Delvewire's coverage of Health: in-depth, with context and evidence.
Delvewire was founded by Amaya Kavya.
Alexander Fleming spotted the mould in September 1928, wrote it up, and largely moved on. Turning it into a drug took a team at Oxford with a purification rig built from a bookcase, a policeman who died when the supply ran out, and a mouldy cantaloupe in Illinois. Fleming's own Nobel lecture ended with a warning about resistance that the world has spent eighty years ignoring.
Health · 2026-09-28
In 1971 a cholera outbreak among refugees at Bangaon ran out of intravenous fluid, so Dilip Mahalanabis handed a glucose and salt drink to the patients' relatives in cups. His camp's death rate was 3.6 per cent against about 30 per cent elsewhere. Half a century on, more Indian children with diarrhoea are seen by a provider than are given the sachet.
Health · 2026-09-22
On 13 September 1848 an iron bar went through Phineas Gage's skull and he stood up and spoke. The case founded a science, on the strength of two short papers by one country doctor and a phrase from his friends. What almost nobody repeats is that Gage then spent seven years in Chile driving a six horse coach.
Health · 2026-09-14
The trial that gave medicine its method was possible because postwar Britain could not afford enough of the drug to give it to everybody. It ran for fifteen months without telling the patients, and what it proved in the end was that the drug did not work well enough.
Health · 2026-09-06
In 1944 the President of the United States was in heart failure with a blood pressure nobody could do anything about, because there was nothing to do about it and no word for the problem. The word was invented in 1961, by a study that had been counting people in one Massachusetts town since 1948.
Health · 2026-08-29
By the plain arithmetic of cell division, an elephant should be riddled with tumours and a mouse should hardly ever get one. The opposite of that arithmetic is what actually happens, nobody has properly explained it, and the most famous explanation is now being picked apart by the people best placed to know.
Health · 2026-08-23
In the autumn of 1347, four Genoese ships limped into a Sicilian harbour carrying a disease that would go on to kill somewhere between a third and half of Europe in four years. It is tempting to file the Black Death away as a closed chapter of the medieval world. It isn't one. The bacterium that caused it never went extinct, and it still infects and occasionally kills people today, from the American Southwest to Madagascar, in a matter of days if nobody catches it in time.
Health · 2026-08-11
The WHO African Region logs more disease emergencies than any other, somewhere around a hundred a year, and the reasons are almost entirely things nobody living there chose. Where the equator sits. Which animals carry which viruses. A band of dry wind that runs from Senegal to Ethiopia. Roads that got better. And a workforce carrying a quarter of the world's disease with three percent of the world's health workers. This is what the numbers actually say, and who has been doing the containing.
Health · 2026-07-26
The virus that stopped the world is still here, but it no longer empties cities or fills mortuaries. Roughly 2,020 days since the year 2020 ended, this is a clear look at what COVID-19 really was, why it killed on the scale it did, why it stopped, and what the lockdowns, the crash and the rest of that year did to the world.
Health · 2026-07-12
Thirteen days after the first polio vaccinations, children who had been vaccinated started getting polio. The company that made the bad batches was found not to have been negligent. It had done everything the licence asked of it, and that was the problem.
Health · 2026-06-28