The two key goals in managing the HIV epidemic are getting as many people with the virus as possible onto ARV treatment and reducing the number of new infections. The results of a study from KZN, published in The Lancet HIV, suggest we’re stalling on the prevention front. The study is well done and important, but the situation may not be as bleak as the authors suggest.
South Africa’s rollout of lenacapavir, a six-monthly HIV prevention injection, requires nurses to learn, adapt and find ways to make it work for patients. Christina Pitt unpacks how.
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.
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.
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.
Dr Hermann Reuter did pioneering work treating HIV in the early 2000s in Cape Town and in the rural Eastern Cape. Today, his focus is substance abuse, which he believes is the country’s biggest health issue after HIV. Sue Segar spent time with him to learn about his work in the Garden Route city of George.
