The first COVID-19 case was diagnosed on March 5th, 2020. South Africa followed recommendations to employ non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as physical distancing, to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Since NPIs are difficult to implement in densely populated communities, the TRACE project (Transmission of COVID-19 in Crowded Environments) was designed to understand and mitigate…
Details*Please note, this press release was originally published by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network on 18 November 2021 and can be viewed here. Scott Hammer – physician, professor, educator, advisor, giant in the field of HIV therapy and prevention – passed away on November 17, 2021. Scott was a transcendent personality in both the…
DetailsProfessor Linda-Gail Bekker cautions that some might say, “‘I’m going to rely on my neighbour,’ but if everyone says that then we’re going to end up with not enough people getting vaccinated. So, we need enough people in the collective to say, ‘Okay, I will be the person to step forward and do this. The…
DetailsVRBPAC declined to vote on booster doses given at least 6 months from the initial dose, stating that it would be unlikely any adverse events (AEs) would arise at 6 months, but not at 2 months, and that the 6-month data presented by the sponsor was only from 17 people. FDA conducted an independent assessment…
DetailsLet me start by addressing the philosophical dilemma of the anti-vaxxer’s “freedom to choose”. The need to maintain individual freedoms is the most important mandate of the modern liberal state. Today’s liberal democratic understanding of freedom (with acceptable restraint) was an idea first conceived over 200 years ago. In political philosophy, Jeremy Bentham’s (1789) Utilitarianism…
DetailsA new international trial to assess whether high doses of the antiparasitic drug nitazoxanide could help treat patients with COVID-19 has begun in South Africa. Researchers at the University of Liverpool and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) are leading the trial as part of the ground-breaking COVID-19 drug testing platform, AGILE. The trial will…
DetailsThe Desmond Tutu Health Foundation (DTHF) and Grassroot Soccer hosted a virtual workshop to jointly disseminate and discuss key findings of the Goals for Girls (G4G) research study. The G4G study evaluated the impact, feasibility, and acceptability of a sport-based, integrated health-promotion intervention, called SKILLZ, seeking to improve sexual and reproductive health outcomes amongst secondary…
DetailsThe Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation greets with great disappointment yesterday’s announcement from Johnson & Johnson and partners that the Imbokodo study, a large-scale HIV vaccine proof-of-concept study (HVTN 705) did not show sufficient levels of efficacy to continue the trial to completion. The results showed that the Adenovirus26-based mosaic vaccine regimen, while safe, did not…
DetailsWomen, specifically young women, are the face of the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. While women are more likely to test for HIV, more likely to initiate and adhere to treatment, and more likely to have improved HIV outcomes than their male counterparts, they remain disproportionality vulnerable to infection – adolescent girls and young women…
DetailsThe following article was originally published in The Lancet, Vol. 21, Issue 6, on 01 June 2021, by Udani Samarasekera The full article can be accessed using the link below. After medical school, Linda-Gail Bekker was sure she wanted to specialise in geriatrics. Working as a young doctor in a rural hospital in Eshowe,…
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