Despite some improvement, the community-led monitoring group Ritshidze’s second report on key populations highlights that sex workers, people who use drugs and LGBTQIA+ community members are often still discriminated against when trying to access public health facilities. This can lead to treatment interruptions and some stopping their clinic visits. Nthusang Lefafa reports.
Lenalidomide is an important medicine used for the treatment of multiple myeloma – a type of bone marrow cancer that is not curable and typically requires long-term, ongoing treatment. Over the last decade, the price of this drug has fluctuated dramatically in South Africa and patients and their doctors have gone to extreme lengths to access it. Catherine Tomlinson unpacks the remarkable recent history of lenalidomide.
Our public health system is creating a new type of disability – ostomates who, with access to the necessary care and medical consumables could live long and fulfilled lives, but who every day are subjected to the indignities of inadequate care, writes colorectal cancer survivor and ostomate, Faizel Jacobs.
The South African Health Products Regulatory Authority has often made the headlines in recent years – be it in relation to COVID-19 vaccines, access to ivermectin, the approval of an HIV prevention injection, or most recently the clearing of inherited backlogs. Catherine Tomlinson assesses the state of South Africa’s medicines regulator as 2022 draws to a close.
Antibiotics play a vital role in the management of bacterial infections, reducing illness, and preventing many deaths. A 2011 report from the UK estimated that they have increased life expectancy by 20 years. However, the extensive use of antibiotics has resulted in drug resistance that threatens to reverse their life-saving power and if the situation is not reversed, it has been estimated that by 2050 as many as 10 million people will die annually of drug-resistant infections. Tiyese Jeranji looks at how antimicrobial resistance plays out in South Africa and the role of pharmacists in the fight against it.
South Africa is expected to begin piloting the every-other-month HIV prevention shot early next year, according to the international medicine financing initiative Unitaid. New modelling shows that the injection could prevent as many as 52 000 new HIV infections in the next two decades. But to be cost-effective in South Africa, the research argues, the price of the injection must fall to levels drugmaker ViiV Healthcare says are unrealistic. Laura Lopez Gonzalez reports.
Though South Africa has in some respects done well in the provision of sexual and reproductive health services for adolescent girls and young women, significant gaps remain. Tiyese Jeranji takes an in-depth look at the current policy landscape and asks how well the implementation of the policies measures up to their lofty ambitions.
Despite some interventions by Mpumalanga’s health department, a litany of challenges at Mpumalanga hospitals continue to hamstrung quality patient care in the province. Nthusang Lefafa explores these challenges and asked the health department what is being done to address them.
South Africa has only one public sector supplier of resized packages of morphine powder and the company’s failure to deliver since July has left some patients in unspeakable agony. Ufrieda Ho reports.
Public healthcare facilities in the North West have been plagued by chronic medicines stockouts for years. Now, as the province’s health department is again taking the reins after four years under administration by the National Department of Health, Nthusang Lefafa asks what progress has or has not been made in that most basic of healthcare functions, providing people with the medicines they need.
A trained engineer and medical doctor, Dr Craig Parker created an oxygen device that was an important lifeline to patients in rural Eastern Cape at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this month at the Rural Health Conference in Oudtshoorn, Parker received the Rural Doctor of the Year Award for 2022. Bienne Huisman chatted to Parker about the device and his life as a rural doctor.
A potentially life-saving or life-extending breast cancer medicine is available to public sector patients in several of South Africa’s provinces, but not in the Western Cape. Elri Voigt asks what is behind the Western Cape government’s decision.