Last month, a baby in the US city of Philadelphia received treatment calibrated to his genetic code, offering relief for his life threatening disease.1 Yet at a time of such stunning scientific advances, elsewhere babies are dying for want of the most basic commodity: food. Recently, I learnt of 4 month old baby Jenan and her mother Aya.2 Our team spoke to Aya at a clinic in Gaza where she was seeking treatment for Jenan’s diarrhoea and acute malnutrition, which she had been facing for three months. Later that day, Aya woke up to find her baby had died beside her. The lactose-free nutritional supplements she needed were not available. Ultimately, the combination of the malnutrition and diarrhoea was deadly. As this, and countless other tragic stories, show, when food is scarce, children face a higher risk of dying from starvation than adults. For their young bodies to grow, they need more nutrients, yet they have smaller reserves to draw on.3 Without nutritious food, they become more v

We need to understand more about how susceptibility to misinformation is socially patterned so that it doesn’t deepen health inequalities, say Simon Williams and Sander van der Linden The effective communication of accurate information is a critical component of successful health systems, health promotion, and prevention efforts. The opposite of this is misinformation, which represents a serious threat to individual and global health. Not everyone is equally susceptible to misinformation, however, and one of the biggest priorities for public health should be to investigate what we might refer to as the social determinants of misinformation. Misinformation is less intentionally harmful than disinformation, which is defined as the deliberate spreading of incorrect information,1 but is arguably more prevalent because people often unwittingly spread misinformation and perceive it as correct. Misinformation can be thought of as a “meta risk” in so far as it transcends, influences, and ampli