Articles

Government clinics often run out of contraceptive medicines, which has been the case since 2015. The latest Stop Stockouts and Ritshidze report shows that...

Yogan Pillay has worked under every health minister since 1994, making him the ultimate healthcare insider. Now he’s an outsider, but one with tremendous influence. Sean Christie visited him at home in Pretoria to hear what he’s been up to.

How much does cutting down on carbon emissions, by doing things like using public transport, walking or cycling to get to places, really save? COP29 was a good place to find out. Our team tracked their steps and calculated how much carbon they emitted — and saved.

Almost 5% of the world’s carbon emissions come from the healthcare sector. Rethinking how hospitals run and deal with waste can get this figure down. But South Africa’s healthcare workers say regulations are stopping them from doing this — and so playing their part in slowing climate change.

South Africa needs to get more than 550 000 HIV-positive men on antiretrovirals before the end of next year to help the country meet its targets for ending Aids by 2030. But in the past it’s been difficult to get men to take up — and stay — on HIV treatment. Could building an all-male sports-like team with a coach help solve it?

The government is facing close to R78-billion in medical negligence claims, which is nearly 80% of the budget used to treat people when they’re sick. But not all of the cases are legit. Find out what the data reveals.

Offering state HIV patients who qualify a six-month supply of antiretroviral (ARVs) pills at a time, so that they only have to return to clinics or community pick-up points twice a year to collect their medication, is one of the goals in the health department’s contingency plan to cope with the near collapse of US-funded HIV projects. This will lower the work load of health workers, the strategy that was sent to provincial health departments and public health facilities on 11 February, says.

A new proposal that aims to get more women to breastfeed, says it could cut back the greenhouse gas emissions that lead to global warming and get countries that produce the bulk of emissions to pay for it. 

South African projects funded through the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, Pepfar, are exempted — at least until the end of April — from the executive order that US President Donald Trump issued on Saturday.

Has psychiatric care in our government health system improved eight years after Life Esidimeni during which 141 mental health patients died because of negligence? Health Beat visits a community mental health organisation, talks to Section27, the Gauteng government and a counselling organisation, Heal SA, to find out.

A leaked memo for grant management staff of the US government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), dated March 25, instructs officers to hold “all [research] awards to entities located in South Africa”.

Babies getting HIV from their infected mothers is rare in a cluster of 39 villages in the OR Tambo district in the Eastern Cape — despite more than a third of pregnant women in this rural part of the province being HIV positive. Find out how an NGO’s peer-support programme here helps.

A month into the foreign aid crisis that the Trump administration’s funding cuts have resulted in, the big question in the HIV world is: what will happen to the US government’s Aids fund, Pepfar? In this podcast, Mia Malan asks former Pepfar head of staff, Jirair Ratevosian, what the future holds, and what will happen if the US government stops its contributions to the Global Fund for HIV, TB and Malaria.

The Health Beat team visits a community suffering the health effects of living near mine waste and finds out whether our new Climate Change Act will make a difference to those affected by air pollution.

Four days after our TV show, Health Beat, was broadcast on eNCA — the Freedom Recovery Centre, which helps drug users sober up, got confirmation from the Gauteng government that they would receive the subsidy they had been waiting for for months. Without it, they would have had to close their doors.

New regulations likely to come into force early next year, will see South Africa’s roughly 200 000 healers having to register with a regulatory council who will oversee their practice. But opposing views between healers and the health department could scupper the plan.