For years, hospitals have relied on the unpaid, unprotected labour of trainee-specialists to fill their rosters, but these doctors are reaching a breaking point. Joan van Dyk reports.

The United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) has lifted its ban nearly 18 months after an order to stop work with South Africa. The funding ban created a crisis...

Researchers who study HIV, tuberculosis, and other infectious disease in the country welcome policy change

The regulation of complementary and alternative medicines in South Africa has been hotly contested in recent decades, including in court rooms. In his latest column for Spotlight, Dr Andy Gray unpacks...

Compression and LLMs are trying to solve the exact same problem: predicting what comes next. Learn the fundamentals of compression and how better prediction leads to better shrinkage.

Dr Hermann Reuter did pioneering work treating HIV in the early 2000s in Cape Town and in the rural Eastern Cape. Today, his focus is substance abuse, which he believes is the country’s biggest health...

A new antiretroviral combination pill that is taken only once a week appears to work as well as daily pills at treating HIV. This is according to interim study findings...

My keynote at ICML 2026

Being a researcher who studies tuberculosis in the lab is one thing, having the TB bug in your lungs is quite another. Elri Voigt sat down with two of a relatively small number of people who have expe...

No buses operate on Msunduzi Municipality’s failed public transport system

Which vaccines are in use in South Africa and how does our vaccination schedule measure up to international standards? In this #InTheSpotlight special briefing, Catherine Tomlinson unpacks the recent ...

South African researchers publish trial results in world’s leading medical journal

Ten years after its launch in the United States, a new, more effective shingles vaccine is finally set to hit the market in South Africa. While the vaccine, called Shingrix, should soon be available a...

Ember — a native, accessible Hacker News reader for iOS, built in SwiftUI with no third-party dependencies. - DatanoiseTV/ember-hackernews

A Supreme Court of Appeal ruling in October 2025 cleared the way for specially trained and permitted pharmacists to dispense antiretroviral medicines without a doctor’s script. Seven months later, no ...

The number of people in South Africa on antiretroviral treatment remained roughly unchanged from 2024 to 2025, according to just-published estimates from the leading mathematical model of HIV in the c...

Along dusty roads in northern KwaZulu-Natal, Biénne Huisman speaks to youth leaders, community mentors and leading scientists who are collaborating to bring a groundbreaking HIV prevention jab to this...

Its defensive response to recent criticism does not earn the public’s confidence in news media

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The tools exist to end this killer disease. It is the money and the will that are lacking.

When push comes to shove, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s talk of building a more capable state hasn’t always been backed up by the appointment of committed and capable people to key government positions. His decision regarding a new Director-General for health will say a lot about how serious he actually is about addressing the country’s many health challenges, argues Spotlight editor Marcus Low.

In part 3 of a Spotlight special series on the role of new weight loss medicines like Ozempic in South Africa, we ask what these breakthrough jabs might mean for people living with HIV in the country....

The Department of Health allows some public sector doctors and nurses to moonlight in the private sector, but the relevant policy and its implementation caused much controversy over the years. Set aga...

Delmore Manuel, Jermaine Conradie, and Leigh-Ann Maroon are getting away with torture

The sale of illegal medicines is a significant threat to public safety. In his latest Inside The Box column, Dr Andy Gray asks whether the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority has the ne...

Many regions in the Northern Hemisphere experienced a slightly earlier start to their flu season, driven in some part by a novel variant of influenza A(H3N2). As our flu season also kicks off slightly...

Around 3.8 million people in South Africa developed depression in 2024, estimate leading local researchers in a major new modelling study.

New TB tests have massive potential for South Africa’s struggle to get to grips with the age-old disease. Making the most of these new tests will require both ambition and smart implementation, argue ...