Articles

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.

Antiretrovirals like dolutegravir help keep people healthy. But their use adds to global warming, which drives climate change. Switching to newer forms of medicines can help to lower the carbon emissions from these medicines. But we don’t have enough to make this a reality. Here’s what has to change.

The Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UCT, in collaboration with the Mastercard Foundation, is offering an academic fellowship to help develop...

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.

Climate change is affecting the way in which we’re producing food and how polluted the water we drink and the air we breathe are, but only about one in three governments pointed out the impact of climate change on their citizens’ health in their yearly United Nations Debate statements last year.

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.

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.

The proposed Tobacco Bill will treat vapes like traditional tobacco products, banning public use and advertising, to stop young people from picking up the habit. But research shows that e-cigarette rules could lead to a spike in traditional smoking. Yet not everyone agrees. Here’s why it’s a tricky issue.

In Westbury, Johannesburg, drugs and gangs overshadow daily life, trapping new generations in addiction and crime. While police crackdowns bring short-lived relief, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime tells Health Beat that affordable rehabilitation and medical treatment for drug dependents are better investments.

Health Beat examines South Africa’s drug policy and finds out why policing and health are operating in silos, instead of following our National Drug Master Plan.

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. 

Zane Wilson founded the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (Sadag) in 1994, in the midst of her own debilitating struggle with panic disorder. Thirty years later, the group is the largest and most impactful mental health organisation in South Africa. Bhekisisa’s Sean Christie found Wilson and several of Sadag’s staff in a proud and reflective mood.

Gilead Sciences, the maker of a twice-a year anti-HIV injection, has approached South Africa’s medicine regulator to discuss how to get the shot registered locally as fast as possible in the country. Sahpra will have to work with the European Medicines Agency on this, as it’s severely understaffed and unable to review medicines speedily.

For the past decade, the Chiawelo Community Practice (CCP) in Soweto has tested how primary healthcare that starts within communities through things like exercise...

By the end of August, 1.65-million HIV-negative people in South Africa had used the anti-HIV pill at least once, making the country’s HIV prevention pill programme the world’s largest. We break down South Africa’s latest anti-HIV pill numbers and explain how they fit into global targets.

A woman’s chance of being killed in the Eastern Cape is almost double what it is in the country as a whole and about half as likely in Limpopo as in the rest of South Africa, results from the South African Medical Research Council’s fourth survey on femicide, reveal.