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The Good Signal

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Signals worth following

Browse our latest investigations, impact stories, and evidence-based progress updates.

TopicHealth
Health
•The Good Signal

The US death rate just hit a recorded low

NCHS Vital Statistics Rapid Release no. 44 (2 July 2026) puts the provisional 2025 U.S. age-adjusted death rate at 689.2 per 100,000 — 4.6% below the final 2024 rate of 722.1, covering 3,094,593 deaths and 99.9% of certificates as of 10 May 2026. NCHS calls it the lowest death rate recorded. The file does not compute life expectancy; that 2024 print (79.0 years) is Data Brief 548.

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Health
•The Good Signal

A pathology AI matched FDA-cleared cancer detectors

Vorontsov et al. in Nature Medicine (31 July 2026) trained PRISM2 on 2,350,518 whole-slide images from 685,507 specimens and 200,692 patients, plus 14 million question–answer pairs. Prompt-based inference matches or exceeds (P < 0.05) Paige Prostate, Paige Breast and Paige BLN on their own test sets. Pan-cancer linear-probe AUC 0.967. Not a prospective reader trial.

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Health
•The Good Signal

An ER AI was rated appropriate in 99 of 100 outputs. Doctors still stopped using it.

A Nature Medicine DECIDE-AI stage 1 study at Rambam’s emergency department found SHAKED, a multi-model LLM clinical decision support system, rated appropriate in 99 of 100 sampled outputs, while clinician use fell from 68% to 30% over four weeks. Length of stay did not change. The authors say the result does not justify deployment.

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Health
•The Good Signal

A liver-scan AI caught 15 cancers doctors had missed

Zhang et al. in Nature Medicine (19 August 2026) trained LiON on 6,443 patients, validated it on 22,251, then ran a single-arm workflow trial on 10,333 consecutive patients. Prospective AUC 0.952 (95% CI 0.942–0.961). AI–human collaboration found 51 previously overlooked lesions, including 15 malignancies. Not a randomised outcomes trial.

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Health
•The Good Signal

Five African countries just closed polio type 2 outbreaks

WHO AFRO closed poliovirus type 2 outbreaks in Burundi, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, the Republic of Congo and Uganda after OBRA teams reviewed surveillance, lab and epi data from January to June 2026. Closure is technical, not eradication — Madagascar is the caution WHO cites.

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Health
•The Good Signal

Chile eliminates leprosy as a public health problem — and leaves a practical roadmap for the region

The WHO verified that Chile has eliminated leprosy as a public health problem, becoming the first country in the Americas to achieve this milestone.

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