The Limpopo health department, which has a track record of dodgy aeromedical contracts, has awarded a lucrative three-year tender to a joint venture including Buthelezi EMS (BEMS), a private emergency medical services company which is under investigation by the Special Investigating Unit, the Hawks and National Treasury.
Marcus Low takes an in-depth look at the politics of NHI, explores the concerns people have with the NHI Bill, and asks what it will take for people in South Africa to find more common ground.
The Public Service Commission (PSC) made a surprise visit to the Cecilia Makiwane Mental Health Unit – 10 days after Spotlight published its investigation into a whistleblower’s plea about the unit’s dire state.
Sasha Stevenson considers what has changed between the 2018 draft NHI Bill and the version released two weeks ago to see how, if at all, thinking and planning for NHI has developed.
While a combination of drugs including now FDA-approved pretomanid is probably the best treatment for XDR-TB, it is still not clear whether or not pretomanid itself is safe and effective.
The new tuberculosis medicine pretomanid has just been registered by the United States Food and Drug Administration. What are the implications for South Africa?
SAHPRA inherited a backlog of around 16 000 medicine regulatory applications from the MCC. How can this backlog be processed and medicines regulation improved in future?
The root causes of high prices—unchecked patent-granted monopolies—remain in place. Once again, thousands of lives are being lost on the altar of profiteering. Mark Heywood and Zain Rizvi argue why South Africa must urgently adopt a new patent law.
Might an ambitious scale up of active case finding be just what is needed to break the back of South Africa’s tuberculosis epidemic?
The derelict Cecilia Makiwane Hospital Mental Health Unit is a powerful indictment of the province’s failure to care for the mentally ill.
The recently released outputs of the Thembisa mathematical model of HIV in South Africa allow us to compare the burden of HIV at the provincial level and see how close each province comes to achieving the 90-90-90 targets. We made some graphs to explore the data.
Two leading South African HIV experts reflect on the future of new ARVs dolutegravir and TAF, following the publication of findings from a major new trial conducted in Johannesburg.