News and analysis

Men who have sex with men can now take on-demand pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, safely.

Forty-four new National Health Insurance (NHI) positions, based at the national health department head office in Tshwane, will be advertised in the coming weeks and filled by January 2023.

Countries in central and sub-Saharan Africa will be hit the hardest by heat waves as climate change ramps up. What can Africans do to survive?

A new study shows that female rape survivors are 60% more likely to contract HIV within a year or two after their rape than women who have not been raped.

Follow our live coverage of the health department’s 23 May briefing on South Africa’s cholera outbreak.

The deaths of at least 144 mental health patients shook SA to its core and led to a historic arbitration that lasted more than 40 days.

British American Tobacco in South Africa says 200 of its workers will be out of a job soon, but public health researchers argue they’re using misleading figures to back the retrenchments.

KwaZulu-Natal’s state facilities are in the lead when it comes to stocking HIV prevention medicines (97% of them do), and the Western Cape is last in line at 8%. But, the home of the Mother City is the only province in which men use HIV prevention medicine more than women.

Vaccines don’t last forever. When they reach their expiration date, the jabs need to be disposed of in a way that ensures they aren’t retrievable. A waste management company explains how this is done.

It’s too soon to tell what effect the COVID-19 pandemic had on teen pregnancies. But here’s what the data shows so far.

Big changes are coming to South Africa’s fight against sexually transmitted infections, according to a draft of the country’s fifth HIV action plan.

Medicine shortages are common. But what happens when a shortage of an effective medication happens because people who the medicine isn’t intended for are drying its stocks? We explain here.

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.

A cheap antibiotic (called doxycycline) used to treat skin infections and to stop people from getting malaria could also work to prevent chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis, found a United States study in men who have sex with men and transgender women.

South Africa plans to make opioid substitutes such as methadone available at all state clinics and hospitals over the next five years. Methadone helps wean people off drugs such as heroin. Here are the five things the government needs to do to get this right.

Government hospitals are likely to run out of beds before the end of July. The health department is in the process of signing deals with the private healthcare sector for additional beds at set prices. But how does this work in practise? We’ve asked Nicholas Crisp, one of the health department’s chief negotiators.