With varying degrees of success, artificial intelligence has begun to play the role of research assistant, radiologist, health educator, and even therapist. In this Spotlight special briefing, Jesse Copelyn tries to see past the hype and pin-points the most immediate implications of these new technologies for healthcare in South Africa.
A Competition Commission probe recently resulted in a patent on an important tuberculosis medicine being dropped in South Africa. Twenty years ago, a similar Competition Commission case resulted in a settlement that helped drive down the prices of several antiretrovirals, thereby helping to set the stage for the country’s HIV treatment programme. Fatima Hassan and Leena Menghaney connect the dots between the two landmark cases and map out what has and has not changed over the last two decades.
Diabetes is the second leading cause of death in South Africa after tuberculosis, according to Statistics South Africa. It is the leading cause of death in women. Yet, despite being a major driver of deaths and illness, we do not have a clear picture of how many people in the country have diabetes or how many people are receiving diabetes care. This leaves our health system ill-equipped to handle the growing diabetes crisis.
While three new tuberculosis (TB) medicines have been registered in South Africa over the last decade, TB treatment still comes with several side effects and requires taking multiple different medicines, typically for six or more months. The search for better TB medicines got a boost last week with the presentation of promising findings from a study conducted in South Africa on an experimental drug called quabodepistat. Elri Voigt reports on this and other TB studies presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Denver, Colorado.
South Africa is barrelling towards its most consequential and most competitive national and provincial elections since 1994. Spotlight editor Marcus Low asks what is on the line in these elections from a healthcare perspective and argues that the stakes are particularly high when it comes to NHI and the Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provincial health departments.
Tuberculosis (TB) preventive therapy has been transformed in recent years, with treatment duration having been cut from six or more months to just three or one. Progress in developing new treatments to prevent drug-resistant forms of TB has however lagged behind, especially in children. Elri Voigt unpacks findings from a major new TB prevention study presented at the Union World Conference on Lung Health last week and plans for another important preventive therapy trial set to start soon.
At the age of 19 Phumeza Tisile contracted multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. For four years she battled the disease, losing her hearing in the process. At one stage, a doctor told her to visit a priest and prepare her soul for death. Recently, Tisile (now 33) made it on to TIME magazine’s 2023 TIME100 Next list, as one of 100 emerging leaders round the world who are “shaping the future and defining the next generation of leadership”. Sue Segar chatted to Tisile about her remarkable journey.
Several of the world’s most important tuberculosis clinical trials of the last two decades were done in part or entirely in South Africa. Tiyese Jeranji chatted to some leading researchers about where the country’s clinical trial capacity comes from and what is needed to maintain and improve it.
Dr Juli Switala (42) has treated children in Nigeria, helped fatally ill patients during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, and delivered babies at a hospital in Afghanistan against a backdrop of upheaval and violence. But nowhere cuts close to her heart quite like Brooklyn Chest – the tuberculosis (TB) hospital on Cape Town’s north-western fringes. Biénne Huisman chatted with Switala about her work in hospitals around the world, the challenges of treating kids with TB, and going for a run to get away from it all.
A recent study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases found that there was an association between healthcare workers’ exposure to high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and their risk of being exposed to tuberculosis (TB). Elri Voigt unpacks the study’s findings and asks experts how CO2 monitors work, how well they predict the risk of TB exposure, and in which settings these monitors might be most useful.
The second United Nations High-Level Meeting on Tuberculosis is taking place in New York today. Sihle Mahonga Ndawonde argues that better TB data and more transparency are needed in South Africa if we are to get and stay on the road to meeting the ambitious targets set and endorsed at this UN meeting.
Professor Valerie Mizrahi, a world-leading tuberculosis researcher and director of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cape Town, is retiring at the end of the year. Biénne Huisman sat down with Mizrahi to talk about her journey in TB research, passing the baton to a new generation of researchers, and how she helped build a research ecosystem that brings together specialists across the basic, clinical, and public health sciences.
