This week the University of Oxford and Astra Zeneca temporarily postponed further vaccination in clinical trials of the Covid-19 candidate vaccine, AZD1222, after one of the participants fell ill...
Ina Skosana 11 Sep 2020
As fall approaches rapidly, many are wondering if the race for a vaccine will bear fruit as early as January 2021...
William Petri 24 Aug 2020
There isn't enough clinical research being done in Africa. Less than 2.5% of all clinical trials in the world are done on the continent. This is why South Africa's involvement in one of the Covid-19 vaccine trials is so important...
Shabir Madhi 14 Jul 2020
South Africa recently announced the start of the country's first Covid-19 vaccine clinical trial. The vaccine is also being tested in the UK and Brazil...
Jeffrey Mphahlele 7 Jul 2020
Health Minister, Dr Zweli Mkhize, has opened the Reverend Dr Elizabeth Mamisa Chabula-Nxiweni Field Hospital in the Eastern Cape to bolster the province's Covid-19 response...
24 Jun 2020
The first Covid-19 vaccine clinical trial on the continent was announced during a virtual press conference hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits)...
23 Jun 2020
Ebola, a viral haemorrhagic fever of humans and other primates, has become endemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The country has had 10 outbreaks in 40 years and has recently declared the 11th...
Yap Boum 23 Jun 2020
Researchers are racing against time to find ways to treat and prevent Covid-19. There is currently no treatment for the disease, and the World Health Organisation has created Solidarity, a global clinical trial which is testing four drugs as possible treatment...
Sheetal Soni 25 May 2020
Social media has proven to be a devastatingly effective spreader of false information, far faster and to a far wider audience than was ever possible before...
Issued by Ogilvy South Africa 19 May 2020
Tuberculosis (TB) and HIV pose a significant burden on South Africa's health system. There's a close relationship between the two. About 60% of TB patients are also HIV-positive...
Emily Wong 26 Mar 2020
Equatorial Guinea is waiving oil & gas services fees in the wake of the oil price drop caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Oil prices currently remain at around $20 a barrel, their lowest level since 1991...
24 Mar 2020
An HIV vaccine trial that started in 2016 in South Africa was halted in February 2020. The study sponsors made the call after interim results showed that the vaccine, known as HVTN 702, did not prevent HIV...
14 Feb 2020
The discovery of a rare new strain of HIV for the first time in nearly 20 years recently made headlines around the world...
Linda-Gail Bekker 7 Feb 2020
Cipla, South Africa's third-largest pharmaceutical manufacturer, hosted an HIV/AIDS workshop in Sandton on Wednesday, ahead of World AIDS Day on 1 December 2019...
Cipla, Issued by Cipla 5 Dec 2019
An HIV vaccine candidate - initially tested in Thailand, where it had modest effects - has shown potential in a study in South Africa...
Elsabé Brits 23 Sep 2019
In August 2015 Dr Sakoba Keita, who led the Ebola response in Guinea during the largest Ebola outbreak the world has ever seen, declared...
Yap Boum 8 Aug 2019
There are an estimated 5,000 new HIV transmissions every day. Around 70% of the 37-million people living with HIV globally are in sub-Saharan Africa...
Glenda Gray 14 Jun 2019
The Ebola virus outbreak of 2014 in West Africa caused more than 11,000 deaths. At the time, scientists were working on several experimental vaccines and treatments but none were licensed for use in humans...
Pramila Rajil & Alain Townsend 4 Apr 2019
Since August last year the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been facing its 10th Ebola virus disease outbreak. As of early March this year, 907 cases and 569 deaths have been reported...
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has emphasised that an experimental vaccine is playing a major role in controlling the spread of Ebola...
Shirin Ashraf & Arthur Wickenhagen 11 Feb 2019
Ghana, Kenya and Malawi will pilot the malaria vaccine trial which was announced as the international community marked World Malaria Day last month...
12 May 2017
Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi will take part in a pilot programme that will make the world's first malaria vaccine available in selected areas...
25 Apr 2017
Uganda, Malawi and Zimbabwe are the three high-burden African countries selected to be the first to benefit from a typhoid conjugate vaccine....
Lilian Namagembe 7 Apr 2017
We say goodbye to 2016 by looking back at the healthcare stories that made headlines...
LAURA LOPEZ GONZALEZ 30 Dec 2016
One tiny protein may be the world's best hope of halting HIV in its tracks...
Penny Moore, Lynne Morris & Nono Mkhize 28 Nov 2016
A new study by researchers from Yale and Johns Hopkins reveals the molecular pathway by which the body's inflammatory immune response may trigger its own inhibition, protecting tumor cells from destruction and allowing the growth of melanoma - the deadliest form of skin cancer. The study currently appears in Science Translational Medicine.
Helen Dodson 2 Apr 2012
According to Mail & Guardian, Tuberculosis (TB) researchers revealed a new strategy to guide the development of a vaccine, which many now believe may be the world's best hope for beating the disease.
22 Mar 2012
The second Discovery Health Journalism Awards, held on Thursday 6 May 2010 in Johannesburg, announced that Anna-Maria Lombard of Health-e News Service was the Health Journalist of the Year, for her stories 'Dora Nginza and Price of Denial' produced for Carte Blanche, M-NET and Third Degree, e-TV respectively. She received a prize of R75 000.
10 May 2010
Evidence for the safety and efficacy of influenza vaccines in the over 65s is poor, despite the fact that vaccination has been recommended for the prevention of influenza in older people for the past 40 years. These are the conclusions of a new Cochrane Systematic Review.
17 Feb 2010
Two South African developed HIV vaccines have begun clinical testing in the United States.
1 Dec 2008
Clinical trials of a new tuberculosis (TB) vaccine recently kicked off in Kenya, meanwhile international TB researchers and activists are worried by funding gaps that may worsen in the global financial crisis.
20 Oct 2008
The College of Health Sciences at Uganda's Makerere University will receive a grant from the African Malaria Network Trust to begin trials of the malaria vaccine candidate GMZ2.
28 Aug 2008
Plans to conduct a large-scale human trial of an experimental HIV/AIDS vaccine in the United States have been shelved.
21 Jul 2008
Recent data show that almost one half of pneumonias in children requiring hospitalisations could be prevented using the pneumococcal vaccine.
Issued by InZalo Communications 5 Mar 2008
Although scientists hope that a vaccine will eventually offer the best protection against HIV infection, the complex biology of the virus has posed constant challenges and even a partially effective vaccine is still some years away.
11 Sep 2007
The Meningitis Vaccine Project (MVP) released new data on the performance of a meningitis vaccine in West African children, suggesting that the new vaccine - expected to sell initially for 40 US cents a dose - will be much more effective in protecting African children and their communities than any vaccine currently on the market in the region.
19 Jun 2007