Long Form

What makes the world’s most successful children’s TV programmes so addictive – and so strange? Linda Geddes explores the research on kids’ TV, what it’s teaching us about childhood development, and how that can help make programmes for the better.

Water births are a growing phenomenon in South Africa and globally. But this birth method is controversial – scientific evidence is lacking.

The Earth is getting hotter and extreme weather events are becoming more common. It’s bad news for our lives. We break down how climate change links to poor health.

The much-anticipated sanctioning of Wouter Basson has still not happened, 13 years later.

Appalling conditions in Free State hospitals reveal a health care system that seems to be corrupt from top to bottom.

South Africa is rushing to roll out its first national gender-based violence action plan. But as bureaucracy and the coronavirus pandemic stall progress, violence against women continues unabated. And the hot spots that will receive extra resources, it seems, have been wrongly identified.

One in three French people think vaccines are unsafe. Here's how the country is fighting antivaxxers through social media.

Three drug addicts tell their stories of devastation, desperation and, finally, the long road to recovery.

Women who have been forced to go without their usual birth control shot are now facing the consequences of months-long shortages.

With a black beret “à la the EFF” and fire-engine red scrubs, Ebrahim Variava is not scared to speak out against the ills of a broken public health system — something that got him suspended from his post as head of internal medicine at the Tshepong Hospital in Klerksdorp in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis. Meet the doctor for whom patients are always the priority.

Could Zimbabwe's new Health Development Fund rescue the country's cash-strapped clinics and hospitals?

Refugees can flee their countries, but they can't escape the trauma of war.

A mother's love led her to South Africa to find a school for her son with autism.

This is an ode to the women whose names made it into news outlets between 2018 and 2020. It’s also a tribute to those who didn’t – the faceless, nameless women whose stories will remain untold. This project is a collaboration among Bhekisisa, Media Hack and the Canon Collins Trust.

Pharmacy expert Andy Gray is the “insider’s insider” in South Africa’s public health sphere. Get to know him better here.

Disease-spreading mozzies may be getting wise to our best defences, but science is fighting back.