HEALTH - The African Mirror

Dec

20

2025

Kenyan engineers take action to help premature babies breathe safer

HEALTH

WHEN healthcare engineer Lisa Mutheu joined the East Africa Biodesign fellowship, she anticipated a year of clinical rotations, design challenges and long hours spent shaping early-stage medical concepts. Instead, she encountered a quieter but urgent emergency unfolding in neonatal wards across the continent. “There’s a problem with oxygen delivery to mostly pre-term babies in Africa. If they’re given too much oxygen, they end up getting blind. If they don’t get enough, they end up dying. And there’s not enough being done around this,” she told bird in an interview. The fellowship is a 10-month program that brings together Kenya’s Kenyatta…

Dec

11

2025

By MACHARIA MAINA

Ruth Apondi’s Smart Route to Mobile Health

HEALTH

24-YEAR-OLD Ruth Apondi Omondi’s August 2025 win of the Top 40 Under 40 Women award in the social Impact category from the Kenyan news publication Business Daily marked a milestone in her lifesaving work. “It's special to everyone because mothers are very important. We bring life, and it's good that I'm able to impact them, and my efforts were recognised, since we're still in the early stages. This is a big award. As we progress, there’s going to be more of Smart Mama, yes,” she told bird. Smart Mama is a mobile health platform that Omondi created in 2024. The…

Dec

10

2025

By MARINA JOUBERT

Telling people to use antibiotics responsibly isn’t enough. What will work instead

HEALTH

ANTIMICROBIAL resistance is projected to cause up to 10 million deaths each year by 2050, making it one of the most pressing global health challenges of this century. In 2021, an estimated 4.71 million deaths were associated with bacterial antimicrobial resistance. Antimicrobial resistance happens when disease-causing microbes such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites develop resistance to antimicrobials (the medicinal substances used to control them). This leads to treatable infections becoming life-threatening. The World Health Organisation, other organisations, networks and alliances run extensive campaigns designed to educate the public about antimicrobial resistance. But a question remains after more than a…

Dec

05

2025

By LIEKETSENG NED and MARGUERITE SCHNEIDER

South Africa needs to rethink how it measures intellectual and developmental disabilities – what’s lacking

HEALTH

THE effective planning and delivery of services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in South Africa is severely constrained by the lack of reliable data. Intellectual disability is characterised by significant limitations in: intellectual functioning (reasoning, learning, problem solving) adaptive behaviour (a range of everyday social and practical skills) which originate before the age of 22. Developmental disabilities are a diverse group of chronic conditions due to an impairment in physical, learning, language, or behavioural areas. Intellectual disability, autism, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and fetal alcohol syndrome are some of the conditions. South Africa measures disability at the population…

Dec

02

2025

By MELANI RATIH MAHANANI

How to stay healthy on HIV treatment, and what side effects to look out for – Malawi research

HEALTH

HIV treatment has delivered life-altering advantages. Antiretroviral therapy has led to reduced mortality and improved life expectancy for people living with HIV. Nearly 41 million people were living with HIV in 2024. Eastern and southern Africa accounted for 21.1 million, while western and central Africa accounted for 5.2 million. But there are risks associated with the therapy, including the potential for a set of health conditions affecting the heart, blood vessels, and metabolism, like high blood pressure and excessive weight gain. Melani Ratih Mahanani, a medical doctor and epidemiologist, unpacks her research conducted in Malawi that showed some drugs have…

Jan

05

2024

By The African Mirror

Stressed out? Why mindfulness and meditation help us cope with the world

HEALTH

IN a world fraught with anxiety, stress, and environmental and humanitarian disasters, people are looking for ways to cope. Many have turned to practices originating in ancient eastern philosophies for guidance. Among these is mindfulness, which is linked to meditation. Lucy Draper-Clarke, researcher and author of The Compassionate Activist, spoke to health & medicine editor Nadine Dreyer about looking inwards and cultivating compassion, awareness and gratitude. LUCY DRAPER-CLARKE, Research Associate in Compassion, University of the Witwatersrand What does mindfulness actually mean? The original translation of the Pali word sati is “remembering”. It was about remembering your ethics, the right way…

Nov

29

2025

By LEANE RAMSOOMAR

Men’s drinking harms women and children, and the impact is worst in poorer countries

HEALTH

DRINKING alcohol is known to be harmful to people’s health. It’s also known to be harmful in other ways. For example, men experience more harm, such as aggression, accidents, and injury, from their own drinking than do women. But when a man drinks, the women and children closest to him often pay a price too. I’m part of a global collaborative group of health researchers who set out to explore how – and how much – men’s drinking harms women and children. Our recent research drew on three global reviews of findings from rich, poor and middle-income countries. These covered…

Nov

26

2025

By JONNY PETER

Long COVID’s hidden toll: the South Africans still battling fatigue, anxiety and memory loss

HEALTH, COVID-19

“I feel better, but my mind isn’t the same.” Four years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, such comments are still heard regularly in many medical practices in South Africa. What began as a respiratory virus seems to have left a lingering mark on some people who were infected. In South Africa, more than 4 million cases of COVID-19 were confirmed. For some people, the physical recovery was just the beginning. Ongoing fatigue, poor concentration, and mood changes due to lasting viral effects have affected work, relationships and quality of life. Our team of specialist psychiatrists, clinical immunologists and…

Jun

08

2020

By The African Mirror

‘I lost my mind’: Ethiopian migrants forced home empty-handed by Coronavirus

COVID-19

EMELINE WUILBERCQ WHEN Rita Alemu realised the plane she had boarded in Dubai had taken her back home to Ethiopia, she burst into tears as she knew she would never recover more than a year's unpaid wages. The 23-year-old domestic helper had only been paid for two out the 18 months she had worked in the United Arab Emirates when the new coronavirus pandemic suddenly forced her and thousands of other Ethiopian migrants to go home. "I went to Dubai hoping I could work and change my life, but I spent all this time there and came back empty-handed," said…

Nov

25

2025

By MARY KINNEY

Africa’s hidden stillbirth crisis: new report exposes major policy and data gaps

HEALTH

NEARLY one million babies are stillborn in Africa every year. Behind every stillbirth is a mother, a family and a story left untold. Most of these are preventable, many unrecorded, and too often invisible. Each number hides a moment of heartbreak, and every uncounted loss represents a missed opportunity to learn and to act. As a public health researcher specialising in maternal and newborn health, I have spent the past two decades working on strengthening health systems and quality of care across Africa. My research has focused on understanding how health systems can prevent stillbirths and provide respectful, people-centred care…