Health Beat shorts

Bayanda Maseko lost 2 000 chickens and more than R100 000 he invested in his farm in 2022, all because of loadshedding. Maseko says psychological support is needed in an industry where “it's every man for himself”. He speaks about the impact of these losses on his mental health in the March episode of Bhekisisa’s television show Health Beat.

In South Africa, 70% of female sex workers in a countrywide survey conducted in 2019 said they’d experienced violence from clients in the previous year. Find out how things change when sex work isn’t illegal from workers in New Zealand.

The justice department is currently reviewing comments from activists, academics and civil society on a proposed new law to decriminalise sex work. They will then ask the cabinet to take it to parliament before it can become law. Mia Malan interviews Deputy Justice Minister, John Jeffery, and United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health, Tlaleng Mofokeng, about what's next for sex workers.

A scholarship programme has been producing doctors for South Africa’s understaffed rural hospitals since 1999, but provinces don’t have the money to employ their recent graduates. Could the country’s planned National Health Insurance scheme fix this?

There are more unplanned pregnancies in countries where men hold more power in society, likely because women don’t have a say in how many children they have. The opposite is true when men support their partner’s use of contraception.

An anti-HIV injection called CAB-LA has just been approved by South Africa’s medicines regulator, and the health department says it could be in clinics by August 2023 — but only if the price is right. In Cape Town, more than 200 women have been using the two-monthly jab as part of a study. We spoke to three of them.

South Africa’s medicine regulator has registered CAB-LA, a new anti-HIV jab. But for how much will drugmaker ViiV Healthcare sell it to the government? We asked them in our TV programme, Health Beat.

South Africa’s medicines regulator will announce a decision on the approval of a two-monthly HIV prevention jab within days. If the shot is approved, the health department could start rolling it out on a large scale within nine months — but that depends on the injection’s price.