May 5th, 2021Researchers at the Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Academic Hospital write: SARS-CoV-2 is the third known coronavirus within the past 18 years to cause severe respiratory illness, its predecessors being severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)...
April 14th, 2021There is ample evidence that governments can be effective economic actors to create capacity and markets through public investment and public procurement in the domestic pharmaceutical sector. A case study looks at why it's not happening in South...
Researchers at the University of Stellenbosch, University of Cape Town, Groote Schuur Hospital, Western Cape Health Department, Swartland Hospital in Malmesbury, and Tygerberg Hospital have released a study on the ethical challenges facing...Research Africa
Is the acknowledged decline in hospital trauma admissions during the various lockdowns a result of the ban on alcohol, restrictions on people’s movement or a combination of both? Daily Maverick reports that an effort at research (conducted on...
March 17th, 2021South Africa has a far higher number of people with tuberculosis (TB) than previously thought and many of them have not been diagnosed or treated, found the country's first national prevalence survey.
The survey notes in it's foreword that A is...
March 17th, 2021Traditional healers trained to administer HIV testing and counselling to their patients significantly increased the proportion of patients receiving testing and linkage to care in rural Uganda.
In a cluster-randomised trial of 500 patients, 100%...
March 10th, 2021Increased activity of the immune system of urban Tanzanians— which may increase the risk of lifestyle diseases — may be due to dietary differences to their rural counterparts, found a study in Nature Immunology.
Urban Tanzanians have a more...
The dominant new variant of the COVID-19 virus in South Africa, 501Y.V2, can escape antibodies generated from previous infection. This means that antibodies from people who were infected with previous variants may not work well against 501Y.V2. The...
March 3rd, 2021Targeted Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) intervention against malaria is not inferior to the “blanket” approach, as well as being more cost effective, found a study by University of the Witwatersrand and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical...
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...
