Features

In some of Kenya’s informal settlements, the floods that wreck homes several times a year aren't always about raging rivers and violent storms. It’s also about drains that don't work. Sean Christie travelled to find out what a lifetime of sewage through the front door does to the mind — and why the same pattern is playing out in places like Cape Town and Beira.

As executive director of SECTION27, Sasha Stevenson spent more than a decade fighting for migrants' right to healthcare, holding the state accountable for the Life Esidimeni deaths, and navigating the legal maze of the National Health Insurance Act. She tells Sean Christie why, when it comes to human rights law, patience is everything.

The palliative care team at Groote Schuur Hospital fields questions about death and dying that the rest of the health system struggles to answer. Here’s why getting those answers right takes an entire network of people.

Northern Mozambique has been absorbing what humanitarian groups call “multiple shocks” for years. Conflict, cyclones, cholera, displacement; each arriving before the last has been processed, each landing on a health system already buckling. What happens to people's minds in conditions like these? And who is there to help?

When climate disasters strike Africa, the physical damage is obvious. But we’re only beginning to understand the psychological toll. Here’s why Western definitions of trauma can miss so much, and how one group of researchers are trying to get a better picture.

By all accounts, Hasina Subedar is who you call when you need to roll out, well, anything new in public health. Known for her grit, grace and humour, the non-conformist middle child from Pietermaritzburg started out as a nurse 30 years ago. She is now responsible for getting the game-changer medication for HIV prevention into 360 clinics around the country.

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.

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

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.

At 33, retired Constitutional Court justice Edwin Cameron thought he had, maybe, seven years left. His story traces the arc from certain death from Aids to a chronic, manageable condition at 73 — and asks what happens when the generation who fought for life finally get to grow old.

A growing body of evidence suggests that unpredictable weather linked to climate change has the potential to injure people’s minds, leading to an increase in the development of common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety. Sean Christie travelled in rural western Burkina Faso recently, where a combination of seasonal flooding, infernal heat and violent attacks has farmers operating under immense strain.

The top read stories this year were focused mainly on Trump’s funding cuts and the 6-monthly anti-HIV jab set to roll out next year. But our staff picks were more nuanced. Read what you most read and we most loved.

From porters to engineers, hospital staff navigate chronic underfunding and staffing shortages while maintaining world-class care at one of South Africa's most storied medical institutions.

National education policy, which has been in place for over two decades, says we need to ensure educators have the training and skills to...

On a recent day, Indira Govender, a doctor in a rural community in northern KwaZulu-Natal, was busy with her weekly session at the local clinic when she witnessed three people breaking down mentally. There wasn’t an ambulance to take the patients to hospital, which was what clinic guidelines say should have happened. But Govender says that day wasn’t a system failure.

From discontinued insulin pens to overpriced TB drugs, meet the young South African holding drug makers to account on behalf of patients.