Last month, she won the Mandela Rhodes Foundation’s award for social impact in Africa for a device that can help save the lives of women who suffer excessive bleeding after child birth. PHOTO: Nasief Manie/Spotlight
By Biénne Huisman for Spotlight
As a child growing up in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, Maureen Etuket used a screwdriver to dismantle electronic appliances and toy trucks. “I was around eight, nine years old,” she says. “I guess it just excited me.”
Slightly over a decade later, this curiosity is driving her quest to find solutions to public healthcare challenges.
Last month, Etuket’s Smart PVD device [Postpartum Haemorrhage Volumetric Drape] won the Mandela Rhodes Foundation’s award for social impact in Africa – the 2023 Äänit Prize – with a cash grant of $38 000. At the awards ceremony in Cape Town, judges described the device as “a brilliantly practical intervention that can immediately and directly improve outcomes for patients”.
Inside the Anatomy Building on the University of Cape Town (UCT)’s Health Sciences campus, Etuket explains that she and her team devised a prototype after spending three months in maternity wards at Kawempe National Referral Hospital in Kampala.
“We went almost every day. We had day shifts and night shifts,” she recalls. “I started asking the question to nurses and midwives, how do you know that a woman is likely to get to PPH?” PPH or post-partum haemorrhage is excessive bleeding after a baby’s birth, which could cause a severe drop in blood pressure leading to shock and death if not treated.
“Like, how do you tell? What criteria do you use? And the nurses told me that they had been doing this for a long time. They said they just observe and know. And I thought to myself, if that was working, we would have [fewer] women dying from PPH.”
How does the Smart PVD device work?
“There’s something already on the market – an under-buttock drape bag attached to the bed while a woman is giving birth, which measures amount of blood loss,” says Etuket. “[It’s] basically a bag where the blood flows into. We then created an electronic module that has a probe and a buzzer, which we put inside this bag, and it gives a beeping sound when the blood has reached a certain level. This alarm alerts a midwife to recognise the need to attend to a particular case. So the blood collection module is disposable. And the electronic module, which has the probe and the buzzer, is reusable.”
Etuket declines to share pictures, citing intellectual property rights.
“I really think that this is one of the simplest innovations,” she says. “We’ve been pitching it and talking about it, and everyone that listens is just like it’s common sense, right?” Apart from the Äänit Prize, they have received $16 000 from the Makerere University’s research and innovations fund and $55 000 from the science and technology secretariat in Uganda.
Moving to Cape Town
Etuket moved to Cape Town in 2021, courtesy of a Mandela Rhodes Foundation scholarship. “I applied for a Masters in health innovation at UCT under the Mandela Rhodes Foundation. So, I’m Christian. I believe in the hand of God in everything I do. I made just that one application. Like, there were options to put three universities, three courses, all that. I just wanted health innovation at UCT, and I got it.”
Her Masters supervisor was Professor Sudesh Sivarasu, internationally renowned for medical device innovation and head of UCT’s MedTech laboratory.
“There were so many questions we had at Pumzi Devices about how to transition an innovation to the market and no one really had the answers because it’s a new space. At a certain point, some of us had to travel to Scotland just to sit with experts to guide us through a protocol design process. No one in Uganda really had a clear picture of [this] so that’s what prompted me to do the Masters in health innovation,” says Etuket.
Find your purpose
Presently, she is pursuing a PhD in industrial engineering at Stellenbosch University under the supervision of Professor Sara Grobbelaar and Dr Faatiema Salie. Yet she spends most of her time at UCT, where Sivarasu is her external co-supervisor. Etuket’s PhD’s working title is “Exploring the development of a localisation roadmap for medical devices in South Africa using an Innovation Systems Framework”. She explains that this line of study – systems engineering – is drawing her thinking wider to understand the systems around biomedical design and innovation.
Going forward, Etuket will continue to lecture students back home in Uganda – online – while being open to further her learning and practice where it is apt or required around the world.
At 28 years old, Etuket’s drive and achievements make her a role model for many. However, she is reluctant to wear the label of “a pioneering young black woman,” voicing caution over mantels based on race and gender. “I notice that when we start to have those mindsets, we may end up trampling on people, on men. We have to work together. There is room for all of us,” she says.
The first born of four siblings, Etuket’s father was a computer engineer and her mother an accountant and businesswoman. Elaborating on leadership, she says, “I think it’s important to pray for people. That’s where we get guidance on how to lead. I tell people, not everyone should do a PhD, maybe not everyone should do a Masters, but find your purpose and fulfil it.”
Professor Valerie Mizrahi, a world-leading tuberculosis researcher and director of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cape Town, is retiring at the end of the year. PHOTO: Nasief Manie/Spotlight
World-leading tuberculosis researcher Professor Valerie Mizrahi was 35 when her mother Etty started losing weight and coughing furiously. After healthcare professionals in Johannesburg failed to accurately diagnose her, it was a doctor in Plettenberg Bay who told Etty: “The good news is you don’t have lung cancer, the bad news is that you have tuberculosis (TB).”
At the time, Mizrahi’s two infant daughters – aged one and three years old – had been spending much time with their granny. And so Mizrahi found herself crushing TB prevention tablets into her children’s porridge with honey.
Etty was treated at the then-Rietfontein Hospital, the precursor to Sizwe Tropical Diseases Hospital in Johannesburg. “My mom got very ill,” recalls Mizrahi. “She almost died of TB. And then 10 years later, she had to have a lobe from one of her lungs removed because she was one of those unfortunate people who got post-TB fibrosis.”
This was the early 1990s. Mizrahi was then with the South African Institute for Medical Research (SAIMR) linked to the University of the Witwatersrand, where she established the Molecular Biology Unit. She had identified TB as a lurking problem in South Africa, particularly in mines and in hospitals, calling it “a worthy foe ripe with opportunity for scientific investigation” – a problem she felt not enough people were talking about. It had been a pivotal moment when TB entered her own home, one that she says galvanised her thinking.
“It was a dramatic eye-opener for me as a basic scientist,” she says. “It was traumatic because of the time it happened in my career. Our family suddenly being thrust into the world of TB control. We had all these questions like we didn’t know where my mum got it, was her TB drug-susceptible, and why it would take so long to find this out. I got to see first-hand how difficult it was to get answers…”
Born in 1958 to Etty and Morris in Harare, Zimbabwe, Mizrahi studied at the University of Cape Town (UCT), forging an unusual career path, veering from mathematics and chemistry to biochemistry, genetics, and microbiology. In a male-dominated field, she became one of the first in South Africa to interrogate TB at a basic science level – that is to say, research aimed at advancing our understanding of the basic science of how TB bacteria survive, replicate, and resist attempts to kill it.
‘the only good TB bacillus is a dead one’
Discussing TB, Mizrahi’s passion is effervescent, her every second sentence punctuated with “okay”. These underscore her statements – subtle pauses allowing for her preceding words to sink in.
Source: CC0
…there’s a reason why TB has persisted for so long. The bacillus is pretty hard to kill. It’s built like Fort Knox.
Prof Valerie Mizrahi
A particular interest for Mizrahi is developing antibiotics “that can kill this bacterium stone cold dead”.
“To me, the only good TB bacillus is a dead one,” she says. “But there’s a reason why TB has persisted for so long. The bacillus is pretty hard to kill. It’s built like Fort Knox. So it’s a monumental challenge. We don’t know where all the bacteria are residing. We know that TB in an infected lung is sitting in really difficult places, hard places for drugs to get to. This notion of going after the bacillus with drugs and just slamming it is a tough problem. Not insurmountable, but there’s a lot of research that needs to be done.”
TB can be cured, but treatment typically takes at least six months and involves taking at least four different antibiotics, with side effects ranging from minor to serious. In addition to research on new antibiotics, there are also several experimental TB vaccines currently in late-phase studies. The only TB vaccine we have was developed more than a century ago and only has some moderate efficacy in kids.
The IDM
Since 2011 Mizrahi has served as director of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDM) – the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) largest cross-faculty research unit with over 800 affiliated staff and grants running into hundreds of millions of rands.
Mizrahi’s glass-encased office looks directly onto Table Mountain and hospital bend – where, at the time of our interview, N2 traffic out of Cape Town is already at a standstill. Behind her desk, Mizrahi quips. “Yes, this is the most beautiful office at UCT, everyone agrees…” Below, students can be seen milling about on the health sciences campus.
Last year in its Best Global Universities 2022-2023 survey, online portal US News ranked UCT as 24th best university in the world for studying infectious diseases. Mizrahi is ambivalent about the IDM taking credit for this accolade. She notes that this success is founded on problems of a “confounding and overwhelming” scope, with many diseases being proxies for poverty and inequality in South Africa.
The IDM’s focus includes TB, HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, other infectious diseases like sexually transmitted infections, and non-communicable diseases such as preventable cancers, cardiovascular, and psychiatric disorders.
Reflecting on the IDM, she says they have accrued a “research ecosystem – a concentration of expertise, something resembling critical mass” – bringing together specialists across the basic, clinical, and public health sciences, in one place.
“We’ve got Groote Schuur Hospital across the road,” she says. “We have geneticists and biochemists, virologists, and immunologists. There’s a clinician across the corridor from me, bioinformaticians, and microscopists downstairs. If you are the kind of researcher who revels in asking questions and finding people who can answer them, then this is the place for you.”
Going forward, multi-disciplinary research is what excites her. “HIV and TB have been so dominant in the narrative of this country. But now when you look at the figures and the data, we are dealing with a huge burden of non-communicable disease on top of infectious diseases,” she says. “The key question moving forward is how not to think in silos.”
Polymaths and dilettantes
This, she says, takes humility.
“To do this, one has to be very humble. You need to know what you don’t know. People who work really well in interdisciplinary spaces are those who understand the limits of their own specialist knowledge, and the need to listen to where another person is coming from.”
She distinguishes between polymaths and dilettantes. “You have to be careful not to be a dilettante, who knows a little about a lot. Research can be very superficial in that way. So I have my antenna out all the time to distinguish between polymaths, who really are people who know a lot about a lot, and dilettantes who know a little about a lot. And well, in this institute we have a lot of polymaths, brilliant researchers who move across disciplines, very interesting people to work with.”
With a string of awards and an A1-rating from South Africa’s National Research Foundation, earlier this year, Mizrahi was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s National Academy of Sciences. However, she recalls humbling moments along the way – like the time she flew to London seven months pregnant with her second child, for her first-ever interview with the Wellcome Trust committee to secure funding. “I was so confident, but I was ill-prepared,” she says. “They savaged me! I tried to frame it not as a failure but as a learning experience.”
Passing the baton
At the end of this year, Mizrahi will pass on the baton when she retires. Of her achievements, she is proudest of young scholars she has helped to shape. “Their legacies will last much longer than a few more citations of a publication,” she says.
Mizrahi notes more and more women leaders in her field. For example, recently, while delivering a talk at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, she noticed chemist and Nobel laureate Ada Yonath in the room. “Talk about a role model; I was almost in tears.”
Studying at UCT, Mizrahi’s own mentors had mostly been men – something she didn’t even notice, she says, as male professors treated her no different. What did cut her was racial segregation at the time, prompting a political awakening and stints leaving South Africa to work in the United States. First as a postdoctoral fellow at Pennsylvania State University and then at drug company, SmithKline & French in Philadelphia.
Her own background makes her sensitive to marginalised groups, she says. Her grandparents were Sephardi Jews who fled Rhodes Island, today part of Greece, ten years before World War II, to find refuge in Zimbabwe.
Having just read former UCT vice-chancellor Max Price’s book Statues and Storms: Leading a University Through Change, she says, “It took me back to some very difficult times. It’s harrowing and brave and made me realise that even though I was here in the midst of it [#feesmustfall and #rhodesmustfall protests], a senior person of the university, how little I really knew of what was going on. It really is a lesson in crisis leadership.”
There’s no control experiment to life, you can’t go back and redo it.
Mizrahi lives in Sea Point with her one daughter. Her other daughter is based in Vancouver. Here, she likes to park her car at the end of the week, walking around – “either listening to a New York Times podcast or a beautiful piece of music and that’s when I think.”
She describes herself as an introvert who needs personal time to stay sane. She is deeply thoughtful about her roots, wondering about a sense of belonging. “As white people in Africa, I think this is part of the reckoning we go through. I truly identify as being African. Arriving at Johannesburg, just breathing in the air, it feels like home.”
Looking back, Mizrahi notes her mother as a major influence in her life. “Not a highly educated woman. But the wisest, smartest person I know.” Etty still lives in Johannesburg while Morris has passed away. To this day, Etty thinks of herself as a proud TB survivor, says Mizrahi.
On her retirement, the scholar says, “Now it’s about opening up opportunities for others, writing a few papers, and contributing to the TB drug discovery space.”
“I’ve done the best I can,” she says, “I don’t believe in having regrets… There’s no control experiment to life, you can’t go back and redo it. But I don’t know that I could have done it any differently.”
Fifth-year Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery (MBChB) student Moses Malebana’s stellar academic record has paved the way for a special international elective at the University of Graz – making him the maiden recipient of this golden opportunity – and galvanising ties between the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Department of Medicine and the Medical University of Graz (Med Uni Graz) in Austria.
Malebana will depart in November and return to UCT’s Faculty of Health Sciences in January 2024. And with just a few short weeks before he boards his flight, he said he is excited for what awaits, and plans to absorb every detail of the experience.
“I plan on becoming a giant sponge while there. I am excited and feel privileged that I’ve been selected for this opportunity. I look forward to learning all there is to learn and flying UCT’s and the Department of Medicine’s flag[s] high at Med Uni Graz,” he said.
Tough grind
But this opportunity didn’t just fall into his lap. To be considered for the elective abroad, the application and selection criteria was clear – the candidate needed to prove an unmatched academic record. Each applicant was also tasked with supplying a motivational letter that highlighted why they felt they deserved the opportunity. It’s safe to say that Malebana passed the test with flying colours.
He said he used the motivational letter to reflect and relay personal anecdotes that focused on the sacrifices that led him to study medicine at UCT, and he enjoyed documenting his story.
“I remember seeing the email and thinking that this is my opportunity to reflect on my journey and to just tell my story. It was interesting because I don’t often reflect on things. But when I started, I realised that my whole life up to this point was about making the most of the opportunities that have come my way,” he said.
First-class motivation
In his motivation, Malebana touched on the events in his life that moulded him into the man he is today. And the list is endless – walking for more than an hour to and from school every day in rural Limpopo, contending with a lack of in-school resources, and a shortage of skilled teachers were just some of the challenges he experienced. These hurdles, he added, provided the impetus he needed to give his high school education and his medical studies his all.
“All of this taught me resilience; it motivated me to work even harder to reap the rewards later in life. I worked very hard to get to UCT, and now that I’m here, I’m working even harder to attain success in my degree,” he said. “I don’t take any opportunities for granted. I’m humbled that I’ve been chosen to represent the faculty and the university in Austria,” he said.
As he prepares for his big trip, Malebana said he’s looking forward to understanding the Austrian health system and gaining some valuable insight into how medical doctors practice medicine in that country and how it compares to South Africa.
A whole new world
The elective will consist of several rotations in different areas of internal medicine and Malebana will be based at a teaching hospital affiliated to Med Uni Graz. He said he is most excited about his oncology rotations after developing a keen interest in this area of medicine.
“I have always enjoyed studying and learning more about the management of different cancers. So, I really look forward to seeing how things are done in Austria. I know each day will be filled with something new to learn, whether it’s in oncology or a different area of medicine. I’m eager to get going,” he said.
But over and above the work, Malebana said he is thrilled to have the opportunity to travel outside of South Africa’s borders for the first time, to experience diverse cultures and cuisines, gain insight into a new way of life, and build new, lasting friendships.
“It’s going to be an adventure, that’s for sure – one that I’ve already embraced with my arms wide open. I’m grateful that it has come my way,” he said.
Graduates and third year students are encouraged to apply for the new Postgraduate Diploma to drive business ownership and job creation.
The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) announced its Postgraduate Diploma in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The diploma aims for graduates and third-year students in engineering, science, and health sciences to become catalysts for business ownership and job creation. Apply for the PG Dip in Innovation and Entrepreneurship before 30 November 2023.
Professor Christo Doherty, the course coordinator says: “We particularly encourage candidates who are contemplating pursuing a Master’s or PhD in any of these fields, so they can embark on advanced degrees armed with the knowledge of how to commercialise their research. Graduates of this programme will have a wealth of career opportunities. Equipped with the aptitude and mindset for innovation and creation, they represent the future generation of entrepreneurs and job creators. They will not merely seek jobs; they will create them.”
The programme was developed and is led by the Wits Innovation Centre, and will bridge the gap between academic research and real-world innovation. It will empower students to translate their research into tangible solutions that drive meaningful change in society. The Diploma seeks to harness the entrepreneurial spirit of young scientists and engineers to ensure that their research outcomes do not languish on dusty shelves but ignite the flames of practical application. Professor Nithaya Chetty, the Dean of the Wits Faculty of Science says: “South African universities must now give attention to both discovery research and innovation. This is a novel diploma that will combine collaborative teaching and learning to fast-track researchers into careers as innovators and entrepreneurs”.
The PGDip in Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a multi-faculty initiative characterised by a hands-on approach, with a year-long research project at its core. Students will collaborate closely with an interdisciplinary team of lecturers, gaining invaluable insights and guidance throughout their journey. The curriculum covers critical subjects such as The Fundamentals of Business for Innovators, Innovation and the Commercialization of Research, Creating Ventures for Innovators, and Applying Design Thinking to Innovation. The programme’s objective is to expedite the transformation of students’ research and ideas into commercially viable endeavours or solutions with significant societal impact.
From 2025, the programme will expand to include humanities, commerce and other faculties.
Both the Khoi and the San believed in a mythical animal, resembling a cow, whose horns were thought to have medicinal attributes. This centuries-old medicine horn contained herbal remedies used by the Khoi-san. Credit: Rodger Smith
By Zelna Booth
Traditional medicines are part of the cultural heritage of many Africans. About 80% of the African continent’s population use these medicines for healthcare.
Other reasons include affordability, accessibility, patient dissatisfaction with conventional medicine, and the common misconception that “natural” is “safe”.
The growing recognition of traditional medicine resulted in the first World Health Organization global summit on the topic, in August 2023, with the theme “Health and Wellbeing for All”.
Traditional medicines are widely used in South Africa, with up to 60% of South Africans estimated to be reliant on traditional medicine as a primary source of healthcare.
Conventional South African healthcare facilities struggle to cope with extremely high patient numbers. The failure to meet the basic standards of healthcare, with increasing morbidity and mortality rates, poses a threat to the South African economy.
In my opinion, as a qualified pharmacist and academic with a research focus on traditional medicinal plant use in South Africa, integrating traditional medicine practices into modern healthcare systems can harness centuries of indigenous knowledge, increasing treatment options and provide better healthcare.
Recognition of traditional medicine as an alternative or joint source of healthcare to that of standard, conventional medicine has proven challenging. This is due to the absence of scientific research establishing and documenting the safety and effectiveness of traditional medicines, along with the lack of regulatory controls.
What are traditional medicines?
Traditional medicine encompasses a number of healthcare practices aimed at either preventing or treating acute or chronic complaints through the application of indigenous knowledge, beliefs and approaches. It incorporates the use of plant, animal and mineral-based products. Plant-derived products form the majority of treatment regimens.
Traditional medicine practices also have a place in ritualistic activities and communicating with ancestors.
South Africa is rich in indigenous medicinal fauna and flora, with about 2000 species of plants traded for medicinal purposes. In South Africa the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and Limpopo are trading “hotspots”. The harvested plants are most often sold at traditional medicine muthi markets.
Uses of medicinal plants
Medicinal plants most popularly traded in South Africa include buchu, bitter aloe, African wormwood, honeybush, devil’s claw, hoodia, African potato, fever tea, African geranium, African ginger, cancer bush, pepperbark tree, milk bush and the very commonly consumed South African beverage, rooibos tea.
The most commonly traded medicinal plants in South Africa are listed below along with their traditional uses:
Cancer bush – Respiratory tract infections; menstrual pain.
Pepperbark tree – Respiratory tract infections; sexually transmitted infections.
Milk bush – Pain; ulcers; skin conditions.
Rooibos – Inflammation; high cholesterol; high blood pressure.
There are many ways in which traditional medicine may be used. It can be a drop in the eye or the ear, a poultice applied to the skin, a boiled preparation for inhalation or a tea brewed for oral administration.
Roots, bulbs and bark are used most often, and leaves less frequently. Roots are available throughout the year. There’s also a belief that the roots have the strongest concentration of “medicine”. Harvesting of the roots, however, poses concerns about the conservation of these medicinal plants. The South African government, with the draft policy on African traditional medicine Notice 906 of 2008 outlines considerations aimed at ensuring the conservation of these plants through counteracting unsustainable harvesting practises.
Obstacles to traditional medicine use
The limited research investigating interactions posed should a patient be making use of both traditional and conventional medicine is a concern.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many patients used traditional remedies for the prevention of infection or treatment.
Understanding which traditional medicines are being used and how, their therapeutic effects in the human body, and how they interact with conventional medicines, would help determine safety of their combined use.
Certain combinations may have advantageous interactions, increasing the efficacy or potency of the medicines and allowing for reduced dosages, thereby reducing potential toxicity. These combinations could assist in the development of new pharmaceutical formulations.
Key role players from both systems of healthcare need to be able to share information freely.
The need for policy development is key. Both conventional and traditional medicine practitioners would need to be aware of and engage with patients on all the medicines they are taking.
Understanding the whole patient
Patients often seek treatment from both conventional and traditional sources, which can lead to side effects or duplication in medications.
A comprehensive understanding of a patient’s health profile makes care easier.
This could also prevent treatment failures, promote patient safety, prevent adverse interactions and minimise risks.
A harmonious healthcare landscape would combine the strengths of both systems to provide better healthcare for all.
Zelna Booth, Pharmacist and Academic Lecturer (Pharmacy Practice Division, Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, University of the Witwatersrand), University of the Witwatersrand
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Dr Mark Blaylock, medical manager at Manguzi Hospital. PHOTO: Supplied.
By Sue Segar for Spotlight
There was a time, about 20 years ago, when, at the Manguzi district hospital in Northern KwaZulu-Natal, (and, of course, at hospitals throughout South Africa too) mothers and their babies were dying of AIDS at shockingly high rates.
“We used to get these patients who were slow progressors,” Mark Blaylock, medical manager at Manguzi, tells Spotlight. “Then there were the rapid progressors – babies who were HIV-positive who would get sick very quickly. There wasn’t much we could do for them. We’d give them vitamins and Bactrim, but ultimately they died. Then we had the ones who got sick a bit later, and those were even worse because now mum has had this baby for five years and they’ve bonded, and are a little family and now they are coming in with AIDS. Obviously, a huge number of mums died too. It was heartbreaking.
“It was the pregnancies that knocked their vulnerable immune systems. We’d watch it over and over again. The mums would come in looking ok and then they’d get pregnant and just go downhill. This was in the pre-ARV era. Pregnancy was a death sentence. I think people have forgotten what it was like in those days.”
Blaylock is talking to Spotlight from Northern KwaZulu-Natal, relaying how things have changed for the better since that terrible era. “It’s quite astounding,” he says. Blaylock returned to the hospital ten years ago after having been away for four.
“I was going through the stats recently, and in those days, 40 percent of all mothers who delivered were HIV positive, and about 40 percent of those babies born to HIV- positive mothers ended up with HIV either from birth or breastfeeding. About 20 percent would pick up HIV at birth and another 20 percent would pick it up subsequently through breastfeeding.
“These days, if we have one baby who is delivered HIV-positive or who picks up HIV, we get really upset. Our six-month HIV-positive rate now for babies is less than 0.6 percent and that is a dramatic change. It makes me so happy. Unfortunately, the young girls are still positive, but at least their babies are not becoming positive.”
Blaylock puts the changes down, “purely”, to prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMCT) using antiretroviral therapy (ART). “Remember how, at one stage, we only gave HIV treatment if a patient was below a certain CD4 count? That was changed to test-and-treat, so regardless of their CD4 count, patients will get HIV treatment which brings the viral load down dramatically,” he says. “And now we have dolutegravir (an ARV), which is the backbone of our current HIV treatment. The success is due to prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTC) as well as the test-and-treat policy.”
‘A mixed bag’
It’s Sunday, a day off for Blaylock, and he’s speaking from a place with the best reception near his house on the edge of the Shengeza Lake. He lives here with his wife, Liz and their 13-year-old home-schooled daughter, Una. The sound of birds in the background makes it hard to hear him on the call. “It’s peaceful. There are hippos all around and lots of birds. It’s Eskom-free, which is even better. I love it. We live with three dogs, three cats, a genet, and I can’t tell you how many snakes. It’s paradise.”
It’s taken a long time to clinch this interview, but Blaylock has finally relented and forwarded us the provincial health department’s media protocol he has to adhere to. On problems in KwaZulu-Natal’s health system, he is reticent, saying only that it’s a “mixed bag”. “There’s a lot of dead wood, but there are real areas of excellence,” he says.
His reticence is understandable.
There was a time, also about 15 years ago, amidst the noise and turmoil of the last few years of state-backed AIDS denialism, when Blaylock was going through his own personal trauma. In April 2008, whilst working as chief medical officer at Manguzi, he was suspended for throwing an official photograph of then-Health MEC Peggy Nkonyeni into a dustbin in the hospital’s foyer. He did this out of anger and frustration, after his colleague at the hospital, Colin Pfaff was charged with misconduct for sourcing funding for antiretroviral drugs for pregnant women, and for implementing dual antiretroviral therapy to save babies from HIV – because politicians were not doing so.
He was also furious about comments made by Nkonyeni, questioning the integrity of rural doctors and suggesting they were racist. The South African National AIDS Council soon after asked the Human Rights Commission to probe the ‘racial tone’ of Nkonyeni’s remarks and to curb her ‘harassment’ of Manguzi doctors.
At the time, Blaylock (and Pfaff) were hailed by many working in the health sector as heroes with a deep commitment to their patients. In a letter to the provincial health department at the time, Blaylock said he had given his “heart and soul” to the under-resourced hospital, going beyond the call of duty.
Needing a change
Blaylock was reinstated but, in December 2008, he decided to leave, saying he needed a change and because the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health was in “absolute disarray”. He says his old colleague Pfaff went to work as a missionary doctor in Malawi.
There was more to Blaylock’s decision to leave Manguzi than just the public disagreement with Nkonyeni. In our interview, he describes those days as “a really tough decade”. “Working in paediatrics, as I did for my first couple of years at Manguzi, I couldn’t take it anymore, emotionally. I just couldn’t do it, so I taught myself surgery. That was easier, as you could fix people. We were also so broken from losing so many friends, colleagues, and patients from HIV at the time. It was definitely traumatising and emotionally exhausting, not just for me but for Liz.
“There’s no doubt most of us were burnt out,” he says. “We kind of knew it, but we pushed on anyway. We were also quite a bit wilder and younger. We’d blow off steam by recklessly taking tiny boats across the lake, in the big waves, with lots of hippos – or we’d go for runs along the beach or naked midnight swims.”
The years outside SA
After leaving Manguzi, Blaylock moved to Ghana, where he took up a position as a general doctor at ABA Hospital in Tarkwa, north-east of Accra. “The hospital was part of the national health system but contracted to a mine, so we would treat people and then try and charge the government, fairly unsuccessfully, for the treatment,” he says. “I’d always fancied the idea of Ghana. I had this fantasy about Kwame Nkrumah and it being the first country to throw off Britain in Africa – but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped. Everywhere you went, the police were pulling you over and asking for bribes.”
A defining moment was when Blaylock says he noticed the anti-malaria medication the hospital was giving patients was “just not working”. “Our malaria patients kept coming back full of parasites. I knew there were similar drugs in South Africa which were fantastic, so there was definitely something wrong.” He says he sent a sample to South Africa for testing and realised that “they weren’t as full of the good stuff as they were meant to be”. “I handed in the report and said ‘deal with it.”
From Ghana, where he married Liz and where his daughter Una was born, the family moved to the Kansanshi Mine Hospital in Zambia where they lived on a “beautiful golf estate, surrounded by poverty”.
“It didn’t feel right at all and was quite unfulfilling work,” he recalls. “I did GP work and there was lots of babbalaria – that’s when mostly the expat wives have a hangover on a Monday morning and they think they have malaria.”
Being “medically bored” in Zambia, Blaylock returned to Newcastle in KZN with the aim of specialising in anaesthetics. He worked in Madadeni Hospital’s anaesthetics department, before getting into a registrar’s programme on the anaesthetics circuit at various hospitals in Durban.
‘Like walking back home’
Then, in 2012, his friend and colleague Etienne Immelman, then working as medical manager of Manguzi, suggested that Blaylock should “come home”. “Etienne had been at Manguzi for more than 20 years when he retired six years ago. We’d always had a friendship and a mutual loyalty. He wanted someone to take over.”
Blaylock decided that indeed, it was time. It meant losing the opportunity to specialise, but he says it “felt right”. He went back as medical officer, before becoming manager.
“When I first arrived back, we were a small team, working hard. We all had the same commitment. It gave me a sense of purpose and belonging which hasn’t left.”
Blaylock said the hospital went through a “wonderful period” with a core team of great doctors. “But I burnt them all out during COVID – we had 164 deaths, but we pulled a lot of people through and many of the doctors have moved on. We have a young team now and they are getting there, but we don’t have the broad skill range we used to have. That is common across most district hospitals nowadays.”
So, is he happy to have come full circle, back to the place that was once a source of deep distress to him? “Yes,” he says. “For me, it’s about the community. This place gives me that, as well as a sense of stability and purpose. If you go into a little shop in Manguzi, everyone knows who you are. You say hallo to each other. You shout at a taxi driver and he says, ‘Hey Mark, don’t be so naughty’. When I came back ten years ago, it was like walking back home. It’s just a nice feeling.”
He says a lot has changed in the area. “People say there’s been no development, but when I first arrived at Manguzi in 2002, we knew every car on the road. Today, the town is overwhelmed with vehicles. There’s more money around. We almost never see malnutrition anymore. A lot of government programmes are working, as much as we like to diss them.”
Taking a stand
Given the toll that taking a stand has taken on doctors like Blaylock and Pfaff, one might be forgiven for wondering whether it was all worth it.
Did it make a difference to how things turned out? “Absolutely,” says Blaylock. “There were people scattered people around South Africa at the time who were doing great things. In our part of the world, it was Victor Friedland at Mseleni Hospital and Colin Pfaff (at Manguzi) who were the big drivers, pushing for the right actions to provide the services that the HIV Clinicians Society at the time thought was the correct one and was affordable. The Western Cape had already started, so we weren’t doing anything that groundbreaking except that it hadn’t been official policy yet,” he says.
“Can you believe that when HIV treatment first came to South Africa, it was going to be done at tertiary hospitals only? Imagine the repercussions for us sending a patient to Durban – in those days the Hluhluwe road was 160 kilometres of dirt road – to go and get their HIV treatment once a month. It was not sustainable.
“The HIV (Clinicians) Society pushed hard to get it decentralised to all hospitals. Then it was just going to be done by doctors and they said we absolutely cannot do it just with doctors. It has to be a nurse-run programme. Their vision became our current system. They weren’t the only people, but they were at the forefront of it at the time.”
‘Keeping it going’
Apart from the many advances in HIV treatment, much else has changed at Manguzi over the last 15 years. Blaylock says these days the hospital’s gastro wards are empty “thanks to the rotavirus vaccine”. “We’ve also seen a turnaround in acute respiratory tract infection,” he says. “The pneumococcal conjugate vaccine has changed that dramatically. We have also seen the pushing out of Continuous Positive Pressure Airway Ventilation (CPAP) for neonatal respiratory distressed newborns to district hospitals. This is a non-invasive way of ventilating babies with immature lungs,” he says.
“Our next great hope is the HPV vaccine, which will be a groundbreaker. It’s been rolled out in the past couple of years, but we’ll only see the effects in ten years or so because cervical cancer takes a few decades to come about. The other thing I really want to get in,” he insists, “is that our therapy department (offers occupational therapy, speech and hearing, and physiotherapy) at Manguzi is astonishingly fantastic. There are a lot of good things happening,” he says. “It is so easy to sit on the things that irritate you, but it is worth trying to remember the wins.”
As with several other rural doctors Spotlight has interviewed over the years, Blaylock seems deeply committed to building on what works at Manguzi and simply getting things done. As he says, “When you’ve invested so much into a hospital, you want to keep going as much as you can.”
Authorities in the US have shut down what seems to be an illegal biological lab in California. Hidden inside a warehouse, the lab held nearly 1000 lab mice, around 800 unidentified chemicals, refrigerators and freezers, thousands of vials of biohazardous materials such as blood, incubators, and at least 20 infectious agents, including SARS-CoV-2, HIV, and a herpes virus. The lab’s owners claim they were developing COVID testing kits.
NBC News affiliate KSEE of Fresno reported that the authorities first cottoned on to the lab when a local official noticed an illegal hosepipe connection, prompting a warrant to search the building, which was only supposed to be used for storage.
Officials first inspected the warehouse in Reedley City, Fresno County on March 3, court documents reveal. It was only on March 16 when local health officials conducted their own inspection – and they were shocked to discover the true nature of the warehouse’s contents and operations.
Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba told KSEE, “This is an unusual situation. I’ve been in government for 25 years. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Certain rooms of the warehouse were found to contain several vessels of liquid and various apparatus,” court documents read. “Fresno County Public Health staff also observed blood, tissue and other bodily fluid samples and serums; and thousands of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material.”
Chemicals and equipment were also haphazardly stored with furniture. They also discovered nearly a thousand mice; more than 175 were already dead and 773 were euthanised.
The tenant was found Prestige BioTech, which was not licensed for business in California. The company president was identified as Xiuquin Yao, whom officials questioned via email. Prestige BioTech had moved assets from a now-defunct medical technology company which had owed it money.
Prestige Biotech is accused of not having the proper permits and disposal plans for the equipment and substances, and would not explain the laboratory activity at the warehouse.
“I’ve never seen this in my 26-year career with the County of Fresno,” said Assistant Director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health Joe Prado.
“Through their statements that they were doing some testing on laboratory mice that would help them support, developing the COVID test kits that they had on-site,” Prado said.
Zieba also commented that this was only part of the investigation. “Some of our federal partners still have active investigations going. I can only speak to the building side of it,” Zieba said.
Further attempts to contact Yao for comment have been unsuccessful.
Dr Chivaugn Gordon, head of undergraduate education at UCT’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, reflects on her love of teaching future doctors about women’s health issues. PHOTO: Nasief Manie/Spotlight
With humour and wearing an occasional wig, Dr Chivaugn Gordon teaches medical students about serious women’s health issues. During hard lockdown she delighted students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) with educational videos using household items as props. For example, she created an endometrium (the inner lining of the uterus) from hair gel and red glitter, performed a biopsy on a potato, and showed a chicken hand puppet go into labour.
One video features a patient named Zoya Lockdownikoff – who is a spy – consulting with her doctor about abnormal menstrual bleeding. Gordon, in a blonde wig with round sunglasses, plays Lockdownikoff; and Gordon’s husband, Dr Adalbert Ernst, plays her doctor.
Lockdownikoff explains that the bleeding started when she “did a very complicated backflip to escape a very compromising situation” and that it’s ruining her expensive super-spy coats.
Gordon is head of undergraduate education at UCT’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, while Ernst is with the university’s Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine.
Speaking from her yellow-walled lounge in Cape Town’s Bergvliet, Gordon says: “I became a doctor because I love working with patients. And then I realised, oh cool, I love teaching too. And now I can do these two things together.”
Interest in IPV
For Gordon a driving interest has been intimate partner violence (IPV) which she introduced into her undergraduate curriculum in 2015.
“The aim is to have graduating doctors who are able to recognise intimate partner violence. Everybody thinks that you can’t possibly be abused unless you have a black eye or a fractured arm. But actually, IPV is often more psychological. It’s often psychological abuse. So the challenge is to teach young doctors what are the red flags in someone’s behaviour, or in their clinical presentation, that might indicate IPV.”
Published online in April, Gordon delivered a talk for TEDxUCT called “Tackling IPV, one awkward dad conversation at a time”, in which she notes IPV is “a global pandemic that has been ongoing since time began”. The title refers to Gordon’s father who raised her.
According to a paper published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry last year, IPV is the most common form of violence worldwide; it is most prevalent in unequal societies, and its victims are mostly women and girls. The paper states that worldwide 27% of women and girls aged 15 and older have experienced physical or sexual IPV, but in South Africa the figure is estimated to be much higher, between 33 and 50%.
Gordon contributed to South Africa’s revised Domestic Violence Amendment Act of 2021, through UCT’s Gender Health and Justice Research Unit.
The new legislation broadens the definition of domestic violence to include (above and beyond physical and sexual abuse) emotional, verbal or psychological abuse, which is described as “a pattern of degrading, manipulating, threatening, offensive, intimidating or humiliating conduct towards a complainant that causes mental or psychological harm…including (repeated) insults, ridicule or name calling; (repeated) threats to cause emotional pain; the (repeated) exhibition of obsessive possessiveness or jealousy…”
Gordon highlights the term coercive control. “Because that underpins most serious intimate partner violence. So, somebody who is extremely controlling; they want their partner to do what they want, when they want, and how they want immediately. They normally start isolating you from friends and family so they can spin a narrative of your reality that can’t be contested by anyone else. And it also makes it more difficult to leave.”
Red flags
Gordon highlights some of the IPV red flags that doctors should look for in their patients.
“Depression, anxiety, PTSD, insomnia, [and] things like self-medicating with substances,” she says. “Because when you are living in absolute, abject terror every day of your life, it’s going to manifest in some kind of psychological manner. So, when people have been broken down and worn down and their self-esteem has been eroded it also affects the way they might interact with the healthcare professional.
“Big red flags come out in body language. Usually when someone goes to a doctor, they tell you everything about all their symptoms, because they want you to make them better. So, if you’ve got a patient who is closed off, they’re not making eye contact, they’re avoiding answering your questions, they’re just very reticent and you can’t get anything out of them…then you’ve got to think.”
Gordon stresses that IPV happens across economic strata and in all walks of life. “Every time I run this workshop, a medical student who comes from a very privileged background, from a very financially stable, loving home, comes to me, saying this is happening to her. It happens everywhere. I’ve got medical colleagues, several, who have experienced intimate partner violence. It doesn’t discriminate.”
Technical work on the discovery of new medicines is not commonly done in Africa, but Kelly Chibale, a professor in organic chemistry and founder of H3D at the University of Cape Town is changing this. PHOTO: Nasief Manie/Spotlight
Inside Professor Kelly Chibale’s office the bookshelves are packed with awards. On the walls, framed photographs include his class photo at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, dated 1989.
Chibale is a professor of organic chemistry and founder of the pioneering Holistic Drug Discovery and Development Centre – H3D – at the University of Cape Town. While many important clinical trials have been conducted by Africans in Africa, the kind of drug discovery work that Chibale is doing is rare on the continent.
Chibale relays how he sees molecules everywhere – in hair, in clothes, in all of life around us. His animated voice fills the space as he speaks. “With organic chemistry, we are very visual. We look at chemical structures. If you give me a chemical structure, oh my goodness, my head starts racing about what I can do with it, or how I can change it to create new properties or new materials.”
H3D has 76 staff members investigating novel chemical compounds that could become new lifesaving medicines, with a focus on malaria, tuberculosis, and antibiotic-resistant microbial diseases.
Effectively a small biotech company embedded within the university, to date, H3D’s most notable discovery was a compound in 2012 which they named MMV390048, which had the potential to become a single-dose cure for malaria. Phase I clinical trials saw MMV390048 tested on human volunteers in South Africa and in Australia.
“In Australia, the testing model used is a volunteer infection study where human beings volunteer to be injected with the malaria parasite, which they know can be treated using available medicines,” says Chibale. “And then a section of those are given the experimental drug. And it worked beautifully there.”
‘Fail your way to success’
He adds, “People don’t realise this – there’s no medicine that will be given to people if it wasn’t tested on people first. Even me as an African. Oh man, I suffered from malaria as a child in Zambia many times. Thanks to our government then I’d be taken to a health facility and get malaria tablets, which I took and got well again. Otherwise, I would have died. Malaria kills very quickly. Now this is something I didn’t know then, something I took for granted. Only much later in life did I realise, goodness the medicine I took – someone somewhere invested in its research and development. And someone, somewhere, another human being, volunteered for that drug to be tested on them for my benefit.”
In 2017, the compound made it to Phase II clinical trials in patients with the disease, but further development was halted in 2020 when extensive further tests showed toxicity signals in rats – not rabbits though, Chibale says, adding that they had to err on the side of caution.
“In drug discovery, you have to kiss many frogs before you meet the prince,” he says. “Many drugs fail to progress. People focus on one product that makes it onto the market, right? But there are many failures that don’t even see the light of day. In this industry, you fail your way to success.”
H3D’s most notable discovery was a compound in 2012 which they named MMV390048, which had the potential to become a single-dose cure for malaria. PHOTO: Nasief Manie/Spotlight
Their work continues. In April last year at a function at Cape Town’s Vineyard Hotel, multinational pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson announced H3D as one of its three satellite centres for global health discovery. The other centres are in London and Singapore. At the time, Johnson & Johnson stated, “Driven by some of the leading researchers in Africa and discovery science, the satellite center [H3D] is focused on outpacing the rising threat of antimicrobial resistance by accelerating innovation against multidrug-resistance gram-negative bacteria.”
Seated at a boardroom table in his office, Chibale laughs deep from his belly. “We associate Johnson & Johnson with baby powder, but there’s much more…”
His left arm is in a sling following shoulder surgery – an injury stemming from lockdown when he slipped and fell while hiking on Table Mountain. “It happened just here, above the university,” he gestures, with his other arm.
Chibale and his wife Bertha live on the university’s campus, where he has served as warden of student residence Upper Campus Residence, formerly Smuts Hall, since 2015. Here he weathered the #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall protests, which saw students torch vehicles and police deploy stun grenades a stone’s throw away from his home.
Referring to his injured arm, he says at least his writing arm wasn’t hurt and that he can still type with one hand.
From a village in Zambia
Mentions of gratitude underpin the story of his journey, which starts in a village without electricity or running water in Zambia’s Mpika district. His father died when he was two months old. Laughing, he relays how hearing in his one ear is still impaired after being ambushed as a kid while stealing mangoes.
“This was a township,” he says. “So I’m climbing up a tree to steal mangoes and I was coming down. This gang, or well guys who were playful, had surrounded us. There were only about four of us, of who three managed to escape. And I was the only one left. Oh my goodness. And they took a big rock and smashed it to my ear. And then, when they saw me bleeding, they actually ran away. They were so scared of the damage they had done. Oh, that day! Anyway, so I went home and lied to my mother and said, no I went to school and tripped over a hole.”
During high school classes, thanks to an excellent teacher, he became fascinated with chemistry experiments. He went on to study organic chemistry at the University of Zambia, where he fell in love with the logical nature of organic molecules. “These things cannot be planned. I simply fell in love with organic chemistry, in the same way I fell in love with my wife Bertha,” he says.
From early on he realised education was a way out of poverty. “To get out of poverty, you either play sport or you follow education,” he says. “So I started applying for scholarships, writing letters to universities around the world. And I got rejected. I kept applying and kept on being rejected. But I didn’t give up. I kept applying.”
His first job was at Kafironda Explosives in the mining town Mufulira, on Zambia’s Copperbelt, where he made detonators, dynamite, and other explosives for use in Zambian mines. Laughing, he says this would come to haunt him later while applying for a visa to enter the United States. “There was a section on the form where you had to declare whether you’ve worked with explosives,” he says. “Of course, I said ‘yes’, and fortunately nothing happened.”
During two years at Kafironda, he continued applying for scholarships. “And I remember this,” he says. “It was January of 1989. I got a letter saying you have been shortlisted for a Cambridge Livingstone Trust Scholarship. Please present yourself for an interview on the 26th of January at the Anglo-American Corporation offices in Harare, Zimbabwe… So that was my first time out of Zambia. The first time to fly on an aeroplane.”
‘This was my turn’
Competition for the scholarship was tight, with shortlisted candidates from several African countries. “So in that year, there were six of us from Zambia, from different disciplines. I was the only scientist. And of course, I’d been failing all this time, getting rejected. But this was my turn. It was God’s appointed time for me. Actually, I was the only successful candidate.”
At Cambridge, without having completed an honours or master’s degree, Chibale enrolled for a PhD under the late organic chemist Professor Stuart Warren. “So Stuart, this amazing, incredible man, just gave me a chance. I mean there was such a gap between me and my colleagues who had all done their undergraduates at Cambridge. But in life, you can moan and complain about a disadvantage, or you can turn it into a challenge. I mean, the first three to six months were rough. Stuart would recommend to me that I sneak into first-year undergraduate classes to catch up. Stuart, he saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself, and really gave me a chance.”
Chibale’s work at Warren’s lab, developing new synthetic methods for optically active molecules, helped secure his first post-doctoral position at the University of Liverpool, in the United Kingdom, after which he joined the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, funded through a Wellcome Trust International Prize Travelling Research Fellowship.
“That was another miracle,” he says. “I was eligible for this fellowship only because I had lived in England for three years, which was a minimum requirement. And the scholarship was so good, it even gave me an allowance for my family. I haven’t forgotten. It was 1 000 pounds per month. In those days, the pound was much stronger than the US dollar. So I went from rags to riches. In Liverpool, I was walking most of the time while in California, I actually had a car!”
Over the years, he was gaining insight into the pharmaceutical sector – the science but also the entrepreneurial side that pushes innovation, all the while longing to bring this knowledge to Africa. Peers suggested he consider South Africa, and particularly the University of Cape Town [UCT]. Around 1994, then UCT Department of Chemistry head, Professor James Bull actually made Chibale an offer to pursue postdoctoral research – which he declined. “Because I thought there was going to be a civil war in South Africa! I remember watching the release of Nelson Mandela on TV in England, quiet, just watching.”
Towards the end of 1995, inside a copy of the British scientific journal Nature, Chibale found an advertisement for a position as a lecturer in organic chemistry at UCT and applied. “It was a calling,” he says. The family moved to Cape Town.
Then in 2010 at UCT, with five post-doctoral staff, Chibale founded H3D. At the time his mentors included Dr Anthony Wood, former Pfizer senior vice-president, now head of GlaxoSmithKline’s Research and Development, who arranged for Chibale to have a four-month sabbatical with Pfizer in the United Kingdom to learn about the practicalities of innovative pharma. Thirteen years later, H3D has blossomed.
Chibale says he is a Christian as well as a soccer and boxing fan. His wife Bertha runs a Cape Town catering business called Hearts and Tarts. They have three sons.
As the interview draws to a close, he looks up at his 1989 Cambridge class photo. “You won’t believe it,” he says. “Last year I visited my college at Cambridge with my wife and second son and they pulled out a copy of my handwritten scholarship application letter, written to them from Zambia all those years back.”
This precious relic of Chibale’s journey is not in his office. He keeps it on his desk at home.
A number of service providers have voluntarily ended their contracts with the Gauteng Department of Health to provide food to hospitals. In response, Gauteng Health is looking at a multi-vendor approach to tackle the problem which it blames on vendors being unable to fulfil their orders.
Meanwhile, Gauteng continues to battle with surgical and cancer treatment backlogs. R784 million has been allocated to this end, with a portion allocated to cancer treatment services, some of which will be outsourced to the private sector and some of which is going to new radiotherapy equipment.
This year has seen a number of Gauteng hospitals battling to secure their food supplies. Responding to SA parliamentary questions, Gauteng Health MEC Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko wrote that 26 out of 34 Gauteng public hospitals have been affected by food shortages.
“The shortages were mostly due to suppliers not being paid, contracts expiring, or companies not delivering. It was so bad for two hospitals, Bronkhorstspruit and Lenasia South, they had to borrow food from other hospitals!” said DA Shadow MEC for Health, Jack Bloom, who posed the questions.
Hospitals have being going through long stretches of not being able to provide full meals: at George Mukhari Hospital, chicken, fish and frozen vegetables were unavailable for four months, and there was no milk from February to May. The petty cash budgets are woefully insufficient to cover the gap: Kalafong hospital can only spend R2000 a day, not nearly enough to feed its 700 patients, reports SA People.
According to News24, Gauteeng Health spokesperson, Motalatale Modiba, said that the main problem was down to vendors struggling to fulfil their orders on time.
Currently, Gauteng health is running a tender to outsource oncology services for the Charlotte Maxeke and Steve Biko hospitals. The outsourcing programme should be able to ensure that patients who are currently awaiting treatment in the public sector will be able to access private sector treatment instead.
In their announcement, Gauteng Health stated: “We recognise the urgency of the situation and want to assure the public that we are committed to handling the outsourcing of radiation oncology sources diligently and are nearing implementation.”
The open tendering process will last 14 days, and is divided into categories for oncology specialists, treatment services and radiation planning services.
The department has already procured 4 Llinac machines, and has recently closed a tender for a Brachytherapy, and have advertised a tender for another Linac machine for Charlotte Maxeke. Ongoing investigations by Spotlight have also revealed that the oncology procurement process is lagging behind. The GDoH aims to have the first treatments under the outsourcing programme to start in August 2023.
