Rashmi Varma

Snakebite kills tens of thousands of people a year, and most antivenom is still made the way it was a century ago, from the blood of horses. This Sky News film follows scientists in Liverpool and Copenhagen developing an oral treatment and a lab-grown antivenom that could change that, and asks why the people they could save are thousands of miles from the labs building them.

Maternity and neonatal services at St Helier Hospital are to move because the building's ageing pipes put vulnerable patients at risk of infection. This story explains the risks, the hospital's maintenance backlog, and the questions still unanswered about where services will go and when they will return.

Where you live in London can decide how much is spent protecting your health. Combining the government's 2026 to 2027 public health grant with population data for every borough, this data story found a more than fourfold gap between Westminster and Bexley, and asks whether funding is reaching the areas with the greatest need.

Britain has recorded its worst year for anti-Muslim hate. This episode asks what the science of sound and fear reveals about the Muslim call to prayer, and whether the way we hear it can change.

Britain's South Asian community arrived to hostility and answered it with solidarity rather than division. This feature asks whether that instinct still holds now, as the right rises again.
I reported it in Southall and across other parts of London, following the thread from the community's post-war arrival, through the racism it faced, to the solidarity that carried it. Reform UK's gains in 2026 gave the question its urgency: is that old unity being tested once more?
The story rests on three people. Sarjit Kaur Rattan, known as Biji, is 88. She came to Britain from Kenya and lived the racism, and the fierce solidarity that answered it, firsthand. Suresh Grover has spent four decades fighting racism; he co-founded the Southall Monitoring Group and stood with the family of Stephen Lawrence. Sadiya Ahmed, of the Partition Memorial Trust, works to keep these histories from being lost.
This piece is personal. During Partition, my grandparents crossed from Lahore to Delhi. In the 1980s my family moved again, to New York, where I was born and raised. I grew up on stories of Indians and Pakistanis in America finding each other, of strangers who became family. The border that split our grandparents mattered less there. At home we had a word for that bond: ekta. I knew what it looked like in New York. I did not know whether it had made its way to Britain, or whether, generations on, it still holds.
Built in Shorthand, the feature brings together text, video and audio for a national readership that believes a community is stronger together than apart.

On Southall Broadway, around one in four food shops sells sweets, in an area with some of the highest diabetes rates in London. Built on four Freedom of Information requests and public health data, this investigation found that Ealing Council spent nothing on diabetes prevention, and asks who is responsible for a crisis hiding in plain sight. Commended in the Hugh Cudlipp Student Award 2026.

When NHS England's waiting lists hit record highs, the headlines focused on numbers. This investigation went further, combining newly released NHS data with patient interviews to show how deprivation, ethnicity and gender shape who waits longest for care. From funding formulas that disadvantage deprived areas to a system that favours patients who can navigate it, the findings raise questions about whether care is still allocated on the basis of need.

Aviation has promised to reach net zero by 2050, and sustainable fuel is meant to get it there. This five-part series, built on 22 interviews across three continents, follows the engineers, airlines and policymakers trying to make it work, and examines why the UK collects penalties for fuel it never created the conditions to produce. Developed through the Vox Media Writers Workshop.

Third author on research presented at the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (2025) and Stanford's Center for Innovation in Global and Planetary Health Convening (2026). The study combines machine learning with hospital data from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to detect diesel generator use, quantify emissions and link air pollution to respiratory health risks. It proposes financing pathways that channel carbon credits into solar energy for hospitals. I contributed the health framing and climate finance analysis.

I contributed to HACIT, a platform that integrates mapping, fuel price and currency data to give real-time cost breakdowns of humanitarian missions. It was developed at the Mercy Corps Appathon and UC Berkeley DisasterHacks with Daniel Sitompul of the International Council on Clean Transportation, and designed for crisis zones such as northern Gaza.

I founded AlkeLink to address persistent shortages of essential medicines. The platform combines real-time stock monitoring, predictive analytics and procurement intelligence to help health systems in low-resource settings prevent stock-outs and cut waste. The team was selected for the May 2024 Collider Cup.

As a 2023 to 2024 Albert Schweitzer Fellow, I partnered with Larkin Street Youth Services to create BEST+, an economic empowerment programme for homeless and transitional-age youth in San Francisco. It ties conditional cash transfers to training in financial literacy, entrepreneurship, vocational skills and early investing, shifting support from emergency aid to long-term resilience. The programme was IRB-approved through UC Berkeley and developed with Larkin Street leadership.

A programme addressing economic instability, gender inequality and climate vulnerability in rural Nepal, with Dhulikhel Hospital, GeoKrishi, the Nepal Internet Foundation and Hamro Janakalyan Credit Cooperative. It equips women farmers with digital tools for precision agriculture, soil testing and climate-adaptive farming, and establishes internet hubs that also serve schools and health clinics. A conditional microfinance model links loans to digital literacy milestones. The programme is designed to reach 2,000 women across Dolakha, Bishuntol, Tamakoshi and Boach.

With Karuna Trust, under the mentorship of Dr Sunitha Chandrasekhar Srinivas, I supported antimicrobial stewardship across 29 primary health centres in rural Karnataka. I audited prescribing practices, supported community education on antibiotic use and helped with data collection for state surveillance. The work showed that antimicrobial resistance is as much a socioeconomic issue as a clinical one. Patients often ration or stop antibiotics early because of cost, or turn to informal providers.

With Reaching Hand, I contributed to the Girls Glory Project, which supports adolescent girls in government schools by tackling menstrual health barriers to education. I helped develop hygiene kits and educational materials, led workshops on puberty and menstrual health for girls aged 11 to 18, and worked with parents, teachers and local leaders to build support for girls' education.