Opinion

This is the first in Bhekisisa's series of commentaries marking the International Aids Conference in Rio de Janeiro that starts on Sunday. Netflix's The Polygamist has sparked conversation across Africa — but its portrayal of HIV also spreads harmful myths. Thabani Nyoni explains why ending Aids will depend as much on defeating stigma as on scientific breakthroughs.

Scientific papers don't travel to fireside conversations. People do. In this essay a young scientist explains how he got to know this. As the anti-HIV

Access to harm reduction treatments, including opioid substitution therapy, clean needles and drug counselling treatment could save lives. I’m living proof. But there are plenty of others who don’t make it out.

Specialist family physicians complete the same type of postgraduate training as paediatricians, psychiatrists and surgeons. So why do private medical aids limit their ability to practice what they trained for?

A new HIV prevention injection could change the course of the epidemic — but only if people trust it. Research shows we can pre-empt the false claims already forming around it. The window is open now.

On June 5, South Africa is about to begin one of its most important HIV prevention drives in decades. The country will start to roll out an HIV prevention injection that has to be taken only twice a year. Will the launch become more than a symbolic event that shows what serious HIV prevention leadership looks like at a time when donor funding is shrinking and global uncertainty is growing?

From throat and anal cancers to reduced fertility, the human papillomavirus poses serious risks to men that go largely undetected and unvaccinated. South Africa vaccinates girls, but boys are left out.

In less than a month, South Africa will start rolling out the most potent HIV prevention medication the world has seen. But that alone doesn’t guarantee that HIV-negative people who need this twice-a-year injection — called lenacapavir — will use it. Katherine Gill, a scientist who has researched HIV prevention medication for over a decade, shares nine lessons that could help our LEN roll-out work.

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

When researchers talked with dozens of girls and young women aged 15–24 across South Africa, they found drinking is on trend, as well as...

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

While we’ve been arguing about the merits of electronic cigarettes as “safer” alternatives to tobacco and the fantastical need for a multitude of vape flavours, our children are getting addicted. Pulmonologist Richard van Zyl-Smit says it's time to put an end to the discussions and make laws that protect them.

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.

Although taxpayer money now funds the bulk of South Africa’s HIV programme, getting to the point where we have the largest HIV treatment programme in the world, would not have been possible without donor support. But the reality is that the golden age of health development assistance is over. Can there be opportunity in adversity?

If the government is serious about building trust in the health sector, it must start by fixing the way the National Health Insurance (NHI) will be governed. Adjusting the scheme’s governance framework would show that leaders are not only hearing, but acting on the loudest demand to come out of the country’s first national convention in August: better governance and real accountability.

Medical school prepares our future doctors to save lives. But with death being the endpoint for all of us, shouldn’t we be talking about it?