A crucial hotline run for nearly 20 years from the slopes of Devil’s Peak in Cape Town for healthcare workers anywhere in South Africa, from the country’s busiest urban hospitals to far flung resource strained rural clinics, has been suspended due to a lack of funding.
Dr Thembisile Xulu is South Africa’s sixth permanent Director-General of health since the dawn of democracy. How will she measure up against her predecessors?
For years, hospitals have relied on the unpaid, unprotected labour of trainee-specialists to fill their rosters, but these doctors are reaching a breaking point. Joan van Dyk reports.
As a young doctor working in rural KwaZulu-Natal, Hennie Hamilton lived with a Zulu family for four years, an experience which, he says, changed him forever. Twenty-three years later, he’s still working in the area as medical manager at Mosvold Hospital and doing cataract surgery on patients from five rural hospitals.
In a country like South Africa which grapples with a high prevalence of gender-based violence, forensic nursing unfortunately remains a largely overlooked specialisation, with little incentive for remuneration. One nurse tells Elna Schütz every flicker of hope a patient carries home is a reminder of why she chose this path.
From counselling about small nodules to overcoming people’s fears of needles, Biénne Huisman takes the pulse of a new HIV prevention injection’s rollout in the Western Cape.
In March 2024, a pivotal clinical trial was launched to evaluate what might well become the first new tuberculosis vaccine on the market in more than a century. As anticipation mounts for the trial to deliver results, Russell Rensburg argues that we need to start preparing for a rollout of the jab, but that we should think of preparation more widely than just the technicalities of regulatory approval and drug supply.
Ten months after an enabling court judgment, some pharmacists in South Africa can finally start applying for permits that allows them to dispense HIV prevention pills without a script from a doctor. Catherine Tomlinson reports.
The United States National Institutes of Health has lifted its ban nearly 18 months after an order to stop work with South Africa. The funding ban created a crisis for HIV and TB research, including NIH grants and US Agency for International Development aid. Many of the world’s major advances over the past two decades in understanding the science of HIV arose from South African scientists and from studies conducted here, the vast majority of them funded by the NIH.
HIV is known for its ability to outsmart our immune system’s normal defences. A small number of people living with HIV are however able to generate more effective immune responses to HIV. In this special briefing, Catherine Tomlinson zooms in on broadly neutralising antibodies, the secret sauce in these immune responses.
With glimmers of tenderness beneath a stoic façade, Tara Gerardy-Bissolati tells Biénne Huisman about her struggle to beat opioids, why homelessness is a public health issue, and her commitment to bring hope to people living rough in central Cape Town.
Long before she became a pioneering scientist, Professor Liesl Zühlke insisted on seeing her tonsils after they were removed when she was just five years old. Today, paediatric cardiology is close to her heart, and her research has helped answer critical questions in the entire pipeline of heart disease.