Safura Abdool Karim

Dr Safura Abdool Karim is a public health lawyer focusing on applications of the law and policy to improve public health. She is presently a postdoctoral researcher at the Berman Institute, Johns Hopkins University (and jointly with the Ethox Center, Oxford University).

Safura’s scholarship more broadly is on public health and human rights and her research converges on the legal determinants of health and rights-based approaches to prevention and control of both infectious and non-communicable diseases. Most of her work in infectious diseases has focused on vaccine equity and she has been called upon to advise a number of international bodies on issues of COVID-19 vaccine access in Africa. She also provided technical assistance in developing South Africa’s COVID-19 regulations. With regard to non-communicable diseases, her research has included regulatory interventions such as sugar taxes, sodium restrictions in food and child-directed food marketing and simplified nutrition labelling, with the latter two informing the development of draft regulations for the adoption of front of package warning labels in South Africa. She has led multi-country studies on sugary-beverage taxation and other obesity prevention measures using policy, legal and qualitative research methods.

Blending this academic expertise with her legal practice in litigation, Safura has been involved in novel class actions related to occupational lung disease in mines and defending health-related laws including COVID-19 policies and a certificate-of-need requirement for private healthcare providers against constitutional challenges. Her cross-cutting expertise is reflected in her more than 40 peer-reviewed publications in leading legal and public health journals including the Lancet, Nature Food, South African Journal on Human Rights and the Journal of Medicine, Ethics and Law.

She is involved in advisory committees for government departments, the Africa CDC and academic programs. She has been actively involved in translating her research into policy impact through dissemination and knowledge translation and developed this skill further during her fellowship with the Aspen New Voices programme.