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.
Despite some improvement over the past three years, the North West province continues to experience medicine shortages, according to a survey by a community clinic monitoring initiative. Nthusang Lefafa unpacks the latest findings and asks why shortages persist in the province.
Most tuberculosis (TB) tests still require a trip to the clinic. Now, new technology has made it possible to test people at home. This could be a big deal for South Africa, where much TB goes undiagnosed. Tiyese Jeranji unpacks the findings and implications of a recent study into such TB home testing.
In this open letter to Minister of Health Dr Joe Phaahla, TB activists call for the disease to be made a political priority and demand multisectoral departmental accountability. They outline six demands for implementation by the end of this year. The letter was submitted on the final day of the South African TB Conference being held this week in Durban.
Besides preventing illness and death, tuberculosis prevention therapy is estimated to be highly cost effective. Yet, uptake of the medication is not what it could be in South Africa. Tiyese Jeranji asks how much has changed since the Department of Health last year decided to make TB prevention therapy much more widely available.
In addition to shedding light on what people actually die of, autopsies can also play an important role in helping us to better understand disease. Tiyese Jeranji unpacks tuberculosis-related autopsy research in the Western Cape and delves into some of the fascinating complexities of this branch of TB research.
South Africa is at the forefront of TB control efforts, striving towards improved health outcomes, argues Dr Priashni Subrayen.
World TB Day is marked in the same week that South Africa celebrates Human Rights Day. A human rights based approach to TB mirrors a public health approach, argue Ingrid Schoeman, Sasha Stevenson, Janet Giddy, Renier Coetzee, and Petula Pienaar.
A massive and long-awaited study of an experimental tuberculosis vaccine has kicked off in South Africa. Marcus Low reports.
Tuberculosis can infect anyone. It is caused by bacteria and spreads through air and is very common in South Africa. Dr Janet Giddy shares how she deals with Mrs Worried – an anxious and fearful voice seeking advice when someone close to her, like her domestic worker, has been diagnosed with TB.
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.
