Unlike with medicines, and with a few exceptions, South Africa’s regulator does not assess whether diagnostic tests and other medical devices on the market are safe and work as they are supposed to. The regulator has however started down a road that should eventually lead to the regulation of all medical devices in the country. Catherine Tomlinson unpacks the details.
Over a long and distinguished career, Professor Susan Fawcus has become known for her work trying to reduce the deaths of mothers and babies in South Africa. In her home in Cape Town, the soft-spoken champion for health equity chats with Spotlight about her journey as a researcher, doctor, and obstetrician, and shares her fears of rising maternal mortality in an age of austerity.
COVID-19 has largely dropped out of the headlines, but the virus that causes it is still circulating. Biénne Huisman asks what we should know about a new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the state of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2025, and the lack of access to updated vaccines in South Africa.
Cuts to United States spending on aid and medical research have caused widespread havoc and anxiety in the last month. Professor Tulio de Oliveira sat down with Spotlight’s Biénne Huisman to talk through what it might mean for health research in South Africa.
Some patients at KwaZulu-Natal hospitals are donating lung tissue for use in TB research. Sue Segar tracks what happens to these tissue samples and explores why these samples are so important to unlocking the mysteries of what the TB bacterium does inside the human body.
The National Health Insurance Act does not deal with the systemic issues that cause high prices and inequity in medicine access, and government is not listening, argues Fatima Hassan.
COVID-19 temporarily reversed South Africa’s hard-won reduction in maternal mortality, but the death rate has now stabilised, and hopes are high that the downward trend will resume. However, if experts are right, we’re missing some crucial interventions that would further prevent what are avoidable deaths. Chris Bateman talks to some of the leading lights in the field.
After a decade at the helm of the country’s primary health research funder, Professor Glenda Gray will focus again on doing the science. She tells Spotlight’s Biénne Huisman about her childhood, her passion for research, administering multi-million dollar grants, and a heated argument in the bathroom with an ANC bigwig.
New data from the World Health Organization and UNICEF show that globally childhood immunisation coverage stalled in 2023, while in South Africa it decreased. Elri Voigt unpacks the new data and asks local experts to put it in context.
Professor Ntobeko Ntusi may be softspoken, but he is not afraid to stand by his strongly held views. As he is set to take up the hot-seat at the country’s primary health research funder, he tells Spotlight’s Biénne Huisman about his background and his priorities for the new job.
COVID-19-related factors resulted in several years of lower-than-normal rates of the flu, but experts say that is now something of the past. As this year’s flu season gets under way, Elri Voigt asks several local experts what their expectations are, which flu vaccines are available this year, and whether we should be concerned about new strains of bird flu.
In June, the Gauteng government launched a major employment drive called Nasi iSpani. Thabo Molelekwa spoke to stakeholders in the public health sector about what this may mean for the province’s chronic healthcare worker shortages.
