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Talking Points
State medico-legal exposure: A need to move beyond platitudes
The National Health Insurance Bill fails to make any provision for medico-legal exposure in State facilities, beyond platitudes about quality health care, writes Donald...
Africa Check puts together the numbers on doctor-patient ratios
The fact-checking organisation Africa Check looks at doctor-patient ratios in both public and private healthcare, following criticism by the Treatment Action Campaign that the...
Amsterdam's famous tolerance delivers health benefits
Amsterdam’s tolerance of sex work and recreational drugs has translated into better health outcomes for its citizens. But, asks an Health-e News report, can...
Tougher anti-smoking laws in the pipeline for SA
When South Africa introduced designated smoking areas in restaurants and bars there was vehement opposition from sections of the hospitality industry. But, writes Savera Kalideen,...
UCT leader should apologise for aggravating student trauma
University of Cape Town Vice-Chancellor Mamokgethi Phakeng owes students an apology for aggravating the 'trauma' students experienced at the suicide of Professor Bongani Mayosi...
Mayosi's death a reminder that actions have consequences
Following the suicide of Professor Bonging Mayosi, South Africans cannot deny the oppositional tide unleashed against anyone who dared to speak critically about the...
Why SA must rein in the private healthcare industry
Criticisms that the Health Market Inquiry is an assault on the free market ignores the reality that there is no market in health care in South...
Motsoaledi: 'No caring state should leave such inequality unattended'
Critics of the National Health Insurance plan are "hardliners, driven by their desire to defend and perpetuate their own positions of huge benefit and...
The 'favoured child' still desperately needs intervention
Almost four decades on and despite having benefited as favoured child of global health funding, the HIV/Aids epidemic is far from over, writes Professor Linda-Gail...
Esidimeni: Global lessons from a local tragedy
The former SA head of mental health services Melvyn Freeman has broken years of silence over the Life Esidimeni tragedy, writing in The Lancet...
Experts call for BJSM study on intersex athletes to be retracted
The study the International Association of Athletics Federations relied on to decide a new regulation on intersex athletes, like Caster Semenya, was flawed and should...
The anti-vaxxer myth has 'become tiresome'
Anti-vaxxers, who generally believe that there is a high risk that vaccines cause serious side-effects such as autism, hate the term “anti-vaxxer”, writes Ivo...
Assessing the actions taken to save Robert Kennedy after 1968 shooting
50 years after the assassination of US Senator Robert F Kennedy, a Duke University study assesses whether Kennedy could have survived if he were...
SA's bleak medico-legal dilemma: How to avoid Jarndyce vs Jarndyce
Modern medico-legal disputes remain reminiscent of Jarndyce v Jarndyce – the fictional long-running court case that terminated in a judgment only when there were no...
SAHRC debate on the right of healthcare providers to protest
Just because healthcare workers are providing an essential service does not mean they can't protest – or does it? The Times reports that the...
Software 'performs better than humans' in Royal College's GP exam
Its commercial artificial intelligence diagnostics software performs better than humans in the Royal College of General Practitioner’s exam that must be passed to become...
NHI demands data sharing between insurers and doctors
Healthcare looks to data to help solve primary challenges in the access, quality and affordability of care in the wake of realising universal health...
Women struggling to have proper conversations with male doctors
Women struggle to get their needs met by doctors because the profession is “overwhelmingly male”, a health minister in the UK has suggested. Jackie...
NHI Bill 'won't be a silver bullet' in saving public healthcare in SA
There can be no dispute that SA’s health care system needs major reforms, writes Professor Laetitia Rispel of the University of the Witwatersrand in...
SA flight attendant grounded because of 'out of date' HIV protocols
South Africa's Civil Aviation Authority dragged a flight attendant who disclosed his positive HIV-status through a bruising battle over his right to work and...
The hurdles and frustrations faced by women in medicine
Hospital employees and patients sometimes still need ‘gentle clarification’ that their female physician is not the hospital social worker or some other junior functionary,...
Admitting SA's health crisis the first step to fixing it
A Business Day editorial says that Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi's selective use of statistics is a classic case of a politician under fire...
Is it abuse when a parent ignores a child's depression?
A barrier to the treatment of adolescent depression that is rarely addressed is when parents ignore obvious signs of depression, writes Professor Michael Shapiro...
Food fad? New illness? Trying to find what is really behind gluten sensitivity
Enigmatic cases with a mystery ailment, reports Science Mag. These patients were convinced gluten was making them sick but there was no evidence that...
Looking to an 'experimental' intervention to fight new Ebola outbreak
An unlicensed vaccine, made by Merck, which performed exceptionally well during the deadly West African Ebola outrbreak of 2015, is being trialled in the...
Motsoaledi is 'crippling' SA's ability to train enough doctors
'Is anyone surprised that the programme that trains South Africans as doctors in Cuba has been a catastrophic failure?' asks Jasson Urbach of the...
Funding allocated to TB 'pitiful' in comparison to HIV
The funding that has been allocated in the past to TB is ‘pitiful in comparison to HIV’, says Dr Helen Cox, an epidemiologist at...
Funding 'still the biggest stumbling block' to NHI
The successful implementation of South Africa's National Health Insurance (NHI) programme hinges on its funding model, according to a legal expert. Partner at law...
SA-Cuba medical training programme: Flawed but successful
After more than 20 years, the contentious SA-Cuba medical training programme is being downscaled. Business Day's Tamar Kahn assesses the situation as the largest...
Lancet Commission: Access to legal abortions still a problem in SA
Despite SA’s liberal abortion laws, the government has failed to turn policy into a reality, with only 270 of 8,000 health facilities offering termination,...
Time for a paradigm shift in the deployment of preventive interventions
Why are highly effective preventive behavioural interventions adopted slowly, if at all? Dr Katherine Pryor and Dr Kevin Volpp write in the New England...
World's chief anti-vaxxer 'still spreading his baleful messages'
Andrew Wakefield’s discredited 20-year campaign to link the MMR vaccine to autism has been sustained by a simple scientific fact: it is impossible to...
SA should give the NHI a chance
Natasha Salant, a law graduate from the University of Cape Town, currently interning at the Rural Health Advocacy Project writes in a Bhekisisa report.
“About...
Psychiatrist argues that brain inflammation is the true cause of depression
A Cambridge University psychiatrist suggests there is a radical way to transform the lack, for nearly 40 years, of a significant advance in the...
Drop in US funding may cause HIV/Aids epidemic to 'go out of control'
The HIV and Aids epidemic could become uncontained if current funding trends continue, warned Dr Mark Dybul, one of the founding architects of the...
Study accuses Asperger of assisting in Nazi euthanasia programme
The Austrian doctor after whom Asperger syndrome is named was an active participant in the Nazi regime, assisting in the Third Reich’s so-called euthanasia...
The vaccine dilemma: Weighing benefits for many against risks for a few
Vaccines protect huge numbers of people, generally children, from serious diseases, but in rare cases, certain vaccines can tragically cause harm. How do scientists...
WHO dismay at SA's failure to enact health regulations Bills
The World Health Organisation has used 'coded diplomatic language' to express alarm at the failure of a 'misdirected and paralytic' SA Parliament to enact...
War on malaria – On the brink of a breakthrough?
Malaria is a disease almost as old as humanity itself, but now science is bringing out the big guns in a bid to destroy...
A case against ritual male circumcision in the UK
Niall McCrae, a lecturer in mental health at King’s College London, is troubled by the act of male circumcision for religious rather than clinical purposes....