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About 40% of the health workers who collected data in the country’s HIV hotspots either lost their jobs in February or will be jobless in September, leaving a massive knowledge gap in their wake. Experts warn not knowing what we don’t know is dangerous.

It's been two decades since the denialism war was won in South Africa. Now HIV scientists and government are pitted against each other once again, with one side saying the health minister is in denial over the impact of US funding cuts and the minister is accusing the activists and the media of overblowing the crisis and spreading disinformation.

While discoveries like these rarely make the news, it happens all the time. We asked leading forensic pathologist Shakeera Holland what her team found after studying remains at the Diepkloof Forensic Pathology Service in Soweto.

How does ADHD medicine work and what can — and can’t — it do? The medication is often abused by university students wanting to cram during exams. But, as psychiatrist Renata Schoeman tells Mia Malan, ADHD meds don’t work for people without the condition.

Today, people over 50 make up the second largest group of South Africa’s HIV-positive population. But as people age, health problems like high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes rise too, which means more and more people will have to be treated for these conditions — on top of getting HIV care. We look at what the numbers show.

Plenty of people told Sarah Stein that practising medicine would be difficult. Now, as a fifth year medical student at the University of Cape Town, she wishes she would have listened more carefully.

Women have had the right to choose to end their pregnancies for 30 years in SA — and government facilities that offer the service do it for free. Here’s what is (still) driving so many of them to unsafe providers.

Baby Savers South Africa is taking the government to court over the ban on baby boxes in Gauteng. Are they a harmful tool that makes child abandonment and trafficking easy, or a lifesaver for mothers with nowhere to turn? With about 3 500 babies abandoned unsafely each year, Health Beat looks at whether a maternal support grant could help change that.

Trump’s slash and burn to foreign aid has hit HIV programmes hard. Here’s what this Limpopo clinic has been doing to prepare for such cuts — and what they’ve learned about surviving over the past 20 years.

R6.65-billion — or $350-million. That’s how much South Africa receives in annual funding from the US government’s National Institutes of Health. If the country loses all of its NIH funding, the country could lose 70% of its medical research capacity, Bhekisisa’s data team’s sums reveal.

Instead of the Aids denialism of decades past, it’s US funding cuts that could lead to up to 300 000 more HIV infections in the next four years. Activists like Sisonke Msimang say the past has some answers for the current fight.

The health department is convinced that all US government funding for HIV and TB projects in SA will end by September 30. The department has calculated that it needs R2.82-billion to plug the gap for the rest of the financial year after the Trump administration cut more than half of such support to the country in February. But these funds have yet to be raised, and the stakes are high.

Up to 16% of school-aged children and 4% of adults have attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, show international studies. But in South Africa, the proportion of people with ADHD who use government health facilities is as low as 2% because the public sector doesn’t have enough of the right health workers to diagnose people.

In her nearly 30 years in public healthcare, Rolene Wagner has risen to lead an institution that many had given up on: the debt-wracked, conflict-ridden Eastern Cape department of health. Her upbringing has custom-suited her to the task.

A modelling study shows the six-monthly anti-HIV jab, lenacapavir, could end Aids in SA by 2032 — but only if between two and four million HIV-negative people in the country would need to use the jab every year over the next eight years. How much should we pay for it?

What’s wrong about blaming teenage pregnancy on bad girls, bad families and bad men? It ignores the system that got them there in the first place.