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Vaccination prospects boosted by Sisonke results and reversal on Astra-Zeneca jab
South Africa’s slow vaccination programme should get a boost from the highly encouraging results of the Sisonke clinical trial of the single-dose Johnson &...
HPCSA’s new president ponders the poisoned chalice
On the kindest reading, the guardedness of Prof Mbulaheni Simon Nemutandani, the new President of the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA) is understandable...
Child poverty associated with smaller, slower-growing subcortical regions — 17-year study
Children in poverty are more likely to have cognitive and behavioural difficulties than their better-off peers, a 17-year US study has found.
Plenty of past...
Vaccination prospects boosted by Sisonke results and reversal on Astra-Zeneca jab
South Africa’s slow vaccination programme should get a boost from the highly encouraging results of the Sisonke clinical trial of the single-dose Johnson &...
Violence and looting cripple healthcare across Gauteng and KZN
Violent unrest and looting in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng have decimated hospitals and health services. COVID-19 vaccination has ground to a halt. Lives are being...
Gauteng’s 3rd Wave: Crippled public hospitals put ’severe strain’ on private facilities
With a key hospital shuttered and others crippled by recurrent water shortages, Gauteng is struggling to handle its largest wave of COVID-19 yet, reports...
CDC: Breakthrough COVID-19 infections mostly rare and mild
Of the more than 130m people in the US who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, there have been reports of some 10,000 breakthrough...
CDC investigates 'relatively few' reports of myocarditis from Pfizer vaccination
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating reports that a very small number of teenagers and young adults vaccinated with mRNA...
Powerful Pfizer response to Indian variant — Public Health England
Both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines showed effectiveness against symptomatic disease from the so-called Indian variant, with the Pfizer showing 88% efficacy after...
SA and world COVID deaths 3x higher than official figures — The Economist
The global death toll from COVID-19 is now 10m, threefold higher than the official estimates, according to a statistical modelling by The Economist. In...
Harness the ‘yuk factor’ to reduce meat consumption
A significant percentage of meat eaters have a disgust response to meat, making the "yuk factor" a possible intervention to help people who are...
Evidence review finds dog ownership is a risk factor for MRSA
Dog ownership is a risk factor for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) colonisation in humans, a German review and meta-analysis reports.
To get a better understanding...
Academics dismiss MAC-Vac head Schoub's angry SAMJ editorial as a 'distraction'
The dispute between leading scientists in academia and the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Vaccines' Prof Barry Schoub, continued this week in the SA Medical...
WHO report on COVID-19's Wuhan origins 'raises more questions than answers'
More than a year after the coronavirus pandemic began, the World Health Organisation has released its report laying out how the virus spread to...
Scientists savage SA's reasoning and ethics on vaccine choices
The reasoning behind the National Department of Health and the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Vaccines refusing to use the AstraZeneca vaccine locally are “muddled”,...
Political blows to AstraZeneca vaccine may boost vax hesitancy
Despite the World Health Organisation and the European regulator backing continued use, inoculations using the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine have been suspended in numerous countries, in what...
US life expectancy drops due to rise in working-age mortality — National Academy report
Increasing mortality rates among the working-age in the US since 2010 have been mainly driven by drug- and alcohol-related deaths, suicide, and cardiometabolic conditions...
Madhi's plea to government: Don't waste the AstraZeneca vaccine
Professor Shabir Madhi, eminent Medical Research Council vaccinologist and principal investigator in the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine trial locally, has urged the Health Department not to...
South Africa's AstraZeneca vaccine now on 'half-price' sale
The muddled acquisition AstraZeneca vaccine from India, found on delivery to have an April expiry date and not the normal six-month one, continues, writes...
Obesity, excess body fat may kill more in England and Scotland than smoking
Obesity and excess body fat may have contributed to more deaths in England and Scotland than smoking since 2014, according to University of Glasgow...
Wide ethnic minority health inequalities in England — GP Patient Survey data
England’s most extensive ever study of ethnic minority health in the over-55s has revealed substantial inequalities across most groups, compared with white British people....
SA needs 'all hands on deck' to avoid vaccine chaos — Scientists' Collective
For South Africans to get their lives back, they need vaccines by winter and herd immunity against COVID-19, says a Scientists’ Collective of 15...
Medical scheme resistance to ‘unfair’ vaccine funding model grows
The Department of Health’s funding model for South Africa's vaccination roll-out is “inherently unfair, unethical and illegal”, Profmed CEO Craig Comrie told MedicalBrief in...
Growing anger over SA government's vaccine 'fiasco'
South African medical scientists, joined by activist groups, health workers and opposition parties, have slammed the government and its Medical Advisory Committee (MAC) over...
Medical xenophobia and discrimination widespread in Gauteng health care
Medical xenophobia is widespread among South African health workers — especially nurses — in Gauteng health facilities, reports MedicalBrief. A University of the Witwatersrand...
AIDS battles hold valuable lessons for managing COVID-19
World AIDS Day this year found us deep amid another pandemic – COVID-19 – writes Prof Linda-Gail Bekker of the University of Cape Town...
Preterm birth a strong predictor of ill health throughout childhood — 1m-child NHS study
Preterm birth is a strong predictor of ill health throughout childhood, up to age 10, even among children born at 38 and 39 weeks...
Fauci wants a global rollout of America's 'right on schedule’ vaccines
Top global infectious diseases scientist and US presidential adviser Dr Anthony Fauci told doctors in South Africa during a PPS-sponsored webinar that it should...
COVID-19: Airlines and medical experts differ over risk of flying
Airlines suffered a COVID-19 setback this week when an expert rejected safety conclusions they drew from his research, writes MedicalBrief. But while numerous studies...
Sibling death markedly higher in low-and-middle-income African countries
In multiple sub-Saharan countries more than half of women reported having lost at least one sibling before the age of 25, found a large...
Mkhize culls his critics in order to 'strengthen' the MACs
All the most outspoken medical scientists serving on the South African government's Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) on COVID-19 who found themselves at public odds with government actions...
Healthy living – chiefly, not smoking – extends life for people with multi-morbidities
A large United Kingdom analysis covering a 10-year period found that regardless of multi-morbidities, engaging in a healthier lifestyle was associated with up to...
Lockdown's terrible damage to South African healthcare
While South Africa’s COVID-19 lockdown may have saved 16,000 lives by end December, its profound impairment of general healthcare meant slashed access to drugs...
Expert estimates of SA's pandemic deaths plummet again
Expert estimates of South African COVID-19 mortality continue to plummet, with the Actuarial Society of SA (Assa) this week slashing by almost in half an earlier...
FDA commissioner 'overstated' benefits of convalescent plasma
US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn has apologised for overstating the life-saving benefits of treating COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma. Earlier, in...
Malaria resurgence linked to decreased bio-efficacy of long-lasting insecticidal nets
Malaria resurgence in Papua New Guinea has been tied to apparent problems in the manufacture of long-lasting insecticidal nets.
Research shows that insecticide-treated mosquito nets,...
Ramaphosa scrambles to staunch anger over medical relief corruption
President Cyril Ramaphosa's administration is scrambling to deal with a wave of national outrage over evidence of billions of rands of corruption and looting...
Corruption feeding frenzy involving R2.2bn of pandemic relief funds
More than R2.2bn of emergency COVID-19 funds have been stolen in a corruption feeding frenzy, the news embarrassingly emerging just as the International Monetary...
COVID-19 transmission — An absence of data
Professor Robin Wood is conducting internationally ground-breaking research into infectious disease transmission at the Aerobiology and TB Research Unit, University of Cape Town, an...
Coronavirus chaos: BBC goes inside SA's 'hospitals of horrors’
An exclusive, weeks-long investigation inside filthy hospitals in South Africa has exposed an extraordinary array of systemic failures showing exhausted doctors and nurses overwhelmed...