South Africa will participate in a large new trial of four potential treatments for COVID-19. Marcus Low argues that the trial takes the right approach in establishing whether any of the potential treatments work.
All schools in South Africa will close from Wednesday as part of South Africa’s efforts to reduce transmission of the COVID-19 virus. Kathryn Cleary rounds up what we do and do not know about the virus in children.
Professor Lynn Morris interim director of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) has a lifetime of experience fighting viruses. She has encountered HIV, Ebola, TB, Listeria, Klebsiella, a multitude of ‘lesser’ pathogens and now COVID-19. However, she thinks that COVID-19, the name given for the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, presents one of the greatest challenges yet to both South Africa and the world.
There are now 17 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in South Africa with most people in their 30s, the oldest being 57. With the global spread of the virus researchers, who inform medical and public health strategies, are working to find out who is most at risk of infection, severe illness and death.
How worried should we be about COVID-19? How bad will it get? How do we place it in its proper context given the limited information we have about it?
As students in Wuhan anxiously await the go-ahead to fly home to South Africa, cabin fever sets in as their movements are severely restricted. They are isolated in their rooms and worry about the planned quarantine period.
Since the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, many countries scaled up efforts to contain the virus. By March 18 the global number of cases reportedly surpassed the 200 000 mark. Here are some highlights in developments since the outbreak in Wuhan, China.
A total of 63 000 people died of tuberculosis (TB) in South Africa in 2018, according to new figures released by the World Health Organization on Thursday.
In 2016, almost 1.7 million people across the globe, and over 120 000 in South Africa, died of TB. We unpack these and other findings from the World Health Organisation’s latest World TB Report.
On Thursday 16 November 2017, Russian president Vladimir Putin told a hall full of health ministers in Moscow that TB is a “serious problem”, and said, “I am confident that the only way we can stand up against this truly global threat is if we join forces.” Did President Putin really mean what he said?
