Threads

Long Form

Teletubbies and friends: Inside the bizarre science behind your child’s favourite show

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.
Do big solutions come in small packages? Questions remain as to how practical baby boxes would be for South African parents and babies.

Could this birth trend make for more serene deliveries?

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

Why our changing climate is bad for your health

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 high court hearing of aparthied-era biological project head Wouter Basson has been postponed.

How long do we have to wait for Dr Death to be punished?

The much-anticipated sanctioning of Wouter Basson has still not happened, 13 years later.
Sydney Mokoena has not been able to access a doctor for eight months.

Life-saving medical care not available to ‘people of nothing’

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

‘If men are these monsters’: Life in the fray of SA’s gender-based violence projects

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.
A teenager receives a vaccination

How this country is beating anti-vaxxers at their own game

One in three French people think vaccines are unsafe. Here's how the country is fighting antivaxxers through social media.
Years of cocaine abuse led his life to ruin

Life’s precipice puts addiction into perspective

Three drug addicts tell their stories of devastation, desperation and, finally, the long road to recovery.
Tender delays have pushed a shortage of the popular birth control shot Nur-Isterate into its second year.

This popular birth control shot is out of stock for the second year running....

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

The importance of being Brimey

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.
Zimbabwean doctors went on strike in February for more money and more posts. In 2008

How to fund a failing health system

Could Zimbabwe's new Health Development Fund rescue the country's cash-strapped clinics and hospitals?
Refugees are at risk of developing mental disorders

‘The baby fell, but I just kept running’

Refugees can flee their countries, but they can't escape the trauma of war.
Autistic children in Lesotho don't have a school of their own. Most of them

Not a school in sight: Autistic children travel 500 km to learn

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

#SayHerName: The faces of South Africa’s femicide epidemic

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.

Meet Andy Gray, the ‘insider’s insider’ of SA drug policy

Pharmacy expert Andy Gray is the “insider’s insider” in South Africa’s public health sphere. Get to know him better here.
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A new kind of chemistry: Why science is rethinking the humble bed net

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