February 24th, 2021The impact of the pandemic in Africa may be vastly underestimated, with 15-20% of deaths sampled in a Zambian post-mortem study linked to COVID-19 and the deaths across a wider age spectrum than reported elsewhere, including an unexpectedly high...
February 3rd, 2021Repurposing the orphan drug drug Nitisinone may kill tsetse flies without harming important pollinator insects, found a study into the control of African trypanosomiasis (also known as sleeping sickness).
It is a disease transmitted by tsetse...
December 16th, 2020All the Chinese KN95 masks, widely imported into South Africa to counter the COVID-19 pandemic, tested in a University of Cape Town study, failed to provide the protection provided by the ‘gold standard’ N95 mask, reports MedicalBrief.
The...
December 2nd, 2020Africa has the highest COVID-19 ICU mortality on any continent with more than half of admissions dying in hospital by the 30-day mark, found a University of Cape Town study conducted in 38 hospitals in six countries, writes MedicalBrief.
The...
November 25th, 2020Young South African children are too short and too fat, concludes a massive analysis pooling data from more than 2,000 studies in 200 countries with a study population of 65m people, write Dr Chantell Witten and Prof Salome Kruger for...
November 18th, 2020It has long been recognised that mental disorders can run in families. Indeed, severe mental illness is influenced by genes more than by any other risk factor, write Lukoye Atwoli of Aga Khan University in East Africa and Anne Stevenson of Harvard...
October 28th, 2020Use of preventive antimalarial treatments reduces by half the number of malaria infections, among schoolchildren, as well as reducing anaemia, according to a meta-analysis across seven sub-Saharan African countries.
Preventive treatment also...
October 21st, 2020The HPTN084 study being conducted in six African countries holds out the promise of a bi-monthly injection for women as an empower new way to prevent HIV infection, writes Siyabonga Kamnqa for Spotlight.
Kamnqa writes that arguably the most...
September 23rd, 2020The World Health Organisation (WHO) has agreed rules for the testing of African herbal remedies to fight COVID-19, reports BBC News. Sound science would be the sole basis for safe and effective traditional therapies to be adopted, it said. Any...
Preliminary results from a large study COVID-19 patients in South Africa indicate that HIV and TB have a modest effect on mortality, lead scientists Professor Quarraisha Abdool Karim and Professor Salim Abdool Karim, write in Science.
"Patients...
July 29th, 2020Drawing on verbal autopsies, a study conducted in Mpumalanga examined what prevented people from seeking, reaching and receiving quality care in a rural part of South Africa.
Justine Davis, professor of global health, Institute for Applied...
July 22nd, 2020The COVID-19 pandemic is seen as the cause of patients defaulting on chronic medical and not seeking care. New data points to fears of contracting COVID-19 at congested health facilities as the primary reason for people not seeking needed care and...
July 15th, 2020The need to strengthen surgical care systems is especially urgent in sub-Saharan Africa, where access is strikingly limited, leading to the highest mortality and morbidity from surgically preventable and treatable conditions in the world, write...
June 3rd, 2020The University of KwaZulu-Natal's analysis of the COVID-19 outbreak at St Augustine's hospital in Durban, which infected 119 and killed 15, is the most extensive study of any hospital outbreak of COVID-19 so far, writes Science.
It suggests...
May 27th, 2020
Rates of tuberculosis (TB) recurrence increased by almost nine-fold between episode 2 and 5 regardless of HIV status, according to a study assessing recurrent tuberculosis in Cape Town, South Africa, over a 13-year period.
“TB disease among...
April 22nd, 2020
Darunavir/ritonavir administered with rifampicin causes hepatotoxicities in people living with HIV, according to results of a study led by researchers at the department of medicine, the Wellcome Centre for Infectious Diseases Research in Africa...
