The study, led by Farzana Aziz of the Department of Community Health Sciences at Aga Khan University in Karachi, together with colleagues at Aga Khan University and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, employed a qualitative exploratory design based on secondary analysis of data collected from rehabilitation facilities. Seven focus group discussions were conducted using semi-structured guides, and the transcribed and translated data were analyzed through both inductive and deductive thematic approaches. Crucially, the researchers framed their analysis with three complementary theoretical lenses: the socioecological model, which situates health behavior within nested layers of influence; Erving Goffman’s classic theory of stigma, which describes how discredited identities reshape social interaction; and intersectionality theory, which examines how overlapping identities such as gender, disability and rural residence produce compounded disadvantage.

At the most intimate level of the socioecological framework, the findings describe a psychological battlefield. Participants reported internalized stigma and stereotyping that undermined their willingness to seek rehabilitation services in the first place. The fear of being labeled, pitied or judged created a form of self-censorship, in which psychological distress itself became a barrier to care. This is a well-documented phenomenon in disability studies, but the Pakistani data show how it operates with particular force in a context where disability is often interpreted through cultural misconceptions rather than medical understanding. When a condition is perceived as a moral failing, a curse or a source of family shame, the clinic door becomes not a gateway to recovery but a public declaration of difference.

The interpersonal layer of analysis exposed how family dynamics, which in many South Asian contexts function as the primary safety net, can paradoxically become instruments of exclusion. Participants described social isolation and limited family support as significant constraints on their participation in rehabilitation. Perhaps most striking is the gendered distribution of caregiving itself: the study documents how caregiving burdens fall disproportionately on women, who are expected to ferry children and relatives to appointments while simultaneously facing restrictions on their own mobility and autonomy. A mother seeking therapy for her child must negotiate not only the logistics of transport but also the social permission to travel, often without a male escort, in communities where such norms are strictly enforced.

At the community level, the built environment emerges as a silent but decisive gatekeeper. Participants described sidewalks that are uneven or broken, buildings without ramps, poorly maintained pathways and scarce public transport, all of which constrain the mobility of people with physical disabilities and delay the seeking of rehabilitation services. These are not minor inconveniences; for a wheelchair user in a city where curb cuts are rare and buses are inaccessible, a single appointment can require hours of negotiation with terrain, strangers and helpers. The study makes clear that inaccessible infrastructure is not an architectural afterthought but a structural expression of how little priority disabled citizens are accorded in public planning.

Cultural misconceptions and restrictive gender norms compound these physical barriers. The research found that community-level attitudes about disability and about women’s proper place in public space interact to restrict movement and delay care-seeking. A woman with a disability faces a double exclusion: she is constrained by norms governing female mobility, and by stigma attached to her disability, each amplifying the other. The intersectional analysis at the heart of the study demonstrates that these disadvantages are not merely additive but multiplicative, where gender, geography and disability status intersect to intensify inequities in access to rehabilitation services.

The health system itself, the layer where policy interventions might be expected to compensate for social barriers, instead reproduces them. In rural areas, participants reported inadequate rehabilitation facilities, insufficiently trained staff and gender-insensitive care. Discriminatory attitudes among providers, the study found, collectively limited access to services. This is a critical finding because it shifts responsibility away from individual patients and their families toward the institutions charged with serving them. A health system that cannot guarantee a trained therapist, a private examination space or respectful treatment effectively tells rural women and people with disabilities that rehabilitation is not meant for them, regardless of what official policy declares.

The compounded disadvantage experienced by women and rural participants stands out as the study’s central analytical contribution. A woman with a disability living in a rural district confronts, in a single journey to care, the full stack of barriers the research documents: internalized stigma, family permission structures, impassable roads, absent transport, distant facilities, untrained staff and providers who may treat her with disdain. Each barrier alone might be surmountable; together they form a nearly impenetrable wall. The intersectionality framework allows the researchers to show that these are not separate problems requiring separate solutions, but a single interlocking system of exclusion in which gender, geography and disability status reinforce one another at every level of the socioecological model.

The policy implications follow directly from this architecture. The authors argue that addressing these inequities requires the implementation of disability-inclusive laws and policies, inclusive training for rehabilitation staff, and stronger integration of rehabilitation within public health priorities. The study was conducted as part of the ReLAB-HS initiative, an international effort to strengthen rehabilitation as an essential component of health systems, and its findings speak directly to that agenda. Rehabilitation is often treated as a luxury service in low- and middle-income countries, an add-on to be funded after acute care needs are met. The Pakistani evidence suggests the opposite: rehabilitation is a gateway to participation in education, employment and community life, and its absence entrenches the very inequalities that development programs claim to combat.

What makes this study resonate beyond Pakistan is the methodological clarity with which it dissects exclusion. By combining the socioecological model with Goffman’s stigma theory and intersectionality, the researchers provide a template for understanding why health services fail marginalized populations even when they exist on paper. The ethical rigor of the work is equally notable: the study was approved by the Pakistan National Bioethics Committee and the Aga Khan University Ethical Review Committee, conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and all participants provided written informed consent. As global health moves toward universal health coverage, the message from Karachi is unambiguous: coverage that ignores stigma, gender and geography is not coverage at all. Equitable rehabilitation will require not just more clinics and more therapists, but a deliberate dismantling of the social and structural barriers that decide, long before any diagnosis is made, who gets to walk through the door.

Subject of Research: Intersecting sociocultural, gendered and structural barriers to rehabilitation access for people with disabilities in Pakistan

Article Title: Intersecting sociocultural, gendered, and structural barriers to rehabilitation access in Pakistan: a qualitative study

Article References: Aziz, F., Zia, N., Thobani, R. S., Ain, F. U., Fazal, M., Latif, A., & Asim, M. (2026). Intersecting sociocultural, gendered, and structural barriers to rehabilitation access in Pakistan: a qualitative study. International Journal for Equity in Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-026-02984-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12939-026-02984-y

Keywords: rehabilitation access, disability stigma, gender disparities, intersectionality, Pakistan, health equity, socioecological model, rural health, inclusive healthcare, caregiving burden, qualitative research, health systems

The scale of the problem makes the details of the survey worth unpacking. Insulin remains the cornerstone of diabetes management when lifestyle modification and oral agents fail to achieve glycaemic targets. Physiologically, the hormone performs two essential tasks: it drives glucose uptake into peripheral tissues such as muscle and fat, and it suppresses the liver’s production of glucose. When these actions are insufficient, chronic hyperglycaemia insidiously damages blood vessels and nerves, setting the stage for cardiovascular disease, nephropathy, retinopathy, neuropathy and premature death. Yet despite well-defined guidelines and decades of evidence, clinicians worldwide delay insulin initiation, a phenomenon researchers call therapeutic inertia. In Lahore, that inertia has now been measured with statistical precision, and the results suggest it is driven by a dense web of patient, physician and health-system factors that reinforce one another.

The research team, led from The University of Lahore, recruited physicians from Internal Medicine, Endocrinology, Gastroenterology and Nephrology at a public sector tertiary hospital. Using a calculated minimum sample of 384, they invited 910 eligible doctors and achieved a remarkable 88.8 percent response rate, with 808 completed questionnaires. The instrument, refined through a pilot study of 20 physicians and content-validated by a panel of 10 endocrinologists, achieved a content validity index of 0.90 and acceptable internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha values of 0.73 for the barriers section and 0.79 for the feedback section. Respondents were demographically diverse: 54.3 percent were women, 58.5 percent were aged 41 to 55, and the largest qualification group held the FCPS fellowship, followed by MBBS, MRCP and MRCS credentials. Most participants managed panels in which 11 to 30 percent of patients required insulin.

The barrier data, collected on four-point Likert scales and dichotomised for analysis, paint a picture of systemic strain. Beyond the twin giants of poor education and hypoglycaemia fear, physicians reported complex administration techniques as a barrier in 84.1 percent of cases, inadequate communication in 84 percent, fear of needles in 83 percent, misconceptions about weight gain in 81.5 percent and financial constraints in 81.4 percent. Patient resistance to insulin itself was ubiquitous. These figures resonate strikingly with international comparisons cited by the authors: in Trinidad, primary care physicians flagged needle fear in 98.6 percent of cases; in Saudi Arabia’s Jazan region, 80.5 percent reported injection phobia among patients; and in Nigeria, fear of hypoglycaemia topped the list at 81.3 percent. The consistency across such different health systems suggests that the psychology of insulin refusal is close to universal, even if its intensity varies with local literacy and economic conditions.

Statistical testing revealed that the experience of barriers was not evenly distributed across the medical workforce. Kruskal-Wallis tests with Bonferroni adjustment found highly significant differences by qualification in several domains. Patients’ resistance to insulin, difficulty explaining the differences between short-acting and long-acting formulations, the influence of cultural beliefs, and hesitation rooted in hypoglycaemia fear and regimen complexity all varied significantly across degree holders, with p values below 0.001. Binary logistic regression added a demographic dimension: male physicians were significantly more likely than female colleagues to report barriers, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.392. Holders of the MRCP qualification faced elevated odds of 1.657 after adjustment, while physicians with 5 to 10 years of clinical experience were markedly less likely to report barriers than those with fewer than 5 years, with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.588. The authors caution that the reasons underlying the gender difference remain unclear and may reflect differences in clinical experience or practice patterns rather than any intrinsic factor.

The experience gradient deserves particular attention. That mid-career physicians encounter fewer obstacles than their juniors suggests a learnable skill set: the counselling techniques, cultural fluency and regimen-management strategies that accumulate with practice. Conversely, the finding that MRCP holders reported more barriers may reflect the complexity of the patients they manage or differing thresholds for perceiving problems. Either way, the authors argue, the pattern points toward targeted professional development rather than one-size-fits-all training. In a country where literacy rates lag behind those of many comparison nations, the dominance of patient education as the leading barrier, reported by 85.8 percent of respondents, takes on added weight. A parallel study from Singapore found that educational level was significantly associated with patients’ willingness to accept insulin, and the Lahore data are consistent with that relationship operating at population scale.

Perhaps the most actionable portion of the study is the physicians’ own prescription for reform. When asked what support was lacking in helping patients understand insulin therapy, the most common answer, endorsed with highly significant differences across qualification groups, was access to diabetes educators. For improving adherence, regular follow-up appointments dominated, and for sustaining patient responses over time, regular follow-up and support was the leading recommendation, chosen by 156 FCPS holders and 105 MRCP holders. On communication, an overwhelming majority across all credential groups selected a combined approach: written instructions, verbal counselling and shared decision-making. When asked how to improve the prescribing process itself, most favoured an all-of-the-above package of streamlined electronic prescribing systems, better patient education resources, improved access to formulary information and closer collaboration with diabetes specialists.

These recommendations align with a growing evidence base. A 2025 systematic review by Aslam and colleagues found that behavioural intervention programmes incorporating patient education, counselling and structured follow-up are effective in preventing and managing diabetes in adults. Pakistan’s rapidly expanding telecommunications infrastructure offers a plausible delivery channel for such programmes, potentially extending education and follow-up beyond hospital walls. Meanwhile, screening initiatives such as the Risk Assessment of Pakistani Individuals for Diabetes aim to identify high-risk individuals before complications develop. The survey’s authors also situate their findings within the broader literature on therapeutic inertia, which attributes roughly 20 percent of clinical delay to health-system factors, including medication cost, resource limits, discontinuity of care and workforce overload, and about 30 percent to patient-related factors such as injection phobia, fear of weight gain and low health literacy.

The study is not without limitations, and the authors are candid about them. Convenience sampling at a single urban tertiary hospital limits generalizability, particularly to rural settings where the majority of Pakistan’s population receives care. Self-reported data carry the risk of recall and social desirability bias. The inclusion of an all-of-the-above response category may have introduced overlap in the chi-square analyses, and the regression models did not formally assess multicollinearity or clustering by department. Crucially, because only physicians were surveyed, the barriers documented are physician perceptions, which may not fully mirror patients’ lived experience. The cross-sectional design identifies associations but cannot establish causation, and the interventions physicians recommended were not tested within the study itself.

Even with those caveats, the research delivers a clear message at a moment when Pakistan’s diabetes epidemic is accelerating. Insulin works; the obstacle is everything surrounding it. The Lahore survey transforms anecdote into quantified evidence, showing that the path to better glycaemic control runs through diabetes educator access, structured follow-up, culturally attuned communication and financial support, tailored to the experience level and professional background of the prescriber. Future intervention-based studies, the authors conclude, must now test whether these physician-endorsed strategies actually reduce barriers and improve outcomes. For a country where one in four urban adults lives with diabetes, the cost of therapeutic inertia is measured not in percentages but in amputations, blindness and lost years of life. What 808 physicians have described is, in effect, a map of where the system is failing, and a first draft of how to fix it.

Subject of Research: Barriers to insulin prescribing and physician-recommended interventions in diabetes care in Lahore, Pakistan

Article Title: Insulin Prescribing Challenges and Physician‐Suggested Interventions: Evidence From a Tertiary Care Hospital in Lahore, Pakistan

Article References: Aamir, M., Nafeesa, B., Aslam, A., Ghulam Mustafa, A., Elahi, M., Elahi, A., Barkat, K., Ashraf, M. U., Wahab, M. S. A., & Akhtar, S. S. (2026). Insulin Prescribing Challenges and Physician‐Suggested Interventions: Evidence From a Tertiary Care Hospital in Lahore, Pakistan. Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism, 9(5), Article e70337. https://doi.org/10.1002/edm2.70337

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/edm2.70337

Keywords: insulin therapy, type 2 diabetes, Pakistan, therapeutic inertia, patient education, hypoglycaemia, physician survey, diabetes educators, cross-sectional study, tertiary care, medication adherence, health systems

The research team, led by Salman Saleem, Musab Imtiaz, Mubashir Ahmed Khan, Tayyub Hussain and Usman Saleem, evaluated nineteen newly developed single-cross maize hybrids alongside a commercial check variety across eight locations over two autumn growing seasons. The trial sites spanned Islamabad, Mardan, Faisalabad, Sahiwal, Vehari, Chiniot, Nowshera and Pakpattan, capturing a wide spectrum of altitude, latitude and macro-climatic conditions that reflect the true range of maize production environments in Pakistan. The hybrids themselves were bred from eighteen yellow-kernelled inbred lines at the Maize, Sorghum and Millet Program within the Crop Sciences Institute, and the check used for comparison was the widely grown commercial hybrid 30Y87 from Pioneer Seeds.

At the heart of the study lies one of the most consequential phenomena in modern plant breeding: the genotype-by-environment interaction, commonly abbreviated as GEI. This interaction describes how the relative performance of different genetic lines changes as environmental conditions change. A hybrid carrying genes well suited to a hot, dry location may underperform a different hybrid in a cooler, wetter valley, and the rankings can flip entirely from one year to the next. When GEI is strong, selecting winners from a single location or a single season becomes misleading, because the apparent superiority may simply reflect a fortunate match between one genotype and one set of conditions rather than genuine genetic merit.

The combined analysis of variance revealed just how dominant these interactions are in Pakistani maize. Of the total variability in grain yield observed across the trials, the genotype-by-environment interaction accounted for a striking 72.60 percent, dwarfing the contributions of genotype alone at 13.40 percent and environment alone at 8.82 percent. In practical terms, this means that where and when a hybrid is grown matters far more to its observed yield than the hybrid’s average genetic potential in isolation. The GE interaction was decomposed into fifteen significant principal components, with the first explaining 24.7 percent of the interaction variability, the second 19.2 percent, and the first five together capturing 78.5 percent of the total.

To make sense of such a complex interaction structure, the researchers turned to two complementary statistical frameworks that have become workhorses of multi-environment trial analysis. The first, the Additive Main Effects and Multiplicative Interaction model, or AMMI, integrates classical analysis of variance with principal component analysis, allowing the additive contributions of genotypes and environments to be separated from the multiplicative interaction terms. Expressed graphically as biplots, AMMI results position genotypes along axes representing mean yield and interaction scores, so that a breeder can see at a glance which entries combine high productivity with low sensitivity to environmental fluctuation. The AMMI Stability Value, derived from the first two principal component scores, further quantifies stability into a single ranking metric.

The second framework, the GGE biplot, is built on genotype main effects plus the genotype-by-environment interaction, and it excels at answering questions that AMMI alone addresses less directly. By constructing a polygon around the genotypes positioned farthest from the origin, the which-won-where analysis partitions the testing locations into mega-environments, each dominated by a different winning hybrid. A companion biplot, ranking genotypes against concentric circles around an ideal entry, identifies which hybrid comes closest to the theoretical combination of maximum mean yield and perfect stability. A third view, based on the average environment coordination, orders hybrids by their distance from the stability axis.

The results were unambiguous. Two hybrids, designated G10 and G6, achieved overall mean grain yields exceeding 13,000 kilograms per hectare while simultaneously showing principal component scores close to zero and favourable stability rankings, marking them as broad adapters capable of performing well across all eight environments and both years. Meanwhile, G13 and the commercial check G2 emerged as the most stable genotypes, maintaining good and consistent average yields even though their yields fell short of the top performers. In the GGE ranking biplot, G10 sat closest to the concentric circles around the ideal genotype, and the authors recommend it as the single best performer overall. In contrast, G18, despite ranking second in raw yield at 13,352 kilograms per hectare, displayed a large stability value and a wide spread across the biplot, marking it as specifically adapted rather than broadly reliable.

The which-won-where analysis carried particular significance for breeding strategy. Sixteen environments were partitioned into six sectors, with four identified as repeatable mega-environments, because individual locations tended to fall within the same sector in both trial years. This repeatability, observed for example among environments in Chiniot, Faisalabad, Sahiwal and Pakpattan, suggests genuine geographical adaptation zones rather than random year-to-year noise. For breeders, the implication is profound: locations that behave similarly across years can be grouped, redundant test sites can be pruned, and breeding programs can target specific mega-environments with hybrids tailored to their conditions, dramatically improving the efficiency of multi-environment testing.

The environmental evaluation component of the GGE analysis added yet another layer of insight. Environments differed substantially in their discriminating ability, visualised as vector length on the biplot. Mardan in both years proved the most effective location for separating genotypes, displaying the longest vectors, while sites such as Nowshera and Islamabad showed weaker discriminating power. Choosing test locations with strong discriminating ability and good representativeness of the target production region is a critical but often overlooked aspect of breeding program design, and this study demonstrates how biplot methods can guide those decisions empirically rather than by intuition.

Perhaps the most important methodological lesson from the work is that AMMI and GGE biplots are most powerful when used together. The two frameworks occasionally diverge in their assessment of individual genotypes, as they weight genotype main effects and interaction terms differently, and relying on either alone risks a skewed picture. By cross-validating candidates through AMMI stability values, mean yield rankings, and multiple GGE biplot views, the researchers converged on recommendations that are robust to the quirks of any single statistical model. The selected hybrids, particularly G10 and G6, are now candidates for incorporation into crop improvement programs aimed at developing broadly adapted, climate-resilient and high-yielding maize varieties for Pakistan’s farmers. As climate variability intensifies and demand for maize as food, feed and industrial raw material continues to climb, the ability to breed hybrids that yield heavily everywhere rather than brilliantly in one place may prove one of the most valuable tools in the agricultural toolkit.

Subject of Research: Genotype-by-environment interaction and yield stability analysis of maize hybrids using AMMI and GGE biplot methods in Pakistan

Article Title: Exploitation of genotype-by-environment interactions in maize hybrids at multiple locations in Pakistan using AMMI and GGE Biplots

Article References: Saleem, S., Imtiaz, M., Khan, M. A., Hussain, T., & Saleem, U. (2026). Exploitation of genotype-by-environment interactions in maize hybrids at multiple locations in Pakistan using AMMI and GGE Biplots. Discover Agriculture, 4(1), Article 287. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44279-026-00758-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00758-2

Keywords: maize, genotype-by-environment interaction, AMMI model, GGE biplot, yield stability, multi-environment trials, plant breeding, Pakistan, Zea mays, grain yield, mega-environments, hybrid selection

The research, published in the journal Natural Hazards, draws on household surveys conducted in ten villages across Chitral, yielding 350 responses from communities with long histories of avalanche and GLOF exposure. The villages surveyed, including Garam Chasma, the Kalash Valley, Reshun, Booni, Arkari, Sonoghur, Yarkhun, and Mastuj, were selected in consultation with humanitarian organizations such as the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat, Secours Islamique France, and the Aga Khan Rural Support Organization, all of which had documented hazard activity in the area. Because village-level population data were unavailable, the team used non-probability sampling, combining field surveys with digital forms to reach a broad cross-section of households.

The physical backdrop to the study is one of rapid cryospheric change. Remote-sensing analyses indicate that glaciers in Chitral lost roughly 816 square kilometers, about 30.8 percent of their glacierized area, between 1992 and 2022. Over the same period, the number of glacial lakes in the region grew from 101 to 162, including 31 classified as Potentially Dangerous Glacial Lakes, six of which lie within Chitral itself. Across High Mountain Asia more broadly, glaciers lost mass at an average rate of 0.19 meters of water equivalent per year between 2000 and 2016, while the number and volume of glacial lakes worldwide have increased substantially since 1990. Regional Himalayan temperatures are rising by 0.15 to 0.60 degrees Celsius per decade, a pace that exceeds the global average.

The consequences of these changes are not abstract. At least 20 GLOF events have been documented in Pakistan’s Himalayan region over the past seven decades, causing loss of life and extensive damage to infrastructure, agricultural land, and forests. The 2015 GLOF in the Reshun Valley of Upper Chitral caused damages estimated at around 15 million dollars. During the 2023 seasonal floods and GLOF event in District Chitral, 282 homes, 38 roads, and 39 bridges were severely damaged, while approximately 335 acres of cropland and 37,350 kilograms of wheat straw were destroyed. Around 80 water supply schemes and 90 irrigation channels were also affected. Avalanches tell an equally grim story: across eight countries in High Mountain Asia, more than 3,131 deaths have been recorded from 681 snow and ice avalanche events, with Afghanistan, India, and Nepal bearing the heaviest tolls.

To understand how these hazards affect daily life, the researchers asked respondents about damage to livelihoods and infrastructure. The results show that while livestock losses were relatively minor, with only 7 percent of respondents reporting animals lost, the effects on agriculture and infrastructure were substantial. Fifty-five percent of respondents reported damage to their agricultural land and crops, with productivity losses ranging from 25 to 75 percent. Two-thirds reported disruptions to transportation and communication networks, and 59 percent reported impacts on tourism, an increasingly important source of income in the Kalash valleys and elsewhere. Around 41 percent of respondents said they had been forced to move temporarily because of the recurring hazards.

Infrastructure damage was even more widespread. Ninety percent of respondents reported damage to their water supply, a figure the authors attribute to the region’s dependence on mountain springs, which are highly vulnerable to hazards originating high in the catchments. Most communities rely on a single water source, and the existing infrastructure is old and fragile. Eighty-six percent reported damage to roads, a vulnerability compounded by Chitral’s topography, where roads and bridges run alongside seasonal watercourses known locally as nullahs that channel floodwaters directly into the transport network. Twenty percent reported damage to residential buildings, often located near nullahs or steep slopes in the absence of a comprehensive urban development plan, while public buildings were least affected at 11 percent.

Recovery, the study found, is painfully slow. The majority of damaged structures took nine months or more to repair or rebuild, a delay the researchers link to Chitral’s harsh weather, which narrows the window for construction, and to the time required to coordinate financial and technical resources among public and private agencies. Restoration of transportation networks and essential services generally took six months or longer, and around 40 percent of respondents said it took more than a week to restore basic services after a disaster. Pipe rehabilitation for water systems is particularly slow because of material shortages. These prolonged recovery times ripple outward: transportation disruptions kept students from school, and unsafe buildings forced closures that hampered academic progress.

The most striking findings, however, concern perception. When asked which hazard worried them more, 57 percent of respondents identified avalanches as the greater concern for their community. Respondents rated avalanche severity higher, with 29 percent calling it very high, while 42 and 35 percent rated GLOF severity as very low and low respectively. Fifty-two percent rated the frequency trend of avalanches as very high, while perceived GLOF frequency was generally lower. A paired-samples t-test comparing perceptions of the two hazards across six indicators confirmed the pattern: for five of the six indicators, the differences were statistically significant at p less than 0.001. Respondents considered GLOFs significantly less often when planning outdoor activities, perceived them as less likely to occur, regarded them as less frequent in recent years, rated their consequences as less severe, and saw less need for protective measures. Only perceptions of controllability did not differ, with both hazards viewed as largely beyond human influence.

This perception gap matters because perceived risk strongly shapes preparedness, resource allocation, and adaptive behavior. Communities tend to prioritize hazards they experience frequently, even when less frequent hazards carry greater potential consequences, a pattern documented in previous disaster research in Pakistan and across the Hindu Kush Himalaya. The authors attribute the gap to cultural differences, varying levels of awareness, and the historical frequency of each hazard, factors that collectively steer funding and attention away from GLOF-related preventive measures. Yet climate change is expected to increase both the formation of glacial lakes and the likelihood of outburst floods, meaning the hazard that residents fear least may be the one growing fastest.

The study’s authors argue that closing this gap requires more than technical hazard mapping. They call for strengthening early warning systems, investing in climate-resilient infrastructure, improving irrigation and transportation networks, and, crucially, involving local communities in decision-making and resilience planning so that local knowledge informs risk management. They also acknowledge limitations: the survey reflects individual perceptions rather than measured hazard exposure, participation among women and older residents was limited by resources and cultural restrictions, and the findings may not generalize to other valleys. Future research, they suggest, should examine the spatial relationship between hazard and perception and track how evolving glacier dynamics reshape community preparedness over time. For now, the message from Chitral is clear: the dangers people watch for are not always the ones most likely to strike next.

Subject of Research: Community risk perceptions and impacts of snow avalanches and glacial lake outburst floods in Chitral, Pakistan

Article Title: Cryospheric risks in the Himalayan region: impacts and community perceptions on snow avalanches and GLOFs in Chitral, Pakistan

Article References: Abrar, S. U., Rana, I. A., Altaf, S., & Siddiqui, M. I. (2026). Cryospheric risks in the Himalayan region: impacts and community perceptions on snow avalanches and GLOFs in Chitral, Pakistan. Natural Hazards, 122(20), Article 645. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-026-08414-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-026-08414-0

Keywords: GLOFs, snow avalanches, Chitral, Hindu Kush, risk perception, glacier retreat, climate change, disaster risk reduction, Pakistan, community resilience, infrastructure damage, mountain hazards

Babesia microti belongs to a group of apicomplexan parasites transmitted to animals and humans through the bite of infected hard ticks. In North America, the primary vector is Ixodes scapularis, while Ixodes ricinus serves this role in Europe and Ixodes persulcatus in Asia. Humans are incidental hosts, and human babesiosis has been documented across the United States, Europe and Asia. The parasite primarily infects small rodents, particularly the white-footed mouse, which acts as its principal natural reservoir, although infections have occasionally been reported in domestic animals such as cats and dogs. Because transovarial transmission in ixodid ticks has not been reported, the parasite depends on an enzootic cycle linking ticks and small mammals, with rodents serving as a continuous source of infection for feeding ticks. Beyond tick bites, humans can acquire the parasite through contaminated blood transfusion, organ transplantation and congenital transmission from an infected mother to her foetus.

In most infected people the disease remains asymptomatic, but symptoms typically emerge after an incubation period of one to four weeks and include chills, fever, sweating, fatigue and haemolytic anaemia resulting from the repeated rupture of infected red blood cells. The preferred treatment in humans combines the antiprotozoal drug atovaquone with the antibiotic azithromycin. Rodents are central to the epidemiology of this disease because they are widely distributed, adapt readily to diverse habitats and often live in close proximity to humans. Approximately 200 rodent species are known to harbour more than 60 zoonotic diseases caused by bacteria, viruses and parasites. Pakistan alone hosts 43 documented rodent species, ranging from common mice and rats to porcupines, desert gerbils and giant flying squirrels, yet these animals have rarely been screened for pathogens, with only a handful of reports concerning Toxoplasma gondii and single reports of Hepatozoon and Lankesterella species in local rats and mice.

To address this gap, the research team trapped wild rodents between October 2023 and September 2024 from four districts in Punjab, namely Rajanpur, Dera Ghazi Khan, Multan and Sargodha, and three districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, namely Upper Dir, Mardan and Buner. Using the Thrusfield formula for prevalence studies with an expected prevalence of 10 percent, a 95 percent confidence level and 5 percent precision, they calculated a minimum required sample of 138 animals but nearly doubled this by capturing 284 rodents to improve the reliability of their estimates. Live traps baited with fruit, sweets and biscuits, along with glue traps, were deployed opportunistically at agricultural fields, houses, storage sites and commercial shops. Captured animals were identified to species using standard taxonomic keys, combed for ectoparasites, euthanized under deep isoflurane anaesthesia and sampled by direct cardiac puncture. Blood was collected into tubes containing EDTA anticoagulant, with complete blood counts performed the same day and remaining samples frozen for molecular analysis. All procedures were approved by the ethical review committee of Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan and conducted in accordance with ARRIVE guidelines.

The trapped animals comprised three species: 137 black rats (Rattus rattus), 80 brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) and 67 house mice (Mus musculus), with males making up 54 percent of the sample. Genomic DNA was extracted from blood using a commercial purification kit and screened by polymerase chain reaction targeting a species-specific region of the parasite’s 18S ribosomal RNA gene, following primers originally described by Persing and colleagues. The assay amplified a 238-base-pair fragment in 35 of the 284 samples, an overall prevalence of 12 percent. Positive controls came from a previously confirmed B. microti-positive dog blood sample from the same laboratory, and distilled water served as the negative control in every run. Representative amplicons from two brown rats, one black rat and one house mouse were confirmed by bidirectional sequencing, submitted to GenBank under accession numbers PQ538588 through PQ538591 and included in phylogenetic analysis.

Prevalence varied modestly among species, with 16 percent of brown rats, 13 percent of black rats and 6 percent of house mice testing positive, though a chi-square comparison found these differences statistically non-significant. District-level patterns were more striking despite lacking statistical significance in binary logistic regression models that used Rajanpur as the reference district. Among brown rats, prevalence peaked at 42 percent in Sargodha; among black rats, at 28 percent in Mardan; and among house mice, at 25 percent in Buner. Notably, every infected house mouse came from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, while none of the mice from Punjab tested positive, whereas both rat species carried infections in both provinces. Fisher’s exact tests showed that infection was not confined to either sex in any of the three species, and no ticks were detected on any of the trapped rodents, a finding the authors attribute to the temporary nature of tick attachment during blood feeding, seasonal variation in tick activity, host grooming behaviour and the timing of trapping.

Phylogenetic analysis of the partial 18S rRNA sequences, performed in MEGA X using the Maximum Likelihood method with a Kimura 2-parameter model and a discrete gamma distribution, placed all four Pakistani rodent sequences in a single cluster. The sequences showed 100 percent identity with B. microti previously detected in dog and cat blood samples from Pakistan, and 99.49 percent identity with isolates from house mice in Japan and France and from the grey red-backed vole Myodes rufocanus in Russia. They were clearly distinct from 18S rRNA sequences of Babesia leo, Babesia felis, Babesia vulpes and Babesia rodhaini detected in felines and rodents across South Africa, Mozambique, the Czech Republic and Japan, with Cytauxzoon brasiliensis serving as the outgroup. This close relationship between rodent and domestic animal isolates within Pakistan suggests that the same parasite lineage circulates across multiple host species in the country, reinforcing the value of the 18S rRNA gene as a conserved and widely validated marker for sensitive detection, even though its resolution for fine-scale genotypic differentiation remains limited.

The study also documented measurable costs of infection in the rodent hosts. Infected house mice weighed significantly less than uninfected mice, although the observational design prevents any conclusion about causation, since age, nutrition, reproductive condition and concurrent infections could all contribute. In black rats, infection was associated with significantly reduced total white blood cell counts, lymphocyte counts and red blood cell counts. In brown rats, lymphocytes and mean corpuscular volume were significantly decreased while mean corpuscular haemoglobin concentration was significantly elevated. These changes align with the established biology of Babesia infection, in which sporozoites injected by an infected tick invade erythrocytes and undergo asexual replication, with the repeated rupture of infected red blood cells during merozoite release producing haemolytic anaemia. The authors caution that multiple haematological parameters were compared with separate t-tests without adjustment for multiple comparisons, so significant findings should be interpreted carefully and validated in larger samples.

Compared with surveys elsewhere, the Pakistani prevalence of 12 percent sits near the middle of a wide global range, from 0.6 percent in social voles in Turkey and 1.4 percent in Irish wood mice and bank voles to 22 percent among small rodents in Chile, with intermediate figures reported from China, South Korea, Turkey, Lithuania and mainland Southeast Asia. Such variation likely reflects differences in climate, geography, sampling season, host age and immunity, and tick density. The study had limitations: trapping was opportunistic and trap numbers varied by site, potential risk factors such as age, body condition, habitat and season were not evaluated, and the absence of blood smear examination means detection relied entirely on molecular methods, so the reported prevalence reflects molecular detection rather than confirmed active parasitemia and cannot distinguish low-level from heavy infections. No human babesiosis cases have been reported in Pakistan, but limited awareness, inadequate diagnostic facilities and underrecognition of tick-borne diseases, particularly in rural areas, mean undiagnosed infections remain a real possibility. The researchers call for integrated surveillance combining molecular diagnostics with microscopy, investigation of rodent-associated ticks for B. microti and other pathogens, and broader epidemiological studies to evaluate the zoonotic risk that these infected rodents may pose to people and animals across the region.

Subject of Research: First molecular detection and genetic characterization of the tick-borne zoonotic parasite Babesia microti in wild rodents in Pakistan

Article Title: Molecular Detection, Epidemiology and Genetic Diversity of Babesia microti Infecting Wild Rodents

Article References: Munir, H. M., Naeem, M., Ijaz, M., Ullah, S., Usman, M., Nasir, Z. U. R., Khan, A., Almaary, K. S., Bouallegue, A., Mengistie, A. A., & Iqbal, F. (2026). Molecular Detection, Epidemiology and Genetic Diversity of Babesia microti Infecting Wild Rodents. Veterinary Medicine and Science, 12(5), Article e71196. https://doi.org/10.1002/vms3.71196

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/vms3.71196

Keywords: Babesia microti, babesiosis, rodents, Pakistan, tick-borne disease, zoonosis, 18S rRNA, phylogenetics, haemolytic anaemia, Rattus norvegicus, Rattus rattus, Mus musculus

The new species is a wood-rotter, meaning it subsists by decomposing dead woody material, a lifestyle that places it among the crucial recyclers of forest ecosystems. Saprotrophic fungi like Stropharia khanspurica deploy suites of enzymes capable of dismantling lignin and cellulose, the structural polymers that make wood one of nature’s most recalcitrant materials. Without such fungi, fallen branches and decaying trunks would accumulate indefinitely, and the carbon and nutrients locked inside them would remain unavailable to plants and soil organisms. Each newly documented wood-decay species therefore carries implications not only for taxonomy but for understanding how nutrient cycling operates in particular forest types, especially in underexplored regions such as the western Himalaya.

Macroscopically, Stropharia khanspurica presents a distinctive profile that immediately set it apart from its relatives during fieldwork. The cap, or pileus, is yellow and bears an obtuse umbo, a blunt central bump that gives the mushroom its characteristic silhouette. The margin of the cap ranges from crenate, with softly scalloped edges, to appendiculate, meaning remnants of the partial veil cling to the rim in delicate patches. The gills, or lamellae, are white rather than the grayish or purplish-brown tones found in many other members of the genus, and the stipe, the stalk supporting the cap, tapers toward its base, a subtle but taxonomically meaningful trait. Colors were assessed against the Munsell soil color charts, a standard reference system that allows mycologists to record hues in a reproducible, comparable way across laboratories and continents.

Under the microscope, the defining characters became even clearer. The basidiospores, the reproductive cells produced on the gills, measure 6 to 8.8 micrometers long and 3.4 to 4.6 micrometers wide, a range described as slightly narrow for the genus and one of the key diagnostic measurements separating the new species from morphologically similar taxa. Equally important is the presence of caulocystidia arranged in clusters on the stipe surface. These sterile cells, which protrude from the fungal tissue and help regulate the microenvironment around the developing fruiting body, vary in shape and arrangement between species and serve as some of the most reliable anatomical markers in Strophariaceae taxonomy. Together, the spore dimensions, cap morphology and clustered caulocystidia formed a coherent morphological case for treating the Khanspur collections as something genuinely new.

Morphology alone, however, is no longer sufficient currency in modern fungal taxonomy, and the Pakistani team reinforced their diagnosis with molecular phylogenetic analyses. The researchers sequenced the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region and the large subunit (LSU) of the nuclear ribosomal DNA, the two genetic loci that serve as the workhorses of fungal barcoding and higher-level phylogenetics. The ITS region, often dubbed the fungal barcode, evolves rapidly enough to distinguish closely related species, while the LSU region provides the deeper evolutionary context needed to confirm placement within a genus. Amplified with established basidiomycete-specific primers, the sequences were aligned and analyzed to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of the new fungus within Stropharia and its closest allies.

The phylogenetic results were unambiguous. Stropharia khanspurica clustered with S. microaeruginosa, S. aeruginosa and S. jilinensis, a group of species distributed across Asia and beyond, and the clade received strong bootstrap support, a statistical measure of confidence in the branching pattern. Bootstrap values reflect how consistently a particular grouping appears when the underlying dataset is resampled, and high values indicate that the relationship is unlikely to be an artifact of the data. Placing the new species within this well-supported lineage confirmed both its generic assignment and its distinctness: its DNA sequence diverged from those of its nearest neighbors even as its morphology corroborated the genetic separation. The combined morphoanatomical and molecular approach follows the current best practice for describing fungal species, reducing the risk of either splitting trivial variants or lumping genuinely distinct lineages.

The discovery also resonates within a broader context of rapidly expanding Stropharia taxonomy in Asia. In recent years, mycologists have described a string of new species from the region, including S. atroferruginea from Battagram District in Pakistan, S. jilinensis, S. populicola and S. lignicola from China, and S. daliensis from Yunnan Province. Each addition reshapes the understood boundaries of the genus, a group that has historically been difficult to delimit because its members share generalized agaric features and differ mainly in fine anatomical detail and ecology. The genus has attracted attention well beyond pure taxonomy: Stropharia rugosoannulata, the wine cap mushroom, is cultivated commercially as an edible fungus, and other members of the family have been studied for their ecological roles in forests, gardens and even coffee plantations in the Americas.

For Pakistan, the description of Stropharia khanspurica adds to evidence that the country’s Himalayan and Hindukush forests remain significantly under-sampled. The region around the Murree Hills and the adjacent Khanspur area supports highly disturbed but biologically rich forests, and field surveys there continue to yield species new to science or new records for the country. Fungi are among the least catalogued of the large eukaryotic groups, with only a fraction of estimated global diversity formally described, and mountainous monsoon-influenced forests in South Asia are widely regarded as biodiversity frontiers for mycology. Documenting species before habitat disturbance erases them is an urgent task, and wood-inhabiting fungi, tightly tied to deadwood availability and forest continuity, are especially sensitive indicators of ecosystem health.

The taxonomic placement within the S. aeruginosa species complex also hints at fascinating biogeographic questions. S. aeruginosa itself, the verdigris roundhead familiar to European collectors, has long been treated as a species aggregate whose true boundaries remain unsettled. Finding a distinct member of this lineage in the western Himalaya suggests that diversification within the group may track the great mountain ranges of Asia, with geographic isolation across disjunct forest habitats driving speciation. As more collections are sequenced from intervening regions, mycologists may be able to reconstruct how ancestral populations spread and split across the continent’s forest corridors, a story written as much in DNA barcodes as in cap colors and spore measurements.

The work, conducted entirely by researchers at the University of the Punjab, underscores the growing capacity of Pakistani mycology to contribute original species descriptions grounded in both classical morphology and molecular systematics. For now, Stropharia khanspurica stands as the newest formally recognized member of its genus, a yellow-capped wood-rotter hiding in plain sight among the mosses of Khanspur, and a reminder that even familiar-looking mushrooms can conceal evolutionary stories still waiting to be read.

Subject of Research: Description of the new wood-rotting mushroom species Stropharia khanspurica (Strophariaceae) from Khanspur, KPK, Pakistan, using morphological and molecular phylogenetic evidence.

Article Title: Stropharia khanspurica (Agaricomycota, Strophariaceae) a new wood-rotten mushroom from Khanspur, KPK, Pakistan

Article References: Naseer, A., Faryad, A., & Khalid, A. N. (2026). Stropharia khanspurica (Agaricomycota, Strophariaceae) a new wood-rotten mushroom from Khanspur, KPK, Pakistan. Plant Biosystems, 160(5), Article 247. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44473-026-00244-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44473-026-00244-z

Keywords: Stropharia khanspurica, Agaricales, Basidiomycota, Strophariaceae, wood-rotting fungi, molecular phylogenetics, ITS, LSU, taxonomy, Pakistan, new species, Khanspur

The intervention at the heart of the study is the Urdu Adapted Unified Protocol, or UA-UP. The Unified Protocol is a transdiagnostic treatment originally developed to target the shared emotional and cognitive mechanisms underlying anxiety and mood disorders, rather than treating each diagnosis separately. This design matters in Pakistan, where anxiety and depression frequently co-occur and where disorder-specific therapy manuals demand extensive clinician training that the country’s overstretched mental-health system cannot provide. Meta-analyses have shown that the Unified Protocol matches disorder-specific protocols in efficacy while reducing training burden, making it an attractive candidate for scalable implementation in resource-constrained settings.

Before any participants were recruited, the research team undertook a systematic cultural and linguistic adaptation of the protocol for Urdu speakers. The UA-UP retained all eight core modules, covering motivation enhancement, psychoeducation, mindful emotion awareness, cognitive flexibility, countering emotional behaviors, interoceptive exposure, situational exposure, and relapse prevention. Adaptations included simplifying psychological terminology in Urdu, replacing culturally distant examples with locally meaningful scenarios, adding visual aids to support understanding of key concepts, and broadening emotional-awareness activities to include culturally acceptable audio and video materials. The treatment’s focus on emotion regulation also resonates with Pakistani social values that encourage emotional composure and harmony within family and community life.

The trial enrolled 51 adults who met DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for anxiety and/or depressive disorders, confirmed through the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5, with moderate-to-severe symptoms on the Beck Depression Inventory-II and Beck Anxiety Inventory. Participants were randomly allocated in a 1:1 ratio to either the 14-week UA-UP intervention or a waitlist control. Those in the treatment arm attended weekly 50-to-60-minute individual face-to-face sessions at a university counselling center in Islamabad, with each session structured around homework review, new skill practice, and planning for the coming week. Treatment was delivered by a clinical psychologist who completed an 18-week Unified Protocol training course and received weekly supervision, with treatment adherence reviewed by a certified trainer before the trial began.

The feasibility results were striking. Recruitment reached 85.7 percent of eligible individuals approached, retention was 82.4 percent, and 23 of the 25 participants in the treatment arm completed the full 14-week program. Randomization proceeded without error, and completion rates for outcome measures remained high at every assessment point. Digital recruitment through platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn proved the most productive channel, generating just over half of enrolled participants, while community outreach in career academies, vocational centers, libraries, and markets contributed meaningfully, as did referrals from local therapists. Two participants withdrew from treatment because of transportation difficulties, a reminder that practical access barriers persist even when a treatment is clinically acceptable.

Acceptability indicators were equally encouraging. Participants completed an average of roughly 82 percent of assigned homework tasks, and ratings on the Homework Rating Scale showed high comprehension, perceived relevance, and collaboration. The Urdu version of the Client Satisfaction Questionnaire yielded a mean score of 29.65 out of a possible 32, reflecting strong overall approval. In semi-structured interviews, participants described increased emotional awareness, practical coping skills, cognitive restructuring, reduced avoidance, and growing emotional acceptance. One participant reported that writing about emotions revealed patterns she had not previously recognized; another described finally being able to pause, breathe, and avoid spiraling into panic; a third explained how gradually building exposure to social situations allowed her to attend gatherings she had avoided for years.

The qualitative themes that emerged from these interviews traced a coherent therapeutic arc. Participants first described initial discomfort with demanding tasks such as exposure exercises, followed by perseverance supported by an empathic, nonjudgmental therapist who adjusted the pace to their readiness. Over time they noticed visible changes in daily life, from calmer responses to family tensions to improved communication with spouses and in-laws. Many reported a fundamentally improved self-image, greater confidence, and more deliberate problem-solving. Notably, several described continuing to feel nervous in challenging situations while functioning markedly better, a pattern the authors interpret as consistent with the Unified Protocol’s emphasis on emotional flexibility and behavioral capacity rather than symptom elimination alone.

The exploratory quantitative outcomes pointed in the same direction. Using repeated-measures general linear models, the researchers found that participants in the UA-UP group showed greater improvements in anxiety, depression, and functional impairment compared to the waitlist control, with large exploratory effect size estimates: Hedges’ g of 1.18 for anxiety and 1.15 for depression. Improvements were also observed in emotion regulation and positive affect, alongside reductions in negative affect. The investigators stress that these estimates, reported with 95 percent confidence intervals, are preliminary and intended for estimation rather than hypothesis testing, given the modest sample size and the absence of a long-term follow-up period.

The authors are candid about the study’s limitations. The trial took place at a single urban university-based site with participants who were predominantly unemployed and more educated than the general Pakistani population, potentially limiting generalizability to rural regions, primary-care settings, or individuals with limited digital access. All sessions were delivered by a single therapist who was also the primary researcher, a design that preserved treatment consistency but restricts conclusions about scalability across providers and leaves open the possibility of therapist allegiance effects. The waitlist control design, while appropriate for an early-phase feasibility study, cannot rule out expectancy effects, regression to the mean, or spontaneous recovery, and the lack of follow-up data leaves the durability of gains unknown.

Even so, the trial clears the critical hurdle it set for itself. Following the Medical Research Council framework for complex interventions, the study team had already completed the development phase with its systematic adaptation of the Unified Protocol, and this pilot now establishes that the feasibility and implementation phases can proceed. High recruitment and retention, strong engagement, high satisfaction, and encouraging preliminary clinical signals collectively demonstrate that the core procedures of a fully powered randomized controlled trial are viable in Pakistan. The researchers found satisfaction with the treatment to be driven more by its perceived personal and cultural relevance than by infrastructure quality, and satisfaction ratings exceeded those reported in a recent internet-delivered Unified Protocol study in Iran, suggesting that face-to-face, culturally grounded delivery may hold particular advantages. If larger trials confirm these effects, the UA-UP could offer a practical template for scaling transdiagnostic mental-health care across Pakistan and other low-resource settings, targeting the shared emotional mechanisms that drive some of the world’s most burdensome psychiatric conditions.

Subject of Research: Feasibility and acceptability of a culturally adapted transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioral therapy for anxiety and depression in Pakistan

Article Title: Feasibility and acceptability of the Unified Protocol for anxiety and depression in Pakistan: a pilot randomized controlled trial

Article References: Nisa, A., Siddiqui, S., & Ametaj, A. A. (2026). Feasibility and acceptability of the Unified Protocol for anxiety and depression in Pakistan: a pilot randomized controlled trial. BMC Psychiatry, 26(1), Article 739. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08345-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08345-x

Keywords: Unified Protocol, transdiagnostic CBT, anxiety, depression, Pakistan, global mental health, culturally adapted therapy, emotion regulation, pilot randomized controlled trial, low-resource settings, BMC Psychiatry, mental health treatment gap

The study’s author, Inayat Ali, who holds positions at Shifa Tameer-e-Millat University in Islamabad and the University of Vienna, approaches the problem through an unusual methodological lens: an anthropology of anthropology. Rather than surveying attitudes from a distance, Ali draws on continuous participant observation across several Pakistani universities between 2021 and 2026, working at admissions counters, teaching in classrooms, and taking part in departmental, curriculum and program development. He supplements this with purposively gathered narratives from undergraduate students between 2022 and 2024, years of informal conversations with students, faculty and aspirants to Pakistan’s Central Superior Services examination, cohort comparisons with a neighboring program, and a documentary review of curricula, program descriptions and policy documents. The result is an ethnography of academic life in which disciplinary value is made and unmade in the most ordinary settings imaginable.

The study’s central analytical device is the local term scope, a word students, families and staff use to judge whether a degree is worth pursuing by weighing anticipated employment, prestige, mobility and institutional recognition. At the admissions counter, anthropology appeared markedly smaller and more vulnerable to attrition than neighboring programs, including a newly established public health degree. Crucially, the pattern could not be explained as a general retreat from the social sciences, since sociology, behavioral sciences and communication attracted stronger and more sustained participation. What looked administratively like a difference in cohort size was experienced ethnographically as a difference in disciplinary futures: some fields promised dependable trajectories, while anthropology was associated with uncertainty.

That uncertainty acquired concrete institutional form in August 2026, when the syndicate of the University of Peshawar approved a proposal to merge its departments of sociology, gender studies and social anthropology into a single unit, reportedly citing enrollment trends, faculty-to-student ratios, salary expenditure and per-student costs. The significance of the case, Ali argues, lies in what it reveals about the conditions under which academic units now survive. An established disciplinary presence dating back to 1978 and 1979 did not guarantee institutional autonomy. A department can become vulnerable when viability is measured through enrollment, resource efficiency and perceived relevance, and marginality can emerge not through explicit rejection of a discipline but through cumulative decisions about where students, resources and recognition are concentrated.

Student narratives collected in the study identify where those decisions appear to be made. Government bodies and planning agencies are repeatedly named as actors that formulate policy without drawing on anthropological research, while university administrations are blamed for emphasizing classroom theory while providing little encouragement for practical training, fieldwork or real-world application. Ali treats these recurring institutional nouns not as a list of culprits but as students’ maps of authority, pointing to the places where judgments about what knowledge a policy, budget, appointment or curriculum requires are actually made. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s account of power and knowledge and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the academic field, the study frames anthropology’s marginality as relational, produced through its weak position within a hierarchy that privileges technocratic, economic and quantitative expertise.

The concept of slow epistemic exclusion borrows its temporal logic from Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence, directing attention to harms that unfold gradually, accumulate across time, and escape recognition as discrete events. Anthropology’s situation fits this pattern precisely. The discipline remains on prospectuses, in classrooms and within examination syllabi, yet the conditions that make it intellectually and professionally reproducible are steadily narrowed: staffing thinners, fieldwork funding dries up, mentoring contracts, and pathways into policy institutions stay weak. Ali also situates this domestic decline within a global division of intellectual labor, invoking Syed Farid Alatas’s concept of academic dependency, in which metropolitan institutions disproportionately shape theory and recognition while scholars in the Global South are positioned chiefly as producers of local data.

The study traces how this hierarchy is absorbed and reproduced through student talk. The phrase ivory tower circulated among interlocutors as a shorthand for distance: anthropologists, in this view, linger in universities behind hard concepts while policymakers favor economists and data-based disciplines. Ali argues that what looks like impracticality is better understood as weak institutional translation, an interrupted movement of knowledge between classroom, field and policy office. A parallel dynamic plays out in conversations about the Central Superior Services examination, where anthropology has been a 100-mark optional subject since the revised CE-2016 framework. Aspirants long described it as a high-scoring subject, but after the 2025 results some branded it risky, with one aspirant expressing relief at having avoided it for the 2026 attempt. Ali emphasizes that no official subject-level pass-rate data exist to confirm any national trend; rather, high-scoring functions as a reputational category assembled from peer stories, coaching advice and anticipations of examiner behavior, capable of attracting and repelling candidates with equal speed.

Faculty experience adds a further layer. Limited research funding, bureaucratic pressure, insecure employment and institutional inertia narrowed the time available for long-term ethnography and mentoring, while university metrics normalized images of productivity aligned with technology, markets and administration. Ali cautions that faculty politics, a common local explanation for departmental trouble, should itself be read as a category shaped by scarce appointments, promotions and grants rather than mere interpersonal conflict. Renewal, he argues, therefore cannot stop at curricular reform. Curricula should connect classical theory to contemporary problems in public health, climate adaptation, migration, education and governance; field schools, supervised internships and community-based research should become credit-bearing components of training; and faculty development must be understood as building collective capacity for mentorship, multilingual publication and collaboration.

The study also insists on historical context. Before 1947, ethnographic knowledge about the territories that became Pakistan was largely produced within British Indian administrative projects such as censuses, gazetteers and caste compendia, constituting anthropology for governance rather than an autonomous tradition. Institutional development after independence was late and uneven: a decisive moment came at Quaid-i-Azam University in the 1970s, with the first small cohort beginning in 1975 and MPhil training in 1980, followed by social anthropology at the University of Peshawar in 1978 and 1979 and gradual expansion to other public universities. Pakistani anthropologists, Ali notes, have continued to produce significant work on kinship, religion and healing, multispecies relations, education and gender, public health and syndemics, and bureaucracy, yet this scholarship circulates unevenly, constrained by funding, English-language hierarchies and the recurrent positioning of local scholars as data providers rather than theory-makers.

Pakistan’s case, the study concludes, offers a broader lesson: a discipline can remain formally institutionalized while becoming progressively marginalized through everyday practices of valuation, from prospectuses and course design to examination gossip and questions about employment. The future of anthropology in Pakistan will depend not on declarations of usefulness but on whether students encounter the field as a viable intellectual and professional practice, whether faculty can sustain fieldwork and mentorship, and whether public institutions can engage anthropological knowledge without reducing it to technocratic procedure. The question of scope, Ali suggests, cannot be answered once and for all; it must be continually reworked through the institutional relationships that determine how anthropology is taught, practiced, valued and understood.

Subject of Research: The institutional decline and disciplinary value of anthropology in Pakistan's universities

Article Title: Anthropology at a critical juncture in Pakistan: slow epistemic exclusion, disciplinary value, and futures beyond the ivory tower

Article References: Ali, I. (2026). Anthropology at a critical juncture in Pakistan: slow epistemic exclusion, disciplinary value, and futures beyond the ivory tower. International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, 10(1), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41257-026-00162-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s41257-026-00162-0

Keywords: anthropology, Pakistan, higher education, slow epistemic exclusion, academic dependency, disciplinary value, Central Superior Services, applied anthropology, enrollment decline, ivory tower, decolonization, Global South

The research, led by Rashid Haider of RWTH Aachen University and the Geological Survey of Pakistan, together with colleagues in Pakistan, China and Germany, focuses on four long-standing puzzles surrounding the 1945 tsunami at the Pasni coast. First, the waves arrived one to two hours later than a directly propagating tsunami from the known epicentral region should have. Second, the wave heights reached at least ten metres, an exceptional value given the magnitude of the parent earthquake. Third, survivors consistently reported three successive waves rather than a single surge. Fourth, the sea first withdrew from the shore, a temporary shoreline regression known as an initial draw-down, before the flooding began.

To resolve these puzzles, the team tested three near-field tsunamigenic earthquake scenarios, simulating the full chain of tsunami physics: generation at the seafloor, propagation across the Arabian Sea, coastal inundation, and the interaction of waves through reflection and amplification. The modelling, which drew on high-resolution topographic and bathymetric data, including an unprocessed digital elevation model provided by the German Aerospace Center, allowed the researchers to track how the tsunami energy behaved once it reached the shallow waters and rugged shoreline of the Makran margin.

The simulations point to a phenomenon the authors call reflection-amplification as the key mechanism behind both the extraordinary wave heights and the delayed arrivals. Two geomorphic reflectors dominate this process. The first is a set of coastal beach cliffs that extend intermittently along the shore, bouncing incoming wave energy back toward the sea. The second, and more consequential, is a bathymetric high, a structural shelf rim on the seafloor that runs continuously along the entire Makran coast of Pakistan. Together, these natural mirrors turned the shallow shelf into a kind of echo chamber for tsunami energy.

The quantitative results are striking. According to the study, a primary tsunami wave of approximately five metres in height can be amplified to roughly ten metres through reflection-amplification, effectively doubling the destructive potential of the original wave. Crucially, this amplification is not instantaneous. The reflected and re-reflected wave energy takes more than eighty minutes, about an hour and a half, to develop fully and strike the coast. That delay explains why the destructive waves at Pasni arrived one to two hours after the earthquake, long after residents might have assumed the danger had passed.

The mechanism also accounts for the three distinct waves reported by survivors. The researchers found that the wave package reaching the coast could be categorised into three major wave-sets, matching the accounts collected from tsunami survivors, including interviews documented by UNESCO. The first wave corresponds to the direct arrival, while the subsequent sets reflect energy that bounced between the shelf rim and the shoreline before returning, enlarged, to the coast. The initial draw-down, the eerie withdrawal of the sea, fits naturally into this sequence as the leading depression of the tsunami signal and the interaction of the wave train with the shallow shelf.

Perhaps the most consequential conclusion of the study is its verdict on the tsunami’s source. Previous researchers had proposed that a submarine landslide, or a combination of earthquake slip and landslide, might be needed to explain the outsized waves. By showing that reflection-amplification alone can transform a moderate primary wave into a ten-metre monster, the team argues that a single earthquake can account for all four observed features of the 1945 event. In their integrated and comparative analysis, no secondary landslide source is required, simplifying the picture of tsunami generation in one of the world’s least understood subduction zones.

The Makran subduction zone, where the Arabian plate slides beneath the Eurasian plate along the coasts of Iran and Pakistan, remains a region of considerable seismic uncertainty. Compared with better-studied margins such as Nankai in Japan or Sumatra in Indonesia, the Makran has produced few instrumentally recorded great earthquakes, and the 1945 event remains its only well-documented tsunamigenic rupture. The new findings suggest that hazard assessments for the region cannot rely on earthquake magnitude alone. Even a moderate megathrust rupture could produce devastating local waves if the coastal cliffs and the continuous shelf rim amplify the signal as they did in 1945.

The implications extend to the rapidly developing coastline of southern Pakistan, including the port city of Gwadar and the town of Pasni, where population and infrastructure have grown substantially since 1945. If a future earthquake produces a primary wave of only a few metres, the reflection-amplification mechanism identified in this study could still deliver waves of catastrophic height to nearby shores, and the hour-and-a-half development time means that the worst flooding may come well after the shaking has stopped. The authors emphasise that further investigation is needed, particularly in reassessing the 1945 earthquake in terms of its fault parameters and fault location, and in characterising the local tsunami reflection-amplification phenomenon in greater detail.

By reinterpreting one of the deadliest tsunamis of the twentieth century through the lens of wave reflection, the study offers both a solution to an old mystery and a warning for the future. The same cliffs and seafloor ridges that shaped the 1945 disaster are still in place along the Makran coast, ready to amplify the next tsunami. Understanding how they work, the researchers argue, is now essential for protecting the communities that live in their shadow.

Subject of Research: Reflection-amplification of the 1945 Makran tsunami by coastal cliffs and a bathymetric shelf rim along the Pakistan coast

Article Title: Tsunami amplification and time-delay mechanism; an insight into the case study of the 1945 tsunami event, Makran coast, Pakistan

Article References: Haider, R., Javed, H., Gardezi, S. A. H., Ali, S., Hoffmann, G., & Reicherter, K. (2026). Tsunami amplification and time-delay mechanism; an insight into the case study of the 1945 tsunami event, Makran coast, Pakistan. Natural Hazards, 122(19), Article 634. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-026-08398-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-026-08398-x

Keywords: 1945 Makran tsunami, Makran subduction zone, tsunami reflection and amplification, tsunami arrival delay, Pasni coast, Pakistan, numerical modelling, bathymetric high, initial draw-down, earthquake source, Natural Hazards, tsunami hazard

The research team, led by Khajid Ullah Khan and Muhammad Tariq Zahid of Government College University, Lahore, together with colleagues in Pakistan and South Korea, collected 126 scorpions, 85 females and 41 males, from rocky field sites during June and July, the peak of the animals’ annual activity window. Specimens were located by day by overturning stones and by night using ultraviolet light, which causes scorpion cuticles to fluoresce. Morphological examination under a stereomicroscope documented the diagnostic features of the species, including its dark brown coloration, densely granulated carapace keels, a triangular sternum characteristic of the family Buthidae, and a bulbous reddish telson bearing a curved, dark-tipped aculeus. Females were consistently larger and thicker-bodied than males, with mean total lengths of roughly 72.8 millimeters compared with 62.9 millimeters in males, and males carried significantly more pectinal teeth, averaging about 30 to 32 per comb versus 26 in females.

To confirm species identity beyond morphology, the researchers amplified and Sanger-sequenced approximately 650 base pairs of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I gene, the standard animal DNA barcode. BLAST comparison against the NCBI GenBank database returned nucleotide identities of 96.95 and 96.81 percent with existing H. tamulus sequences, and maximum-likelihood phylogenetic analysis in MEGA11 clustered the new sequences firmly within the species. The roughly three percent divergence from the nearest reference strain, which originated from a commercial insect market in China with undocumented provenance, suggests notable geographic structuring within the species, a pattern consistent with the deep intraspecific lineages documented in other scorpion genera such as Scorpio in the Levant and Alpiscorpius in the European Alps.

The centerpiece of the study was its metataxonomic analysis of the gut contents of six adult scorpions, three males and three females, dissected aseptically after surface sterilization. Genomic DNA was extracted with a bead-beating kit and sequenced on an Oxford Nanopore MinION flow cell using primers targeting the full V1 through V9 hypervariable regions of the 16S rRNA gene. The run produced 355,264 high-quality reads, averaging about 71,000 per sample with a mean length of approximately 1,390 nucleotides, effectively covering the entire gene. Because nanopore sequencing carries higher raw error rates than short-read platforms, the team clustered sequences de novo into operational taxonomic units at a deliberately relaxed 85 percent identity threshold using VSEARCH, then classified them against the SILVA reference database within the QIIME 2 pipeline, removing putative contaminants flagged in negative controls.

The results reveal a gut community dominated overwhelmingly by two bacterial phyla. Firmicutes accounted for between 79.5 and 90.4 percent of sequences across individuals, followed by Proteobacteria at 9.5 to 20.5 percent, while Actinobacteriota and Bacteroidota were barely detectable. At the class level, Bacilli made up roughly 73 percent of the community, with Gammaproteobacteria and Mollicutes contributing about 13 and 7 percent respectively. Four genera stood out as the core microbiota: Bacillus, Mycoplasma, Pantoea, and Enterobacter together comprised approximately 84 percent of all recovered 16S sequences. Bacillus alone represented 17 to 30 percent of the gut community, echoing recent findings in the black scorpion Heterometrus longimanus, where the same genus also dominates. The authors suggest Bacillus may function as a key endosymbiont, supporting antioxidant defenses, gut barrier integrity, and the synthesis of vitamins and amino acids for the host.

Perhaps the most evolutionarily intriguing member of the community is Mycoplasma, a genus of wall-less bacteria that has repeatedly surfaced in scorpion microbiome surveys. Previous work by Bolaños and colleagues documented Mycoplasma lineages in 15 scorpion morphospecies across Mexico, with cophylogenetic analysis suggesting cospeciation between the bacteria and their hosts. The new Pakistani data reinforce the idea that Mycoplasma is an indigenous, long-term associate of scorpions rather than a transient dietary contaminant, a conclusion paralleled by reports of Mycoplasma comprising up to 40 percent of the respiratory microbiota in some snake families. In the present study, Mycoplasma was roughly twice as abundant in females, averaging 10.5 percent relative abundance, as in males at 5.3 percent.

Sex emerged as a consistent theme throughout the diversity analyses. Alpha diversity metrics, including observed species, Chao1, Shannon, and Simpson indices, showed that female scorpions harbored markedly richer and more evenly distributed bacterial communities, whereas male guts were dominated by a smaller set of taxa. Two intestinal fermenters, Enterococcus and Romboutsia, were significantly enriched in females. Both genera are associated with carbohydrate and bile acid metabolism in nutrient-rich gut environments, and the authors speculate that the reproductive energy demands of females may create a more favorable niche for these bacteria, potentially influencing host energy harvest from food. Comparable sex-dependent microbiome patterns have been reported in ticks, where males and females of species such as Amblyomma americanum carry distinct communities, and in the wolf spider Pardosa astrigera, where seasonal and physiological state modulate sex-specific diversity.

To move beyond taxonomy, the researchers applied PICRUSt2, a bioinformatic tool that infers metagenome functions from 16S profiles by matching marker genes against reference genomes. The analysis predicted 23 enriched MetaCyc metabolic pathways spanning energy metabolism, amino acid and lipid biosynthesis, nucleotide metabolism, and the biodegradation of xenobiotic compounds. Male samples appeared enriched for energy metabolism and biosynthetic routes, while female samples showed greater representation of lipid metabolism and fatty acid biosynthesis pathways, hints that the sex-specific microbial differences may extend into function. The authors are careful to stress, however, that PICRUSt2 output is indicative rather than definitive: it does not measure actual gene expression, and the predictions require validation through shotgun metagenomics or transcriptomics, particularly given the study’s small sample of six individuals.

Situated in a broader ecological context, the findings portray scorpions as hosting a moderately diverse microbiome that sits above the extremely depauperate communities of social spiders, which average a Shannon index of just 0.66, yet below the hundreds to thousands of operational taxonomic units recoverable from soil or lepidopteran eggs. The overlap between the H. tamulus core genera and those documented in wolf spiders, crab spiders, and moths suggests a partially conserved gut microbial blueprint across predatory arthropods. The authors also raise an untested but plausible transmission hypothesis: because scorpions exhibit extensive brood care, including mothers provisioning enzymatically treated prey to offspring, maternal transfer could explain how these symbionts persist across generations, a mechanism previously documented in brown widow spiders.

As a first baseline for a medically iconic species in a previously unsampled region of Pakistan, the study opens concrete research avenues. Bacillus and Mycoplasma emerge as prime candidates for integrated follow-up work combining metagenomics, transcriptomics, and analysis of the venom apparatus microbiome, where Proteobacteria have been shown in other species to exceed half of the bacterial load and may contribute to nutrient cycling within the telson. Whether the gut community actively underpins H. tamulus adaptation to arid, resource-limited habitats, as microbiome-mediated stress tolerance studies in spiders and flies suggest it might in other arthropods, remains a compelling but unproven hypothesis. The authors are explicit that their six-individual sample cannot define a species-wide core microbiome; larger geographic surveys and controlled experiments will be needed before the hidden microbial partners of the world’s deadliest scorpion can be fully credited with any of its remarkable ecological success.

Subject of Research: Gut bacterial microbiome diversity and functional potential of the Indian red scorpion Hottentotta tamulus in Pakistan

Article Title: Gut Microbiome Diversity, Functional Potential, and Ecological Relevance of Hottentotta tamulus

Article References: Khan, K. U., Zahid, M. T., Mustafa, G., Tanpure, R. S., Tahir, H. M., Kumar, R., Kim, D.-W., Park, H.-K., & Jeon, B.-H. (2026). Gut Microbiome Diversity, Functional Potential, and Ecological Relevance of Hottentotta tamulus. MicrobiologyOpen, 15(5), Article e70373. https://doi.org/10.1002/mbo3.70373

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/mbo3.70373

Keywords: Hottentotta tamulus, Indian red scorpion, gut microbiome, 16S rRNA sequencing, Oxford Nanopore, Firmicutes, Bacillus, Mycoplasma, PICRUSt2, sexual dimorphism, scorpion venom, Pakistan