable, and at the time of writing, no poetry collection on the subject has come out of Ireland. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean there is an absolute silence in poetry: In 2024, Amelia Loulli published Slip, the first single-authored collection on the subject in the UK.

Milena Williamson, an American poet living in Belfast, wrote on the the theme in her poem An Irish Woman Travels to England. And Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa dedicated her poem Waking Again to Savita Halappanavar, in her 2021 collection To Star the Dark.

I believe that writing through that silence is an act of healing – and I am trying to start filling that void. Representation of abortion in Irish literature In pre- and early Christian Ireland, abortion was a common practice.

In fact, Ireland had four saints associated with abortion: Brigid, Ciarán, Áed and Cainnech. In their hagiographies, the books of the saints’ lives and the miracles they performed, St Brigid reportedly performed two miraculous “womb-healings” on women with unwanted pregnancies.

St Ciarán, meanwhile, freed Bruinech, his mother’s young foster daughter, from conception following a rape. St Áed and St Cainnech share similar abortion narratives: both made a nun’s pregnancy disappear, restoring the holy virgin’s “purity”.

St Áed, however, at first fled when he discovered the nun’s pregnancy, only to return after she’d confessed her “sin” to the entire community. But the women’s perspectives in these stories are absent.

A section of the poetry collection I am working on as part of my PhD seeks to give them a voice. The 2018 referendum ensured for the first time that the female body could feel like a safe home in modern Ireland, marking its shift from being public and debated property.

Women can now make reproductive choices in private, without the risk of criminal charges. While academic and journalistic writing can provide facts and opinions, poetry has the power to bring emotion to the forefront and make diverse abortion experiences tangible for the reader.

A poem from my project is written in the form of a medical abortion consent form issued by the Health Service Executive as a standard procedure before medications are handed out. It begins: You have been fully informed of, and understand to your complete satisfaction.

The poem then replaces the form’s clinical language with conflicting emotions, such as relief, grief and uncertainty that the bureaucratic forms do not hold space for: You’ll ask the Tarot cards for their blessing.

You will pull the 7 of Cups. After dreaming every possible scenario, you must choose your cup. All of them are cold to the touch. Poetry can build a bridge between medical language and women’s lived realities.

And what’s more, it can foster empathy without pushing political agendas. It holds space for the full spectrum of abortion experiences. Abortion is rarely a straightforward choice and a poem can balance contradictions without judgement.

Since 2018, Ireland has taken significant steps towards becoming a safer home for women, where women’s lives come first. But rights on paper do not automatically guarantee rights in practice and there are still improvements to be made in terms of access.

As a relative newcomer to Ireland, I haven’t had to carry the traumas that weigh on generations of women. Perhaps the silence on abortion in poetry has something to do with the processing and healing after the long fight for reproductive rights.

My collection on the subject aims to uncover and gather stories from the past and to write into the present, while acknowledging that my perspective is only one voice among many. Although poetry cannot make laws, it can help us process past trauma and create visions for the future.

Poems can make us sit with the spectrum of complexity involved in reproductive decisions – the discomfort, grief, relief and joy. I’d like to see more poems about difficult choices, about owning our bodies and about the nuances beyond the yes/no binary of the referendum.

That conversation has only just begun.

Christina Hennemann does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/poetry-can-give-voice-to-irelands-unspoken-abortion-stories/

Tensions have recently emerged around the Ebola response in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

These tensions have manifested in a series of incidents, including the burning of an Ebola treatment facility in Mongbwalu, confrontations involving families seeking to reclaim the bodies of relatives who had died from the disease, and reports of police firing warning shots.

Against a backdrop of grief, fear, political mistrust and uncertainty, these incidents highlight difficulties that have shaped infectious disease outbreaks throughout history. With hundreds of Ebola cases reported in the DRC, and a growing number of cases identified across the border in Uganda, attention has increasingly focused on vaccines.

This focus is understandable. But these events also serve as a reminder that outbreaks are rarely controlled by vaccines alone. While vaccines play an important role in reducing the spread of disease, infectious disease outbreaks have historically been brought under control through a combination of public health measures, behaviour change and community engagement.

For example, in the case of mpox, changes in the behaviour of those who were susceptible to the disease meant that the outbreak could be brought under control, and when later combined with vaccination, kept under control.

In many outbreaks, it is often these less visible interventions that begin to slow transmission. In the case of Ebola, this is particularly important because transmission can be closely tied to care itself.

Many lessons emerged during the 2014-16 west African Ebola outbreak, including how people cared for one another during illness, how public health interventions interacted with local customs, and the importance of involving trusted local leaders in outbreak response.

Family members may spend days tending to sick relatives, helping them eat and drink, washing them and their clothing, and staying by their side throughout their illness. While these acts of care are often essential, they can also create opportunities for disease transmission when infection control measures are not in place.

However, despite the risks, some families continued to care for their sick relatives at home during the 2014-16 outbreak due to a strong sense of moral responsibility to care for a loved one, which often outweighed the known dangers of Ebola.

Transmission can also happen during funeral and burial practises that involve direct contact with the body. During the west African outbreak, efforts to introduce different burial practises were initially met with resistance, because they prevented families from washing and preparing the bodies of their loved ones, according to local customs.

Over time, response teams worked with local communities to develop protocols for safe and dignified burials. These burials helped to stop the infection from spreading, while also preserving the dignity of the deceased and enabling families and communities to participate in burial practices in culturally appropriate ways.

Read more: Two scientists on their race to make a new Ebola vaccine The outbreak also highlighted the importance of involving trusted local leaders. During the outbreak, many communities were sceptical of messaging coming from government officals and international response teams alike.

In some cases, families were reluctant to report their symptoms or to allow their relatives to be taken to treatment centres over fears they would never return. Others continued to rely on familiar sources of care, such as traditional healers.

However, influential community figures, such as community or religious leaders, helped to communicate how Ebola can spread, provided support to families and encouraged them to report suspected cases. Applying the lessons to the current outbreak Recent events in eastern DRC illustrate how quickly relationships can come under strain.

Reports of families attempting to reclaim the bodies of relatives from Ebola treatment centres, and the tensions that followed, reflect the difficulty of implementing infection control measures amid grief, fear and uncertainty. As in west Africa in 2014-16, these disputes sit at the point where public health guidance meets real-world caregiving expectations, mourning practices and the immediate experience of bereavement.

In settings where trust in authorities is weak or absent, even effective public health measures – such as safe burial procedures or infection control steps – can be questioned, resisted or refused locally. Public health measures rely on widespread participation.

Contact tracing depends on people sharing their information. Isolation depends on people feeling supported enough to step away from daily routines. Vaccination depends on confidence in the services delivering it. Vaccines remain an important part of outbreak preparedness, but like any public health intervention, their success depends on more than how well they work in a clinical trial.

Communication, engagement and trust all shape how well they work in practice

Charlie Firth works for the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/ebola-vaccines-alone-wont-stop-an-outbreak-heres-what-else-is-needed/

Large-scale solar power plants are key elements of energy policies in New York and other states.

Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images The state of New York could meet its goal of building 46 gigawatts of large-scale solar by midcentury, but not without making difficult choices in how land is used across the state.

That’s the overall finding of an analysis several colleagues and I have made in that state. It’s an issue that other states, and the U.S. as a whole, are facing as they seek to shift electricity generation from fossil fuels to renewable sources, such as wind and solar.

The question of land use arises because power plants that burn coal and natural gas can produce large amounts of electricity from relatively small areas of land – but solar requires more space to generate the same amount of electricity.

That means deciding which land to build on, and why. It’s often convenient to build solar projects in pastures and hay fields, for instance. But the dairy industry and agriculture more generally are key components in New York state’s economy, and building in agricultural areas would leave less land for those important industries.

However, protecting farmland could lead solar developers to consider using existing forests. Yet forests not only soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping reduce the effects of fossil-fuel emissions that are changing the global climate, but also support biodiversity by providing important habitat for wildlife.

Basically, deciding to prioritize one type of land use means shifting that amount of development pressure to land now being used for other purposes. As a geographer, I study these trade-offs and their inherent tensions to better understand how to determine the best way to use a particular piece of land to reduce carbon emissions.

One of the primary obstacles to building more large-scale solar is the drawn-out debate over where to put it. Typical decision-making factors include farmland loss, wildlife habitat, rural landscapes and who ultimately uses the energy.

The results will determine who benefits from the expansion of renewable energy and who bears the ecological and social costs. A changing energy landscape Solar energy is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the U.S., with nearly 397 gigawatts waiting to come on line as of 2025.

Of that, 70 gigawatts of generating capacity is expected to come on line in 2026 and 2027 – on top of the nearly 148 gigawatts operating at the end of 2025. This represents progress toward reducing carbon emissions but also requires vast tracts of repurposed land.

For example, a 100-megawatt solar project could require approximately 417 acres of land, roughly the same area as 316 American football fields, based on a conservative power density of 0.24 megawatts per acre.

Therefore, the 70 gigawatts of solar energy expected to come on line in the next two years will require just over 320,000 acres of land, or about 242,424 football fields, about 53% of which is expected to displace farmland.

Additionally, those projects are expected to replace roughly 22,000 acres of forest and just under 10,000 acres of wetlands. Dual-use alternatives Energy, agriculture and conservation don’t have to be mutually exclusive uses of land. Instead, land can be managed more efficiently by integrating multiple uses, commonly referred to as colocation.

Grazing livestock or growing crops underneath or between rows of raised solar panels, known as agrivoltaics, is one way to keep land available for agriculture while also generating electricity. Another approach, known as ecovoltaics, involves designing solar projects to equally support renewable energy and ecosystem services, such as providing habitat for pollinators or reducing evaporation in stressed arid ecosystems.

Another emerging alternative involves solar panels that are constructed to float on water rather than being mounted on land. These approaches won’t work everywhere, but they demonstrate that, with careful thought, more renewable energy doesn’t have to hurt the environment.

Specific project proposals, evaluations by local planning boards and input from the public can consider more than the costs and electricity generated from new projects. They can also take into account how plants and animals will be affected and the degree to which the land use really must change to accommodate the addition of solar panels.

As New York, and the U.S. as a whole, seeks to achieve renewable energy goals to help fight climate change, I believe discussions will be more productive if they expand beyond just how much generating capacity can be built, but where and how it is constructed.

Adam Gallaher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/building-more-renewable-energy-sources-means-rethinking-land-use-for-agriculture-and-conservation/

At least 15 people drowned in open water in the UK’s recent heatwave, mostly children and teenagers. The public response is understandably urgent: warnings are issued, parents are told to talk to their children, and young people are reminded that rivers, lakes, reservoirs and canals can be dangerous.

Those warnings matter. Open water can be risky, especially when the air is hot but the water remains cold. Hidden currents, submerged hazards and cold-water shock can all turn a moment of relief into tragedy.

But warnings can also make the problem seem simpler than it is. Heatwave drownings are not only about water safety. They are also about climate justice. Evidence suggests these tragedies become more likely as temperatures rise.

A study of almost 2,000 drowning deaths in the UK found that the risk of unintentional drowning increased by 7% for every 1°C rise in daily maximum temperatures, with the greatest risks on the hottest days. As the UK gets hotter, children and teenagers will increasingly seek water to cool down, play, socialise and escape uncomfortable temperatures.

But access to safe, affordable and supervised places to cool down is deeply unequal. A changing climate means changing choices Climate change is making hot spells in the UK more frequent and severe. By 2070, Met Office predictions show that two or more days above 30°C could become 16 times more frequent over southern parts of the UK than they are today.

The conditions that draw children towards water during hot weather are likely to become more common. Children and young people seeking water in a heatwave is not surprising. Water offers relief, play, friendship, freedom and escape.

For many teenagers, gathering near water is not simply a reckless choice, but it is part of how they socialise and move through their local area, finding spaces to cope when the weather becomes uncomfortable.

Unequal access to cool spaces Climate justice is not only about who causes climate change. It is also about who is most exposed to its effects, who has the fewest resources to adapt, and whose everyday lives are missing from climate adaptation planning.

Heat is not experienced equally. Some children can retreat into cooler homes, private gardens, cars, holidays, leisure centres or supervised swimming pools. Others live in hotter homes, more crowded neighbourhoods, or places with fewer trees, parks, shaded spaces and safe blue spaces.

Some families can pay for swimming sessions or travel to safer places. Others cannot.

Indeed, children from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to drown, according to the National Child Mortality Database’s analysis of child drowning deaths in England, which found that the risk was more than twice as high for children living in the most deprived areas.

Simply telling young people simply to “stay away from open water” is incomplete. It may be correct as immediate safety advice, but it does not address the unequal conditions that shape children’s choices in the first place.

For a teenager in a hot, crowded home, with little money, limited transport and few local cooling spaces, a river, lake, canal or reservoir may feel like the only available place to go. This means that the risk is not simply individual, it is affected by place, poverty, infrastructure and climate.

The UK’s Climate Change Committee recently warned that, by the middle of the century, hotter heatwaves will mean 92% of existing homes could overheat. If homes, schools, streets and public spaces are not adapted, children will be left to find their own ways to cope.

Cooling spaces are climate infrastructure The decline of public leisure infrastructure makes this worse. Swimming pools, leisure centres, shaded parks, youth spaces, safe blue spaces and affordable transport are not luxuries in a warming climate.

They are part of how society adapts. Yet this infrastructure is under pressure. Swim England and ukactive have warned that the loss of publicly accessible swimming water is accelerating. This matters for climate justice because adaptation cannot depend on private resources.

A climate-safe childhood should not depend on whether a family can pay for swimming, drive to the coast, access a garden or live in a cooler home. If a river, lake, canal or reservoir becomes the most accessible cooling space available to a young person, then that is not only a water-safety problem.

It is a failure of climate adaptation.

Learning to live with water In my own flood education work with children and schools, I have seen how easily water is framed only as danger: do not enter floodwater, do not go near rivers, do not take risks.

These warnings can be necessary. But on their own, they do not build the deeper water literacy children need in a changing climate. In my work using participatory and creative methods, including children’s flood stories and immersive storytelling, young people are not treated simply as passive recipients of safety messages.

They are encouraged to explore how water affects their everyday places, what risks look like locally, and what kinds of knowledge communities need to adapt. The same principle matters during heatwaves. Children need more than fear-based messages.

They need to understand the complexity and need this practical knowledge, but they also need environments where safer choices are possible. There is a wider disconnect here. In winter, children may be warned away from floodwater.

In summer, they may be warned away from open water. Both messages may be right in the moment. But in a changing climate, avoidance cannot be the whole strategy. Recent drownings should prompt more than warnings.

They should prompt a conversation about how children experience heat in an unequal society. We cannot tell children to stay away from open water without asking what safe alternatives they actually have. And we cannot term this a water-safety problem when it is also a sign of a society not yet adapting to the heat that is already here.

If the UK is serious about preparing for hotter summers, it must build climate-safe places for children and young people: places where cooling down, playing, gathering and being safe are not privileges, but part of everyday public life.

Katie Parsons receives funding from United Kingdom Research and Innovation, Environment Agency, Wellcome Trust and the British Council.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/child-drownings-spike-during-heatwaves-and-its-a-serious-climate-justice-issue/

Prostock-studio/Shutterstock Starting next year, the Home Office plans to use AI-driven facial age estimation to assess the age of asylum seekers. At the UK border, deciding whether someone is 17 or 19 is a consequential judgment.

Get it wrong one way, and a vulnerable child loses legal protections they’re entitled to. But if it’s wrong in the other direction, then an adult enters a system designed for minors. Is this technology ready for such a high-stakes decision?

Facial age estimation works by feeding a photograph into an AI system that goes through multiple layers of analysis, each picking up increasingly subtle patterns in the image. It is trained on millions of photographs of people whose ages are already known.

Over time, the model learns to associate patterns in a face with likely age ranges: skin texture, the depth of lines around the eyes, bone structure and the distribution of soft tissue. This is different from facial recognition, which identifies who someone is by matching their face against an existing database.

The system does not produce a single definitive answer.

It produces a probability distribution, something closer to “most likely between 17 and 21” than “this person is 18.” Research on automation bias in immigration finds that even when algorithmic outputs are advisory, officers under time pressure tend to focus on them rather than question them, and a range becomes a number.

Under UK law, unaccompanied asylum seekers under 18 are treated as children, which means they are placed in local authority care, given access to education and afforded legal protections that adults are not. The stakes of that single-year boundary are considerable.

How good is the technology? The National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) is the US agency that provides independent global benchmarks for this kind of technology. It has been running ongoing evaluations since 2024, testing algorithms on datasets spanning multiple image types, including border crossing photographs.

These systems measure success with a mean absolute error: the average number of years by which the system’s guess is off. Leading algorithms now achieve a mean absolute error of less than three years across all ages, a figure that would have seemed ambitious not long ago.

An average error of three years for an unseen photo is technically very good – research using passport-style photographs found that humans estimating the age of an unfamiliar face are typically off by around eight years.

But when borderline decisions can shape the course of someone’s life, even the best available tool needs scrutiny. The Home Office has contracted Cognitec, ranked fourth globally in Nist’s most recent published benchmark, to develop the system via UK firm Akhter Computers.

A live trial is planned at a Home Office processing facility in Dover before a wider rollout. The technology will act as one input among several, while officers retain the final decision. But despite the technology improving, Nist’s own data shows that its accuracy degrades significantly at the boundaries that matter most.

At the 16-to-18 threshold (the exact line being drawn at the border) error margins for leading systems are materially higher than the overall average. The age of migrants who arrive by small boat will be assessed by AI age estimation beginning in 2027.

Sean Aidan Calderbank/Shutterstock Nist’s data also shows performance is consistently weaker for female faces and varies significantly by geography, meaning algorithms trained predominantly on certain regions perform less accurately on faces from others.

Given that the majority of those assessed at the UK border originate from regions underrepresented in those training datasets, this is a concern. There’s also the training data problem. These models are built predominantly on western, white-majority datasets and skewed heavily male, which is a real limitation.

This is because the research and commercial infrastructure that built these datasets (universities, tech firms, government ID programmes with accessible archives) was concentrated in North America and Europe. The data reflects who was in the room.

Research consistently shows the consequence: lower accuracy for underrepresented ethnic groups. The people most affected by errors in this system are the same people the technology was least designed to serve. Before this tool carries meaningful weight in age decisions, three things need to be demonstrably true.

Accuracy must be validated on the actual population it will assess – not a generalised benchmark dataset, but exhausted, potentially malnourished people photographed in real border conditions. Demographic performance must be published transparently, broken down by gender and ethnic origin, with clear protocols for when results should be discounted.

Finally, the “human in the loop” guarantee – the principle that a trained officer, not the algorithm, makes the final call – must be real and not a rubber stamp. The Home Office’s own watchdog found staff at the Dover processing centre lacked adequate training in current assessment methods.

Getting the human part right matters every bit as much as technology.

The independent inspector acknowledged that without a foolproof test, some decisions will inevitably be wrong, and that this is a cause for particular concern if a child is denied the rights and protections to which they are entitled.

AI age estimation alone will not be that foolproof test. But used carefully, transparently and with accountability, it could be a meaningful part of getting these decisions right, more often.

Oli Buckley receives funding from UKRI.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/uk-home-office-to-use-ai-age-estimation-on-asylum-seekers-how-accurate-is-the-technology/

This curation of The Conversation UK’s arts and culture coverage was first published in our fortnightly newsletter, Something Good. Maggie O’Farrell is responsible for some of my biggest COVID cries (impressive, considering how hotly contested that category is).

Hamnet hit home with its uncanny parallels to pandemic life with shuttered playhouses, quarantines and families separated by illness. The film adaptation, released last year to great acclaim, presented me with another emotional outpouring. This time at the powerhouse performance from Jessie Buckley, whose grieving maternal howls made me flinch – but never look away.

O’Farrell’s new novel looks set to leave an equally devastating impression. Land follows mapmaker Tomás and his eldest son Liam, charting the land in the aftermath of the great famine in 1860s Ireland.

It’s a family saga spanning centuries and continents, inspired by O’Farrell’s real great-great-grandfather, who worked for Ordnance Survey. Our reviewer described the novel as “exquisite” and “haunting”. An expert in the famine, he was impressed by the way O’Farrell charted a land that was “changed utterly.

A whole way of life was eroded, and Land imagines what it must have been like to walk among the ruins, to see an agrarian culture collapse, and, for those left behind, to forge a future from remnants”.

Land is in bookshops now. Read more: Land by Maggie O’Farrell is a haunting tale set in post-famine Ireland about history, map-making and memory We want to know: do you enjoy books that make you cry?

Let us know in the comments. We’d also love to know what your favourite tear-jerking novel is. Brilliant non-fiction Writing about major pop figures comes with an inherent tension: there’s no shortage of appetite for new material, but the challenge is to avoid simply retreading what we already know.

George Michael fans will be pleased to know that Sathnam Sanghera avoids this trap with his new book, Tonight the Music Seems So Loud. Part biography, part love letter, part social commentary, it’s an attempt to correct a great cultural forgetting of Michael’s talents – so often overshadowed by the singer’s personal life.

As Sanghera points out, many of his songs were single-handedly “written, produced, arranged and performed” by Michael, who demonstrated an extraordinary range and depth of artistry and innovation across his career.

Tonight the Music Seems So Loud is in bookshops now Read more: Tonight the Music Seems So Loud: George Michael’s music, artistry and drama The Women’s prize for non-fiction celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in narrative non-fiction written by women.

In only its third year, the 2026 shortlist covers a range of topics as diverse as the experts we’ve enlisted to review them, examining themes from creativity and wellbeing to conflict and family ties. I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy.

A “literary memorial” paying tribute to her relationship with her mother, it’s Roy’s third book. Her first, God of Small Things, is one of my favourite novels of all time.

The Women’s prize for non-fiction books are out now One thought dominated when our reviewers came out of a press screening of the latest A24 horror flick, Backrooms last week: “How on earth is this only rated a 15!?” Failed architect Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) accidentally slips out of reality and ends up trapped in an endless labyrinth of yellow-tinted rooms, humming fluorescent lights and eerie, disembodied sounds – the “Backrooms”.

Inspired by the viral internet horror clips, the fear factor is derived from just how much Clark’s nightmarish portal has in common with the world of modern work. Moviegoers will (hopefully) never find themselves trapped in a nauseatingly jaundiced and never-ending labyrinth.

But they may recognise Clark’s experience of living among failed promises, diminishing aspirations, precarity, social isolation and the growing fear of becoming obsolete. Backrooms is in cinemas now.

Read more: Backrooms: why being trapped in the film’s endless corridors feels a lot like modern life More unsettling scenes are on show at British Landscapes: A Sense of Place at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

The exhibition traces the evolution of landscape painting over the last 300 years. Among them are Paul Nash’s disconcerting, sepia-toned landscapes painted in the aftermath of the first world war. He’d served as a war artist and emerged from the conflict determined to capture countryside stripped bare by battle.

He’s among several artists on show who turned to the countryside after the war, trying to capture its disappearing character and preserve a sense of what was being lost. My favourite work on display is Cerne Abbas Giant by Eric Ravilious (1939).

Seen through barbed wire, the landmark is rendered in earth browns to reflect the way it was turfed over to prevent it acting as a landmark for the Luftwaffe. British Landscapes: A Sense of Place is at the Pallant House Gallery until November 1 2026.

Read more: British Landscapes: A Sense of Place shows how ideas of scenery have evolved across 300 years of art This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org.

If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/heartbreaking-historical-tales-unsettling-scenes-and-shortlisted-non-fiction-what-to-read-watch-and-see-this-week/

Dragon Images/Shutterstock Modern breast cancer screening and treatment have transformed survival. Many women now live long and healthy lives after diagnosis, thanks to increasingly effective chemotherapy and targeted therapies: medicines designed to attack particular features of cancer cells.

But as cancer outcomes improve, another challenge has become more apparent: protecting the heart from the side-effects of treatment. Some breast cancer treatments can affect heart health.

These include anthracyclines, a group of chemotherapy drugs, and trastuzumab, a targeted therapy used to treat HER2-positive breast cancers: cancers that have high levels of HER2, a protein that helps cells grow and divide.

In some patients, these treatments can weaken the heart’s ability to pump blood around the body or contribute to heart failure. Other cancer treatments can increase the risk of abnormal heart rhythms. Early changes may not cause obvious symptoms.

By the time a patient experiences breathlessness, fatigue or palpitations, the sensation that the heart is pounding or beating irregularly, damage may already have occurred. A small study, which is yet to be peer reviewed, suggests that regular blood tests and heart traces could help doctors detect warning signs earlier.

Researchers followed 50 women with stage 1 to 3 breast cancer, cancer that had not spread to distant organs, through six cycles of chemotherapy. They measured cardiac troponin I, a protein released into the blood when heart muscle cells are injured.

They also recorded electrocardiograms (ECGs), which measure the electrical activity controlling the heartbeat. They found that troponin levels rose during treatment. ECG abnormalities also became more common, including prolonged QT intervals, which is the time the heart’s lower chambers take to contract and prepare for the next beat.

If this takes longer than usual, the risk of a dangerous irregular heartbeat can increase. Larger studies are needed to confirm these findings, but the research adds to evidence that signs of heart stress can sometimes be detected before a patient develops symptoms.

Troponin and heart health Troponin tests have been used for more than two decades to help diagnose a heart attack (myocardial infarction). A raised troponin level does not always mean that someone has had a heart attack, because heart damage can have other causes.

During chemotherapy, raised levels may reveal small amounts of heart muscle damage before conventional measures of heart function begin to worsen. A 2004 report identified troponins as promising biomarkers: measurable signs in the body that can indicate injury or disease.

A later clinical study found that persistently raised troponin levels during high-dose chemotherapy predicted a decline in the pumping ability of the left ventricle, the heart’s main pumping chamber. Troponin may therefore offer an early warning that a patient is at greater risk of future heart problems.

Adding pieces to the puzzle Established forms of heart monitoring remain important. One commonly used measure is left ventricular ejection fraction, or LVEF. This is the percentage of blood pumped out of the left ventricle with each beat.

It is usually assessed using an echocardiogram, an ultrasound scan of the heart. Echocardiograms remain central to heart monitoring during cancer treatment. But LVEF can remain normal while subtler changes are developing. Doctors can also use a measure called global longitudinal strain, which looks more closely at how well the heart muscle squeezes and relaxes.

It may reveal changes before they show up in the ejection fraction. Blood tests and ECGs could provide additional pieces of the puzzle. An ECG is quick, painless and widely available. Some chemotherapy drugs can disrupt electrical activity in heart cells, increasing the risk of abnormal rhythms, or arrhythmias.

Regular ECG monitoring may help to identify patients who need closer observation. A more personalised approach A raised troponin level does not necessarily mean that a patient will develop heart failure. An abnormal ECG does not guarantee a serious irregular heartbeat.

These tests identify signs that the heart may be under strain and help doctors assess risk. The emerging field of cardio-oncology focuses on protecting the heart health of people with cancer before, during and after treatment.

Doctors are increasingly tailoring monitoring to each patient’s risk. Existing heart health, age, blood pressure, diabetes risk and previous exposure to treatments that may damage the heart can influence the level of monitoring required.

If doctors detect rising troponin levels or ECG changes, they may carry out tests more frequently, refer the patient to a heart specialist with expertise in cancer care or consider treatments intended to protect the heart.

This does not necessarily mean stopping cancer treatment. The aim is to manage risks while allowing patients to continue receiving effective care wherever possible. The latest research does not provide a standalone test for predicting who will develop heart problems after breast cancer treatment.

Troponin levels and ECG changes must be interpreted alongside other information. Scientists still need better evidence about how early warning signs should influence treatment decisions. But the principle is important. As more people survive breast cancer, protecting their long-term health becomes increasingly urgent.

The goal is no longer simply surviving cancer. It is maintaining heart health after treatment has ended.

David C. Gaze does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/05/how-a-simple-blood-test-could-help-detect-heart-damage-during-breast-cancer-treatment/