SHADE Newsletter 3rd April 2025

Welcome to the thirty fifth edition of the SHADE newsletter! 

SHADE is a research hub with a mission to explore issues at the intersection of digital technologies/AI, health and the environment. It is guided by a fundamental question: How should the balance between AI/digital enabled health and planetary health be struck in different areas of the world, and what should be the guiding principles?

The SHADE newsletter comes out every two weeks, taking an in depth look at selected topics, as well as highlighting new resources, events and opportunities in the SHADE space.

In this newsletter we highlight the benefits of, and the challenges around, accessing, sharing, regulating and managing data. We also zoom in on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), looking at their successes in identifying disease outbreaks, their use of digital health tools, their changing funding landscape and their vulnerabilty to human pathogenic bacteria. We conclude with a packed selection of resources, events and opportunities. We hope you enjoy it!

Please tell us what you like, what you don’t like and what you think is missing at [email protected].   

Data

• Check out this free Atlas of Longitudinal Data Sets. As Louise Arsenault, who led the Wellcome funded project, explains in this LinkedIn post, longitudinal data sets ‘can help us understand how people’s health and behaviours change across time, and how the brain, body and environment interact’. With a vision to facilitate research by maximising the use of existing data, the Atlas focusses on mental health but also contains datasets relating to physical health conditions and socioeconomic factors.

• Meanwhile, ‘unprecedented access to longitudinal academic records of a Chilean student cohort’ meant this study is ‘one of the first to robustly analyze the long-term effects of environmental pollution on student performance in a non-U.S., non-high-income setting’. The latest epiosde of the One World One Health podcast talks to one of the study’s authors.

• Nature reports on a big pharma consortium planning to use their own data to improve AlphaFold - but with no plans to make the resulting model available outside the consortium. Opinion is divided as to whether this initiative could eventually lead pharma companies to sharing more of their internal data.

• The European Health Data Space regulation came into effect in March. It is the first common EU space dedicated to a specific sector and fosters interoperability and data re-use, which can benefit research and minimise environmental impacts - for example those associated with data duplication. How this interoperability and re-use will be implemented is still unclear as this blog from IQVIA highlights.

• Understanding and Mitigating Webpage Data Bloat: Causes and Preventive Measures: This paper from Hotcarbon.org resulted in the Green Page Analyzer tool which can analyze the amount of data on any public webpage. It also provides recommendations for reducing the amount of data without removing content.

LMICs

• African scientists set genomics ‘world speed record’ in confirming Ebola outbreak in Uganda, contributing to a collaborative model that ‘could go a long way to improving the identification, tracking, monitoring and combatting of disease outbreaks in Africa’ reports Nature Africa.

• This study in the International Journal of Medical Informatics ‘significantly advances our understanding of digital health tools (DHTs) by providing actual data on their use in climate change-vulnerable countries’. Taking the perspective of local healthcare practitioners, the study ‘highlights the necessity of context-specific capacity-building initiatives by evaluating the professional preparedness to use DHTs and the sufficiency of training’.

• With the known link between climate change and infectious disease, and the backdrop of the changing funding landscape for infectious disease research and control, this editorial in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases highlights the impact of recent cuts in funding from high-income countries and considers the implications for resource-limited countries. It calls for LMICs to prioritise self-sustainability in their health programs. Meanwhile this paper in Vaccine undertakes an analysis of the funding landscape for human bacterial vaccines in low-and middle-income countries. It finds that ‘most funding was received by organisations in North America and Europe, with Asia, Africa, and Central/South America collectively receiving less than 20% of the total funding’. It also highlights that ‘data gaps remain for critical bacterial pathogens on WHO's AMR priority pathogen list’.

• This paper from Science Advances constructed and analyzed a global atlas of potential human pathogenic bacteria (HPB) using over a million samples worldwide. The study found that ‘human activities and climate change could profoundly affect the distribution, richness, and dispersal of HPB in the environment, highlighting the necessity and urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and assisting LMICs in improving medical conditions’.

Resources, Events and Opportunities

• PATH Digital Square have launched an open call for Global Goods Integrating climate services for health. Selected solutions will be included in the Global Goods Guidebook for Climate Health, an extension of the existing Global Goods Guidebook —a curated resource for implementers, funders, and governments. The first round of the open call runs until April 30th.

• Oxford University’s Ethox Centre is seeking a Senior Researcher to work on the Wellcome-funded SHARE project (Environmentally Sustainable Health Research). The closing date for applications is noon on 23rd April 2025.

• A flurry of articles from different perspectives on the potential and risks of AI: Firstly, recognising the environmental cost of generative AI, a blog from the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health at the University of Manchester, adds to growing calls for caution around the use of generative AI. Secondly, Oliver Cronk sums up the Insights on AI Sustainability from Data Centre World 2025, noting that he is ‘both concerned and optimistic’. Thirdly, Wellcome’s Director of Mental Health explains why Wellcome are choosing curiosity over fear of AI, calling for investment in science to explore genAI’s potential, including its potential risks and harms. Fourthly, this paper in Big Data and Society undertakes the largest-scale interview study of AI ethics auditors to date. The paper notes that audits are ‘hyper-focused on technically oriented AI ethics principles of bias, privacy, and explainability, to the exclusion of other principles and socio-technical approaches, reflecting a regulatory emphasis on technical risk management’. Finally, from Computers and Society, Bridging the Gap: Integrating Ethics and Environmental Sustainability in AI Research and Practice.

• Are you a researcher exploring climate and health impacts? Do you use evidence to inform policy on climate action and health? The ECO-CHICA project sets out to ‘develop a set of accessible guidelines to bridge the divide between environmental economic evaluation involving health co-benefits and health economic evaluation involving environmental/sustainability concerns’. Consider signing up as a stakeholder.

• Two items on a One Health and AMR theme: Firstly, The UK Health Security Agency has launched a list of 24 diseases that they believe pose the biggest threat to public health. The list, to be revised annually, includes diseases linked to climate change and AMR and zoonotic diseases. The purpose of the list is to help guide research and development investment. Notably, it is the first list ‘specifically designed to consider both global public health threats as well as those most relevant to a UK population’. Secondly, this study in Nature makes use of a variety of digitally enabled analysis techniques to open up a whole new research area in the fight against infectious diseases and AMR. It establishes that natural antibacterials could provide alternatives to conventional antibiotics in combating antibiotic-resistant infections.

• This review article, part of a special issue on Innovations in Surgery, asks How can the model for a sustainable surgical pathway be enhanced by digital medicine? Noting that surgery is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions from healthcare, the authors examine how digital technologies can be applied to the surgical pathway, ‘reducing the burden on carbon-intensive healthcare systems through minimizing operative risk, enhancing the patient's perioperative experience and modelling sustainable resource use’.

• Two reminders: Firstly, the deadline for applications for Wellcome’s Climate Impacts Awards is April 30th. Secondly, you can register for CleanMed Europe 2025 from Healthcare Without Harm, happening online between June 10th and June 13th.

• The World Meteorological Organisation State of the Global Climate report documents spiralling weather and climate impacts. It highlights that ‘early warnings and climate services are vital to protect communities and economies’.

And finally, this comment piece in Nature outlines six ways to tackle the ‘carbon catch-22: governments are hesitant to impose regulations without clear price signals from markets, while markets struggle to deliver price clarity without regulatory guidance’.

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