Dear CHIFA colleagues,
Here is a brief summary of the 25 messages so far. I decided to try using AI (Copilot) to help with this and have gone through the text output and made a few minor changes. Meanwhile, a cautionary tale: just half an hour ago I was talking to a friend who is a physiology lecturer at a medical school in England. He told me that the pass rate for medical students taking their first year exams had fallen substantially in 2026. This is also being seen nationally. He and others suspect that part of the reason may be AI. It seems that many students are now asking AI to produce summaries of lectures rather than working this through themselves. As a result, the students' lerning process is compromised, with poorer learning and poorer recall.
==
CHIFA Digest – Short Summary: Spotlight on Group B Streptococcus (GBS)
(Messages up to 9 July 2026)
Our first CHIFA/HIFA Spotlight — timed with GBS Awareness Week (8–14 July 2026) — has generated powerful contributions from parents, clinicians, and researchers worldwide. The discussion highlights the global burden of GBS, the preventable nature of much GBS disease, and the critical need for reliable information for parents, health workers, and policymakers.
Key points from the discussion:
Personal testimonies from parents in the USA (Kelli Smith, Marti Perhach, Dura Schlei) describe the tragic loss of their babies to early- and late-onset GBS disease. Their stories emphasise how quickly GBS can progress and how gaps in awareness and clinical practice can lead to preventable harm.
The WHO 2024 guideline recommends universal antenatal screening and timely intrapartum antibiotics, reducing early-onset disease by ~80%. However, country experiences show wide variation in screening and diagnosis. We have heard from Ethiopia, Gambia, Japan, Kenya and Nigeria and look forward to hearing from other countries.
Contributors consistently highlighted low awareness among parents, inconsistent information for health workers, and the need for maternal vaccination, better surveillance, and improved stillbirth investigation.
All CHIFA members are encouraged to help publicise the Spotlight, invite colleagues to join CHIFA (free), and share the landing page: www.hifa.org/gbs.
==
Best wishes, Neil
CHIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org