Jaishree Raman, National Institute for Communicable Diseases and Shüné Oliver, National Institute for Communicable Diseases
The successful development of an effective vaccine against the deadliest form of malaria that is most common in sub-Saharan Africa is indeed a major achievement.
Smallholder rice farmers in Ghana should be supported by the government to access finance needed to adopt modern technologies for greater productivity.
Making vaccines in South Africa by building on the foundation that’s been laid is possible. But only if substantial and sustained investment in human resources and infrastructure becomes a reality.
Sexually transmitted infections and bacterial vaginosis can provide ideal conditions for HIV infection in women. A new test aims to detect these conditions even when women don’t show symptoms.
Malaria control must move away from relying too much on insecticides to more innovative and sustainable options. Genetic programming of mosquitoes is one.
Potential benefits of human genome editing include new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent genetic disorders. But there’s a significant gap in regulation.
The decision is supported by the government’s policy environment in recent years. This has aimed to increase innovation, and views technology as a way to achieve this.
Policymakers need to make sense of the data so as to predict and manage what’s happening. To address this need, we developed a visualisation tool to track and predict country-level COVID-19 cases.
BCG remains the only widely available vaccine for TB. Yet the development of a COVID-19 vaccine over the last year shows that there is capacity to rapidly create new vaccines.
Vaccine manufacturing doesn’t come cheap. It depends heavily on support from developed countries. It also requires much more than relaxing intellectual property rights and a desire for vaccine equity.
The rule, which previously acted as the upper time limit on human embryo research, has been dropped, paving the way for research on older human embryos.
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
Professor of Organic Chemistry, Neville Isdell Chair in African-centric Drug Discovery & Development, and Director of the Holistic Drug Discovery and Development (H3D) Centre, University of Cape Town
Professor of medicine and deputy director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University of Cape Town