Imagine you have been taking a medicine for years. Then one day you are told at the pharmacy that supplies have run out. In his latest Spotlight column, Dr Andy Gray zooms in on how governments can monitor and plan for such shortages.
It isn’t always easy to know what to believe when it comes to cancer. In part 2 of a Daily Maverick and Spotlight special series on cancer, Biénne Huisman asks whether cancer cases are on the increase in South Africa, and why. On the way, she visits academic corridors and a Limpopo citrus orchard, all while trying to make sense of the available data.
We can keep writing new policies and passing new laws and launching new reforms, but until we confront the human frailties that undermine every system we build, progress will evade us, argues Dr Claire Botha.
All medicines and treatments have to go through lengthy safety and efficacy testing, but this is particularly tricky – and often delayed – for one important age group. Elna Schütz explores the complexities of conducting clinical trials involving babies, and why those complexities are worth grappling with.
Two women, two breast cancer journeys. In the first article of a new Daily Maverick and Spotlight special series on cancer in South Africa, Biénne Huisman speaks with rugby referee Aimee Barrett-Theron and cancer warrior Joyce Witbooi, who helps women navigate Cape Town’s public health system.
Many people who report with TB symptoms at South Africa’s public sector clinics do not receive TB tests. Testing more of these people is one of the most effective things we can do to reduce rates of TB disease and death, according to a major new modelling study. Marcus Low reports.
Precious Matsoso tells Biénne Huisman how, over three decades, she helped shape some of the most consequential health policy negotiations in South Africa and in global governance. She also shares memories about her Soweto childhood filled with music, science, and political uprisings.
Aspen Pharmacare has announced that it will not be manufacturing the lenacapavir HIV prevention injection, and that it will instead focus on producing alimatravir, an experimental HIV prevention pill. Catherine Tomlinson explores the reasoning behind Aspen’s decision and assesses what it all means for local pharmaceutical production.
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.