Children at window of a building in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. Children will be vulnerable if vaccinations are postponed.
Photo by Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images
With recent calls for their use in combating COVID-19, there are concerns that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine might become unavailable to people who need them.
Unlike in wealthy nations, lockdowns are simply impossible in overcrowded conditions with no sanitation and high levels of poverty.
Health workers walk from house to house during vaccination campaign against polio in Kano, northwest Nigeria in 2017.
Photo by Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP via Getty Images
Adequate numbers of healthy and motivated health professionals are also critical to governments’ effective responses to public health emergencies such as COVID-19.
Research participants want to know the results of the studies in which they participate.
Shutterstock
Findings that are effectively communicated can go a long way to serve the interests of the public. They can help to address social injustices or improve treatments offered to patients.
South Korea has been the quickest to bring the pandemic under control.
Jung Yeon-je/AFP/Getty Images
A third of South African children live below the food poverty line. The fact that many caregivers can’t work because of the lockdown will worsen food insecurity. Here’s what needs to be done.
Somali women on a coronavirus awareness campaign.
Abdirazak Hussein/GettyImages
The current lockdown in Zimbabwe is going to provide a stern test for its informal economy, which is the country’s dominant economy and employs 90% of people.
An elderly man at a social grant paypoint in South Africa after the COVID-19 lockdown. (Photo by MARCO LONGARI / AFP) ()
Photo by Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images
South Africa must develop a comprehensive health and economic strategy if it is to stop the COVID-19 pandemic without causing long term socio-economic damage.
Scientists are better equipped to do ground-breaking research.
GettyImages
Instead of seeking to protect our health and stop the coronavirus epidemic by instituting totalitarian surveillance regimes, we should rather focus on empowering citizens.
Medical staff treating a critical patient with COVID-19 at the Red Cross hospital in Wuhan, China.
Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images
Dean Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand; and Director of the SAMRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand
Principal Medical Scientist and Head of Laboratory for Antimalarial Resistance Monitoring and Malaria Operational Research, National Institute for Communicable Diseases
Professor and Programme Director, SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science - PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand