Pope Leo XIV left a Rome hospital four days after lung cancer surgery, Kenya’s Ebola tally climbed to seven with three health workers among the new cases, and Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak drew federal reinforcements. Hospital ramping in Queensland, Palantir’s NHS platform, Irish health funding, vaping among people who never smoked and an elephant vaccine trial complete the day’s health picture.
Pope Leo leaves hospital four days after lung cancer operation
Pope Leo XIV walked out of the Gemelli hospital in Rome on Saturday afternoon without assistance, four days after surgeons removed a cancerous tumour from his right lung. The 71-year-old pontiff, the first leader of the Roman Catholic Church to be born in the United States, stopped to greet well-wishers before getting into the car that took him back to the Vatican. His doctors, Luigi Carbone and Stefano Margaritora, said in a statement released through the Holy See that blood tests and a chest X-ray taken that morning, together with his overall clinical condition, made him fit to go home. The operation on Tuesday lasted about an hour and a half and removed the lower lobe of the right lung. Leo had been diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, which is the most frequent form of lung cancer, after a small nodule was found during a routine check-up.
The speed of his return surprised many observers. The Vatican had first expected a stay of roughly a week, and all of the Pope’s appointments had been cancelled until 20 October. Instead, the Holy See said he would appear at a window of the papal apartment overlooking St Peter’s Square on Sunday to lead the Angelus prayer, the same weekly occasion at which he had stunned pilgrims a week earlier by revealing that he needed surgery. Before leaving hospital he celebrated Mass in his tenth-floor room, and images released on Friday showed him giving communion to staff. Doctors have described his recovery as normal and free of complications, but they have not yet published results showing how large the tumour was or whether the disease had reached nearby lymph nodes, details that specialists regard as central to any prognosis and to decisions on further treatment.
Margaritora, the lead surgeon, said the Pope had committed himself fully to his recovery and that he expected the pontiff to be completely recovered from the operation in about ten more days. Asked about the long-haul journey planned for November, he said he saw no clinical reason why it should not go ahead. The trip to Latin America is scheduled to run from 6 to 17 November and includes Peru, where Leo spent many years as a missionary before his election in May 2025. People close to the pontiff have said he was keen to avoid postponing the visit. Even so, it remains uncertain whether further therapy will be needed once the pending pathology is known, and that could still affect his calendar in the weeks ahead. Before the diagnosis he had been widely regarded as healthy and active, with a well-known enthusiasm for tennis.
Leo did not stop working while he was in hospital. On Friday he held a telephone conversation with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the first contact between the two since June 2025, which the Vatican described as an appeal for dialogue and peace. During the call he pressed for a humanitarian ceasefire in Oleshky, a Ukrainian city under Russian occupation that is shelled almost constantly, so that residents could be evacuated and food and medicine could reach those who remain. Recent accounts from the city have described people surviving on weeds picked from gardens. The call came as Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities have intensified, with civilian casualties rising. A senior Vatican diplomat also said this week that the Pope’s health should not be taken for granted, a remark that underlined the uncertainty that remains while the final medical results are awaited and the Pope resumes his duties.
The Gemelli hospital, in the north-west of Rome, has a long association with reigning popes. John Paul II was treated there so often that the Vatican and the hospital created a secure papal suite for his visits, and it remains the hospital most closely associated with the care of popes. Leo’s diagnosis had raised questions about the future of a papacy that began only last year, and his early reappearance will come as some relief to Catholics around the world. Priests and lay followers gathered outside the building to recite the rosary beside a statue of John Paul II while he was a patient there. The results of the tests on whether the cancer has spread are still awaited. For now the immediate focus is Sunday’s Angelus, which will be his first public engagement since the operation and an early indication of how quickly he can resume a full schedule.
Kenya confirms four more Ebola cases, including three health workers
Kenya’s Ministry of Health announced on Saturday that four more people had tested positive for Ebola, bringing the number of confirmed infections in the country to seven, a total that includes the first patient, who died. Three of the new cases are health workers who treated that patient in hospital between 3 and 4 October, two men aged 29 and 35 and a woman aged 32. The fourth is a close male relative of the man who died. The statement was signed by the Director General for Health, Dr Patrick Amoth. Each of the four developed a fever while already in quarantine and was isolated immediately before samples were taken. The relative had been under observation since 6 October, while the three health workers had been confined since 9 October after they were identified as contacts. All four are now receiving supportive care at designated treatment centres.
The samples were confirmed as Bundibugyo virus disease, one of the forms of Ebola, at two separate laboratories, the National Virology Reference Laboratory and the Kenya Medical Research Institute. Kenya currently requires positive results from both facilities before it confirms a case, a double check intended to prevent false alarms during a sensitive outbreak. The ministry said the second and third patients, who are also relatives of the first, were stable and responding well to treatment, and it promised further updates on the condition of everyone affected. The World Health Organization said on Friday, before the latest announcement, that those two earlier cases were a man aged 39 and a woman aged 65 who had been monitored daily in quarantine before symptoms appeared. The first patient was a Kenyan man who had travelled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo before he fell ill.
Officials stressed that every one of the new infections was found among people who were already being watched, which they say has reduced the chance of the virus spreading further to families or the wider community. Of the 130 people listed as contacts of confirmed patients, 128, or 98.5 per cent, have been traced and placed in quarantine, and teams are still looking for the remaining two. Four family members who looked after the first patient during his hospital stay are also under close watch. People in quarantine are being offered mental health and psychosocial support. The ministry warned that more cases could still appear among those being monitored before the end of their 21-day observation period, but said anyone who develops symptoms will be identified and treated promptly, which improves the chances of survival as well as limiting onward transmission.
Amoth said there was no sign of community transmission and that the risk to the general public remained low. The government has not imposed limits on travel, trade or public gatherings, and it has described the country as open for business while urging people to stay calm and alert. The World Health Organization has advised against closing borders or restricting commerce in response to the outbreak, and Kenyan officials have followed that advice so far, preferring quarantine, testing and contact tracing to wider restrictions on movement. The agency has said it is supporting the Kenyan response, and it noted earlier in the week that the third case had been found early because the patient was already in quarantine. Officials have presented the high proportion of contacts traced as evidence that the containment strategy is working, while cautioning that vigilance must continue until the monitoring period for every contact has ended without new infections.
The ministry used its statement to remind the public how the disease is passed on. The virus is passed on when someone touches the blood or other body fluids of a person who is infected, the body of someone who has died of it, or with contaminated objects, and it is not transmitted through the air. Symptoms include fever, unusual tiredness, muscle or joint pain, sore throat, vomiting, diarrhoea and unexplained bleeding. Anyone who notices such signs, particularly after possible exposure, has been told to go to the nearest health facility at once or to ring the ministry’s free helpline on 719 for advice. The infection of three health workers underlines the risks faced by staff who treat patients before a diagnosis is known, and it is likely to renew attention on protective equipment and infection control in Kenyan hospitals as the response continues.
CDC sends specialist help as Pennsylvania measles outbreak passes 1,200 cases
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that it would deploy a so-called disease detective from its Epidemic Intelligence Service to help Pennsylvania confront a measles outbreak that has now infected more than 1,200 people. As of Wednesday, the state had confirmed 1,222 cases since the outbreak began in late April, almost all of them in people who had not been vaccinated, and six deaths associated with the disease. The agency is also releasing nearly $4m to support the state’s response. A spokesperson said the CDC director, Dr Erica Schwartz, recommends the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine as the most effective protection against infection. Nationally, the CDC reported 4,410 measles cases as of Friday, an increase of 330 on its previous weekly update. The national figure shows that Pennsylvania accounts for more than a quarter of all infections recorded in the country so far this year.
Lancaster County sits at the centre of the outbreak, with more than 415 confirmed cases as of 9 October. It is the largest county in Pennsylvania without its own health department, and local officials say that gap has left them at a clear disadvantage. Plain communities, including the Amish, who have historically had lower vaccination rates, make up about eight per cent of the county’s population. Alice Yoder, a county commissioner and former critical care nurse, said officials were very concerned. She explained that 60 of the state’s 67 counties rely on the centralised state system rather than running their own departments, which places a heavy communication burden on state staff. Yoder, who is campaigning for Lancaster to set up its own health department, said she and her colleagues often learn of new cases and deaths at the same moment as the public.
A local department, Yoder argued, would give the county real-time data and an established team with existing ties to community partners, allowing a faster response when an outbreak first appears. Counties that do have their own departments, such as Montgomery, can work with groups like the Montgomery County Immunization Coalition, whose vice-chair, Susan Wenrick, said the main obstacles to vaccination there had been access and availability. She added that partnerships formed during the coronavirus pandemic had helped bring vaccines into neighbourhoods and reach people without adequate insurance, but warned that the volume of misinformation, and the habit of seeking health advice online rather than from professionals, made the work harder. Yoder said she had never expected to see measles again in her lifetime, but conceded that once it returned the county probably should have been better prepared for it.
The state Department of Health has meanwhile run more than 200 small pop-up vaccination clinics over the past five months in communities where the virus has spread among unvaccinated residents, including several in Lancaster County. The clinics are deliberately discreet, with times and places shared mainly by word of mouth, local businesses and health providers, in an effort to build trust. At one held in a fire station in New Holland, some people arrived by horse-drawn buggy, and for several it was the first vaccine they had ever received. Dr Jennifer Wallace, medical director of the department’s Bureau of Community Health Systems, said fear had changed now that measles was present next door rather than in a distant country, and that people were coming forward because they wanted protection. Public health experts hope this approach can raise immunisation rates enough to slow the outbreak.
The outbreak has also become entangled in national politics. The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has been widely criticised for fuelling scepticism about vaccines, and Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, has clashed with him publicly. In August, when the state reported its first two measles deaths in three decades, Shapiro said the rhetoric coming from the federal administration was harming communities across the country and especially in Pennsylvania, and warned that spreading misinformation and scaring people had real consequences. The CDC’s decision to send specialist staff and money suggests the agency sees the outbreak as a serious threat that could spread further. Some public health officials in the state have already said it is only a matter of time before the virus moves well beyond its current centre, making the coming weeks important for containment efforts.
Several NHS trusts in England decline to use Palantir data platform
Many NHS organisations in England are choosing not to use the federated data platform run by the US technology company Palantir, according to freedom of information responses that suggest health managers believe existing or alternative systems are as good or better. The £330m platform was introduced in March 2024 under a seven-year contract intended to join up health data and improve clinical accuracy and efficiency. Of more than two dozen responses examined, 16 trusts and health boards said they do not use it. Some organisations did report gains, saying the platform had made waiting lists easier to manage and improved the scheduling of operations. Others, from Gateshead in the north to Truro in Cornwall, said they had declined to take it up, or had tried it and then gone back to their previous systems because the benefits did not justify the change.
The responses contain blunt assessments. University Hospitals of North Midlands said the platform did not seem to offer anything beyond what it already had, while Dorset HealthCare said it would not adopt the system or go live with it. Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust said it did not intend to use it, while the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust reported that, having used the system, it had not delivered significant improvements over local tools. University Hospitals Birmingham, which serves more than two million people, cited limited expected benefit over its existing solutions. A Suffolk trust said other systems surpassed the platform’s functions, and the integrated care board for Greater Manchester described the Palantir product as duplicative and retrograde. Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership said it had not found a tool on the platform that improved significantly on its current capabilities.
The freedom of information requests were submitted by Medact, a health campaign group that opposes Palantir’s involvement in the NHS, and the replies were published on the WhatDoTheyKnow transparency website. A Medact spokesperson, Dr Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne, said they showed that alternatives existed and that a safe move away from Palantir was possible, leaving the government no excuse to extend the deal. She urged ministers to invest in NHS innovation and in the health service’s own data specialists rather than outsourcing core functions to large technology firms. Palantir has disputed claims that other software could do the job equally well. Tom Watson, a former Labour MP and minister who became the company’s senior vice-president and chief lobbyist last month, said any firms capable of running the platform would have competed for it, and warned against allowing what he called mob rule to shape procurement.
The findings arrive as the government led by Andy Burnham faces a decision on whether to use a break clause in the contract. Two parliamentary select committees, including the Commons science and technology committee, have urged ministers to end the agreement. Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat member of that committee, said the replies vindicated his long-held view that the system was not good enough and showed that imposing a single solution on the NHS from the centre could not work. He argued that the health service should instead develop interoperability standards, letting each trust keep its own software while ensuring the systems can exchange information. Wrigley also said the company was good at selling its products but tended to promise more than it delivered, a charge Palantir rejects as it continues to defend the platform’s record.
Opposition to the contract has broadened well beyond questions of software performance. Critics point to Palantir’s other work, including contracts with the Israeli military and with homeland security agencies in the United States, and to the role of its co-founder, the billionaire Peter Thiel, who said in 2023 that the NHS makes people sick. Earlier this autumn more than 44,000 people lodged formal objections to the handling of their data on the platform, and protesters gathered outside the company’s London headquarters at the start of October. There is also continuing disagreement about the evidence for the platform’s effectiveness. Whatever ministers decide about the break clause, the patchy uptake across trusts suggests the national ambition of a single connected data system remains far from complete, and that local organisations retain considerable influence over which digital tools they actually rely on.
Queensland ramping barely improves as death after ambulance wait is reviewed
Ambulance ramping in Queensland remains close to the level it was at before the state’s Liberal National government took office, according to the latest figures, as paramedics describe whole shifts spent waiting outside crowded emergency departments. In August, 42 per cent of patients brought by ambulance to the state’s 26 largest public hospitals waited more than 30 minutes to be handed over to emergency staff, compared with 43.9 per cent in the same month before the October 2024 election. Each ambulance lost an average of 17.2 minutes beyond the handover target. Several major hospitals have done worse since the change of government, including Cairns, Mackay, Gladstone, Caboolture, Toowoomba, The Prince Charles Hospital and Sunshine Coast University Hospital. The Metro South region fared worst, with Logan, Redland and the QEII hospitals all ramping more than 60 per cent of ambulance arrivals.
The figures have drawn attention because of a death now under investigation. A man in his early fifties with chest pain called triple zero from his home in the Brisbane suburb of Annerley shortly after 10pm last Saturday, only a few streets from Princess Alexandra Hospital. Reports of his exact age differ. He was given one of the most urgent classifications, meaning his emergency was potentially time-critical, and a call-taker rang back about five minutes later to check on him. When paramedics reached the house roughly two hours after his first call, they found him dead. It was an unusually busy night, with about 80 active jobs in the area. The Queensland Ambulance Service has offered condolences and begun a review, and the Health Minister, Tim Nicholls, has promised that any lessons will be applied. The man’s family only learned of the delay through media reports on Thursday.
Paramedics have shared photographs and videos of long rows of ambulances parked outside hospitals. One based in Metro South, speaking anonymously, said he sometimes spent an entire 10- or 12-hour shift ramped with a single patient, and that on the day he spoke he had been held at Logan Hospital for five hours. He said there had been cases in which urgent lights-and-sirens calls waited two or three hours for a crew, and described the system as overwhelmed. A colleague in Metro North said some crews spent whole shifts on the ramp and that some patients were abusive. Fiona Scalon, state secretary of the United Workers Union, called Metro South a recent hot spot and said ramping was a symptom of a hospital system that was not working well, adding that it demoralised paramedics who wanted to be out helping people still waiting for assessment.
The ambulance service said it is the busiest in Australia and getting busier, but that it had improved response times for the most critically ill patients over the past year, and it acknowledged the concerns raised by its staff. Nicholls declined to accept that the premier’s pledge to cut statewide ramping below 30 per cent by the 2028 election was out of reach, despite a record 211,000 emergency department presentations in August, an ageing population and rising chronic illness. He said the rate was much higher than the government wanted but that the trend showed its measures were having an effect. Asked whether he would quit cabinet if the target was missed, he said time would tell and that the government was working extremely hard to achieve it. He said he remained hopeful and insisted his optimism was grounded in evidence.
Nicholls also blamed the federal government, saying that 1,400 people occupying Queensland public hospital beds were awaiting an aged care place or support under the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Freeing even 200 of those beds, he argued, would improve ramping dramatically because patients could move out of emergency departments, allowing ambulances to unload and return to the road. State and territory health ministers have jointly called on Canberra to invest more in aged care to relieve that pressure on hospitals. Justin Thompson, a Toowoomba emergency physician who chairs the Queensland branch of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said burnout among staff was increasing alongside overcrowding and a rise in violence against hospital workers. He said the most important step the state could take was to increase its capacity of acute hospital beds, which would also ease pressure on exhausted staff.
Irish consultants hear warnings over health budget and ministerial engagement
Ireland’s health budget for next year is unrealistically low and makes further overspending in 2027 highly likely, a senior official at the State’s fiscal watchdog told the annual conference of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association in Kilkenny on Saturday. Niall Conroy, acting chief economist at the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, said the way the health allocation is calculated is no longer grounded in evidence. The health service received €25.8 billion for current spending this year, but a deficit has opened up that could reach €1 billion by December. Budget 2027 provides €27.4 billion for current services, which Conroy described as only a modest uplift. Because the service needs about €1.7 billion simply to maintain existing levels of care, and this year’s expected overrun absorbs much of the new money, he said the real increase amounts to roughly €600 million, or about two per cent.
Conroy said the sector was being funded merely to stand still and predicted that, if he gave the same talk next year, he would again be discussing substantial overruns. He criticised a recurring cycle in which the health service recruits heavily in the first half of the year, spending runs ahead of its allocation and tighter controls or a hiring moratorium follow, calling it a very poor approach to workforce planning. The Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, has taken the opposite view of the problem, criticising regions of the Health Service Executive for hiring beyond their limits. Last week she called the practice unsustainable and said those areas had already eaten into next year’s allocation. The exchange highlights a long-running tension between demands for more staff and the government’s efforts to keep health spending within the limits it has set.
Jennifer Kearney, chief executive of Cork University Hospital, told delegates that returning to the Irish health service after 22 years in the NHS in Britain had felt in some ways like going back 10 or 15 years. She listed the infrastructure, financial arrangements, complicated rules on pay and staff numbers and the limited autonomy given to those running services as obstacles. Kearney drew public attention in August when she wrote to the HSE warning of growing patient safety risks linked to a shortage of about 1,000 staff, a claim the minister disputed by pointing to substantial hiring and an overspent pay budget. Kearney said she stood fully by her warnings and that the situation was worsening, with only seven posts approved since her letters became public. The hospital had lost €15 million from its budget at the start of the year, she added.
Kearney said half of the hospital’s diagnostic capacity was switched off, with scanners idle because there were not enough radiographers to operate them, and that its surgical hub was open but not working at full capacity because of employment restrictions in the region. She accepted that the hospital was overspending, but attributed this to the costs of the public-only consultant contract and to overtime made necessary by vacancies. The conference also heard criticism of the minister’s approach to the profession. The association, which represents almost 5,000 consultants, said it had met Carroll MacNeill only once, in March 2025, since she took office, and had been unable to secure further meetings for 20 months despite repeated requests. Its president, Prof Gabrielle Colleran, said the union had entered that meeting with open minds but left disappointed that its offer of collaboration was not taken up.
Colleran asked what it said about relations between the health service’s leadership and the medical profession when the body representing almost 5,000 hospital consultants could not secure a conversation with the minister, particularly given the minister’s sustained focus on weekend rostering for consultants. She contrasted this with the government’s willingness to talk to public sector unions as both sides try to avert a second national strike over pay next Wednesday. The association also said that the HSE chief executive, Anne O’Connor, had been obliged to withdraw from Saturday’s event at short notice, and that two other senior figures had pulled out of earlier engagements this year. Colleran said the association was ready to work constructively and offer solutions led by clinicians, but that any deliberate effort to discourage engagement would be a matter of profound concern for the profession.
Rise in UK adults who vape without ever smoking raises questions over habit and marketing
Over a million UK residents who report never having been smokers now use vapes, according to recent survey data from the Office for National Statistics, and that figure has grown each year. The trend has prompted fresh discussion among doctors, researchers and campaigners about why e-cigarettes, originally promoted as a route out of smoking, are being taken up by people who never had a tobacco habit to break. Nicotine vaping is considered less harmful than smoking, but the NHS says its long-term effects remain uncertain. The statistics office puts the number of vapers in Britain aged 16 or older at roughly 5.4 million, while around 4.9 million adults in the UK smoke and the number of smokers continues to decline gradually. Its figures suggest that almost one in six people aged between 25 and 34 vape either daily or occasionally.
Personal accounts show how the habit can take hold. Gracey Mungulu, a 21-year-old Londoner who works as a hairdresser and in a school, said she once found vaping as off-putting as cigarettes, but that it became so widespread among classmates that she started at 16 despite coughing the first time. She now buys a refillable device costing £5 every day and says she reaches for it whenever her hands are free, especially when she feels socially anxious, describing the act as almost automatic. She has thought about stopping to save the £35 a week it costs, but says the idea of quitting frightens her. Malin Andersson, a 33-year-old domestic abuse campaigner and former reality television contestant, began during a stressful break-up, compared the device to a dummy for adults and gave it up in May.
A GP, Dr Helen Wall, said many patients describe a psychological reliance in which the device helps them manage their emotions, and that vaping often goes hand in hand with endless scrolling on phones. Another young woman, a 26-year-old from Manchester who gave only her first name, Alex, said occasional use on nights out turned into a constant presence, to the point where she worked from bed with the device resting on her chest. When she later stopped vaping while travelling for several months, she found no vapes available and began smoking cigarettes for the first time instead, an outcome experts do not regard as a healthy way to quit. Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable illness and early death in the UK, and the NHS strongly urges people to give it up.
Prof Sarah Jackson of the University College London Alcohol and Tobacco Research Group cautioned against reading the figures only as bad news. Some of those who vape without having smoked might otherwise have taken up cigarettes, she said, in which case vaping would have steered them away from a more dangerous behaviour. Others, however, are being exposed to risks they would not otherwise have faced. She pointed to a 2024 study by researchers at the same university which found that nicotine use had increased among young adults in England even as smoking fell, suggesting that some vapers would never have smoked. Hazel Cheeseman of the charity Action on Smoking and Health said that among the 1.1 million never-smokers who vape, there was probably a group who would not be doing so without the highly visible marketing of the products.
Regulation has tightened in recent years. Disposable vapes, widely seen as a major driver of vaping among young people, were banned last year, and it is illegal to sell vapes to anyone under 18. The NHS advises non-smokers and anyone aged 17 or younger never to vape. The government has also consulted on further restrictions on the bright colours and sweet flavours used to promote the products, and a response is expected. Wall said heavy promotion had fed a mistaken belief that vapes are safe and not addictive, and Mungulu has suggested they should be sold in the same plain packaging as cigarettes. For those wanting to stop, the NHS recommends gradually lowering nicotine strength, lengthening the gaps between sessions or switching to a nicotine replacement product, although a recent survey found that fewer than half of healthcare providers in England offer help to quit vaping.
Elephant calves in Victoria join trial of vaccine against deadly herpesvirus
Three young Asian elephants at Werribee Open Range Zoo in Victoria have become the first in Australia to receive an experimental vaccine against elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus, a disease that is one of the biggest killers of young Asian elephants in zoos worldwide. The illness caused by the virus has no cure and can progress with alarming speed, causing massive internal bleeding that can kill an animal within a single day. Over the past 25 years there have been more than 90 fatal cases among elephant calves under human care. The trial carries particular meaning at Werribee because of Man Jai, an Asian elephant born at the zoo in 2013 who died of the disease three years ago at the age of nine, despite intensive efforts by staff who worked around the clock to save him.
The vaccine was developed by a team led by Tabitha Hoornweg, a veterinary scientist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who has studied the virus since 2019. Her group is one of three, alongside teams in the United States and Britain, working on vaccines against it. Hoornweg has explained that virtually all elephants carry or encounter the virus at some point, but some young animals become gravely ill when first exposed. The problem is well documented in captivity, and she estimates that at least 100 to 150 wild calves have also died. The vaccine, which teaches the immune system to recognise the virus, was first given to six older elephants in Dutch zoos about three years ago. That work showed no dangerous side effects but only demonstrated safety, so the current phase aims to establish whether it protects the young.
So far 11 calves in Europe have received the jab, and the three Werribee animals are the first in Australia to take part. The zoo offers a valuable setting because, since Man Jai’s death, its elephants have undergone weekly PCR and blood tests so that keepers can spot infection immediately, a level of monitoring that is not applied in the same way everywhere the vaccine has been used. Collecting the samples requires training. Keepers insert a large syringe of saline into one nostril of the trunk, and the elephant learns to raise its trunk and hold the liquid for about 20 seconds before blowing it into a plastic bag. The resulting trunk wash is then tested for several viruses. Fruit and vegetable rewards are central to the process, and keepers admit they are sometimes sprayed while young animals are still learning.
On vaccination day nine keepers and two veterinarians followed a carefully rehearsed routine, conscious that adult elephants weigh more than 2,000 kilograms and even calves about 1,400 kilograms, so a mistake could be dangerous. The first pair, the mother Mali and her calf Roi-Yim, were brought into separate metal enclosures within sight of each other to keep them calm. While one keeper offered treats and used a whistle to reward good behaviour, another helped the zoo veterinarian Natalie Rourke clean and prepare the skin on the calf’s back leg. Rourke then injected the vaccine into his thigh, and Roi-Yim barely seemed to notice, carrying on eating the snacks keepers were handing him. Moments later mother and calf were released on to the savanna enclosure for the day, and the team moved on to the next pair of animals.
Elephant keeper Lucy Truelson, who has worked with animals for nearly 30 years and watched Man Jai’s birth, described every elephant death as devastating and called the disease aggressive and painful. She said the training approach depends on the animals’ willingness, with the calves treated much as a dog might be trained at home and allowed to take part on their own terms, and that their curiosity and enthusiasm make the work easier. For Truelson, seeing a new generation receive a chance of protection is a special moment, and she regards the trial as part of Man Jai’s legacy, saying his death strengthened the zoo’s commitment to fighting the disease. She hopes the vaccine will spare the zoo’s other young elephants, and calves elsewhere in the world, from the fate that befell Man Jai, and the trial’s results will now be followed closely by researchers.