Articles

Shame, silence and incomplete sex ed are stopping South African girls from getting treated for sexually transmitted infections — even as rates stay stubbornly high.

South Africa has less than eight years before the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria phases out its grants entirely — and...

New research shows a steep decline in adolescent pregnancy rates across all nine provinces from 2021 to 2025, reversing course from previous years. It’s good news, even if it's not clear why it’s happening.

The uptake of the once-every-six-month HIV prevention jab lenacapavir (LEN) in South Africa will be heavily affected by the Trump administration’s funding cuts to the country, a new report has found. Researchers conducted in-depth interviews with doctors, nurses, peer counsellors, transgender and young people, sex workers, gay and bisexual men and government health workers with personal experience of the funding cuts in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

In Burkina Faso, more than 70 languages are spoken, armed conflict continues to escalate, and half the country's psychiatrists have left. With few mental health services available, families and traditional healers absorb what the system cannot.

Experts say South Africa's contradictory approach to drugs — treating addiction as both a disease and a crime — is fuelling a worsening crisis in places like Westbury, where illicit drugs plague the community.

As South Africa's climate warms, the air is changing — and the effects are landing directly in people's lungs. Here's what reporters need to know.

SA’s first consignment of the twice-a-year anti-HIV injection, lenacapavir — 37 920 doses — arrived last week at OR Tambo Airport via two shipments from Dublin. The batches reached the country six weeks later than expected. The delay of the shipment meant the health department couldn’t start its roll-out on April 1, as it had originally planned, and had to postpone it to mid to late May.

It’s been a year since the US government’s aid cuts sent shock waves around the world. But in one maternity hospital in Freetown it’s the loss of UK funding that threatens to unravel years of steady progress to address maternal mortality.

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has met with the South African Medical Association — one of the organisations taking him to court about the National Health Insurance Act — to talk about “things we have in common”. President Cyril Ramaphosa is also planning to meet with Business Unity South Africa, again, after an initial meeting in 2024, during which they discussed alternatives to the NHI.

Norbert Ndjeka was born on World TB Day. Decades later, he would reshape how South Africa treats the deadliest forms of the disease.

South Africa is trialling a cheap, portable TB test that costs a third of the current standard. But the new test can't detect drug-resistant TB, raising questions about how much diagnostic accuracy a national programme can afford to trade for reach.

The HIV prevention shot lenacapavir will be rolled out at South African clinics within the next couple of months — from 2027, the health department will also buy generics. But how best to spend the HIV prevention budget so that the country can drive infections down as fast as possible? We take a look at what modelling data shows.

CAB-LA, the two-monthly HIV prevention injection, was approved in South Africa over three years ago but never reached government clinics. As lenacapavir prepares to launch, CAB-LA's quiet exit carries lessons about what it takes to turn good science into public health.

Six years after Cyclone Idai ripped through Beira, the city's wounds — physical and psychological — are still raw. As a new storm gathered in the Indian Ocean in February, journalist Sean Christie found a city caught in a permanent state of waiting for the next disaster to hit.

South Africa’s National Aids Council, Sanac, has asked local drug companies to submit applications by April 7 to make generic versions of an anti-HIV jab that could end Aids by 2043 in the country. The original version of the once-every-six-months shot, known as lenacapavir, is produced by the US pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences. Sanac will submit a shortlist of successful applicants, who met the requirements of the Council’s expression of interest call, to Gilead by July.