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Talking Points
The rights of foreign nationals in accessing SA healthcare
Directives recently issued by the national Health Department and Gauteng Health requiring foreign nationals to pay in full for healthcare at public facilities weren’t only...
Academic medicine must step up with LGBTQ patients
Medical schools have failed to include in their standard medical curricula training on hormone therapy, gender-affirming surgeries, or even the basics of sexual orientation...
Psychotherapist talks about suppression of his ‘politically incorrect' research
Psychotherapist James Caspian attempted to undertake a research project into ‘detransitioning’, where those who have transitioned to another gender come to regret their decision...
Vaccination advocates face vicious campaigns of online abuse
When the naturopath Elias Kass testified before a Washington state senate committee on 20 February with a baby on his chest and a pacifier...
The war over faecal microbiota transplants
Will corporate greed get in the way of patient access to non-profit stool for faecal transplants? The New York Times reports that there are...
Eskom crisis may be dwarfed by the looming NHI disaster
As much as the country is currently focused on the crisis in Eskom, the nation seems to have lost sight of the looming National...
The Lancet Commission on Obesity recommendations 'deeply problematic'
The Lancet Commission on Obesity, three years in the making, has just been released. It is an infringement of personal freedoms and based on...
Ticking boxes instead of actually doing something to save SA's ailing health system
This is an illness we have as a country: we convene summits, appoint task teams, create war rooms, and hold press conferences, but very...
FDA warns against the vampire fad
Unscrupulous parties are touting blood plasma infusion from young donors to fight ageing or serious illnesses. This week the US Food and Drug Administration warned against...
Medical journals slated for ethics failure on Chinese organ donor articles
A world-first study has called for the mass retraction of more than 400 scientific papers on organ transplantation, amid fears the organs were obtained...
Mapping gender inequality in the scientific community
A special issue of The Lancet reports that gender inequality in the scientific community starts right at the beginning of the scientific process –...
Delay in release of private health sector report 'bad news'
The release of a final report about the state of competition in South Africa’s private health sector has been delayed again, writes Wezile Chitha,...
'Urgent need' for antiretroviral pregnancy registry in SA
South Africa has an "appalling record" on pregnancy registries but one is urgently needed to answer questions about the new antiretroviral dolutegravir, which is being...
Gene therapy: A game changer for those with sickle-cell disease
With advances in gene therapy, scientists have begun to talk of a cure for sickle-cell disease, an inherited condition that mainly afflicts people of...
Are the Dutch euthanasia laws a 'slippery slope'?
The idea that we humans have a variety of deaths to choose from is more familiar in the Netherlands than anywhere else. But the...
The 'battle of ideologies' may further delay healthcare legislation
Because 2019 is an election year, legislation arising out of a four-and-a-half year Competition Commission inquiry and the proposed National Health Insurance plan may...
Are doctors turning down rural community service posts being 'picky'?
After turning down placements at rural hospitals, hundreds of newly qualified doctors remain unemployed while the country’s rural state hospitals remain desperately understaffed because...
Vaccine hesitancy — one of the world's top 10 health threats
The World Health Organisation has ranked vaccine hesitancy – growing resistance to widely available lifesaving vaccines – as one of the top 10 health...
The complex reasons behind SA's organ donor shortage
While religious and cultural practices play a role in the acute shortage of organ donations, her extensive research as identified other critical factors, writes...
Caesarean rates are rocketing in SA
About 26% of babies born in South African public hospitals are born by caesarean, the latest available figures show. Bhekisisa looks at the...
A 'myopic focus on weight' drives the popularity of keto diet
This time last year, Google searches for the keto diet outranked those for paleo for the first time. Laura Thomas, registered nutritionist writes in...
Unregulated US fertility industry a haven for controversial services
The US fertility industry remains largely unregulated and draws IVF patients from around the world seeking controversial services – not just sex selection, but...
Bacon-cancer link: Outgoing UN agency head defends its work
The head of the UN agency that provoked a massive outcry and some ridicule when it declared that bacon, red meat and glyphosate weedkiller...
Africans living longer but spend those extra years in poor health
People are now living longer in sub-Saharan Africa than they did two decades ago, writes Charles Shey Wiysonge, director, Cochrane South Africa, in The Conversation. However,...
Russia: The faltering frontline in the HIV/Aids war
In Russia and its former Eastern bloc satellites, Aids deaths have climbed 38% in 10 years – almost as much as they have fallen...
NHI plans are ‘an act of desperation’ — DA
Plans by the Minister of Health, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, to push ahead with the National Health Insurance are ‘an act of desperation ... doomed...
UCT professor warns about Africa's science brain drain
Not only are many science graduates in Africa unemployed but the situation is getting worse, fuelling a brain drain to Europe, the UK and North America, warned...
Overcoming the perceived and real barriers to HIV testing
There was a time when HIV was untreatable, heavily stigmatised, and the benefits of testing weren’t as clear as they are now. But, writes...
Decrease in malaria deaths flatlining
Despite a few bright spots, the recently released World Malaria Report paints a gloomy picture of stagnating progress and increasing concentration of the burden...
FDA's 'deceptive' system allowed implant complaints to escape notice
Because of the way that the US Food and Drug Administration allowed the manufacturers of breast implants to report complaints, thousands of adverse events, including deaths,...
Duty of care is also for non-medically qualified administrative staff
It is not only medical practitioners but also administrative staff who owe a duty of care to their patients, in conducting themselves with reasonable...
The Bottom Line – the costs and risks of the butt-lift
Butt lift injections and buttock implants were the fastest-growing plastic surgery in the US, up 58% from 2012, but the British Association of Aesthetic...
Africa bears the brunt of the counterfeit medicine curse
Almost half the fake and low-quality medicines reported to the World Health Organisation between 2013 and 2017 were found to be in sub-Saharan Africa,...
As China's health system falters, the desperate smuggle drugs or make their own
Out of a desperation born of necessity, ordinary Chinese are buying drug ingredients online and making them up at home, reports The New York Times....
Egg providers changing the way SA thinks about assisted reproduction
There is limited literature addressing assisted reproduction in Africa, yet the continent’s societies are pronatalist, with immense social, economic and religious imperatives to reproduce, writes...
UK-trained forensic pathologist's alleged role in murder
Medical associations have condemned the alleged role of the top UK-trained Saudi forensic pathologist had in the killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, reports...
The rise and rise of the cholesterol deniers
Butter is back. Saturated fat is good for you. Cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease. By far the greatest threat to our...
SA pharmacies 'knowingly stock dangerous and ineffective products'
The US Food and Drug Administration's Tainted Products Marketed as Dietary Supplements database lists hundreds of products with hidden active ingredients that are unsafe...
There should be no barriers of access to life-saving medicines — ConCourt judge
The intellectual property system remains wildly skewed, favouring the pharmaceutical industry over the public interest, writes Constitutional Court Judge Edwin Cameron in Daily Maverick.
Eighteen...
MTBPS gives no concrete commitment to address crisis in health
With elections looming in 2019, the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS) was always going to be a case of “flattering to deceive” with no...