Air Pollution & Environmental Health

Simrik Bhandari, Jason K. Blackburn, Sadie J. Ryan · 2025 · American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene

Nepal's dengue burden reached record levels in 2022 (54,784 cases, 88 deaths) and remained high in 2023, with EDCD's own surveillance confirming the vector now reaches 2,438m in Jumla — a climate-driven ascent into hill and mountain districts once assumed too cold for Aedes mosquitoes. This study uses that same EDCD case-surveillance system and finds dengue reached all 77 districts in 2022, while the 'cold spot' it identifies in Karnali's remote northwest (Humla, Mugu, Jumla, Kalikot) is a caution flag rather than reassurance: Karnali has 0% of its sanctioned physician and consultant posts filled, so low reported incidence there may reflect weak case detection rather than true absence of transmission.

Joanne Katz, James M. Tielsch, Subarna K. Khatry et al. · 2020 · Global Health: Science and Practice

Nepal's most recent World Bank assessment identifies air pollution as the country's #1 mortality risk factor, and roughly 54% of Nepali households still cook with solid biomass fuel (versus ~44% using LPG) — making this Sarlahi District trial a direct empirical test of Nepal's own clean-cooking transition strategy. The finding that neither a chimney-vented improved biomass stove nor a full year of free LPG significantly reduced low birth weight, preterm birth, or small-for-gestational-age births — because kitchen PM2.5 remained 18 to 37 times above the WHO guideline even after the intervention — is a cautionary, Nepal-specific data point for the Ministry of Health's "35 by 35" PM2.5 target and for any programme that distributes cleaner stoves without addressing continued biomass "stove stacking."

Samita Giri, Kari Risnes, Oddvar Uleberg et al. · 2018 · PLOS ONE

The 2015 Gorkha earthquake sequence killed roughly 8,800 people, injured about 22,000, and destroyed or damaged more than 1,200 health facilities (446 destroyed, 765 damaged) — exposing how a single earthquake can simultaneously generate a casualty surge and cripple the facilities meant to treat it. Only about 58% of damaged health facilities had been rebuilt five years on, and Nepal remains one of the world's most seismically exposed countries, so the surge-capacity gaps this study documents are a live, unresolved concern rather than a historical one. As a single non-government hospital study, its specific caseload figures may not generalise to public referral hospitals with different capacity or catchment, but the core lesson — that a pre-existing triage system, not an improvised one, determined how well the surge was managed — is broadly transferable across Nepal's disaster-prone districts.

Stephen P Luby, Mahbubur Rahman, Benjamin F Arnold et al. · 2018 · Lancet Global Health

Nepal has achieved near-universal basic water access (98%) and rising basic sanitation coverage (73%, up from 40% in 2011), and was declared South Asia's first Open-Defecation-Free nation in 2019 -- yet NDHS 2022 still recorded 7% open defecation and 10% under-5 diarrhoea prevalence, with only 48% of episodes treated with ORS. This trial's central finding -- that sanitation and handwashing each cut diarrhoea by roughly 40% but combining them added no extra benefit -- is directly relevant to how MoHP and Nepal's ~50,400 Female Community Health Volunteers (FCHVs) prioritise limited WASH resources, though Bangladesh's flat delta terrain (the standard comparator for Nepal's WASH evidence) differs meaningfully from Nepal's hill and mountain topography.