Page 122 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Slimmer, but Not Lacking Gray Matter: The MRC, 2012–2021

example of how a survey can impact on policy’. Even President Jacob Zuma praised
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how the MRC’s research had ‘led the way in providing the first compelling evidence
of the country’s progress in the quest to mitigate the toll exacted by AIDS’. Indeed,
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so telling was BODRU’s data and analysis of it that the Western Cape Provincial
Department of Health borrowed its methodology for its own mortality surveillance.
Further proof of how central BODRU was to the piecing together of South Africa’s
health profile was the Department of Science and Technology’s decision in 2017 that,
as BODRU’S home, the MRC should host the South African Population Research
Infrastructure Network (SAPRIN) to pool in one database information from all of the
country’s diverse health and demographic surveillance sites.
Critical demographic data and analyses were also provided by other research units,
for instance those by the Maternal and Infant Healthcare Strategies Research Unit
on perinatal and neonatal morbidity and mortality, which were fed into, inter alia, a
national assessment of the quality of care in maternity facilities. In the field of TB,
the MRC’s TB Platform led South Africa’s first National TB Prevalence Survey from
2017 to try to establish the full extent of the disease in the country as a basis for
planning fresh interventions to find, treat and curb it. The survey was ‘a milestone in
the history of TB management and research [locally]’, enthused its compilers, as it
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provided a precise, first-ever estimate of the TB burden as well as of health-seeking
behaviour of TB patients and those reporting TB symptoms.
Statistical data on social issues generated by research units also impacted on official
policy-making. The Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs Research Unit’s empirically
based conclusion in 2015 that alcohol was a significant factor in nearly 60 per cent of
road deaths helped to persuade the Government to raise the tax on liquor and how
best to shape the National Department of Health’s alcohol strategy policy, while
the Gender and Health Research Unit’s figures on rape, femicide and gender-based
violence gradually began to alert the state and society to the scale of these attacks on
women and the need to identify what underlay them. ‘We need to develop interventions
for primary prevention and prevention of its long-term health consequences’, argued
its director, Dr Rachel Jewkes. Moreover, even if a rape was reported – which was
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the exception rather than the rule – its Rape Adjudication and Prosecution Study in
South Africa showed that the chances that it would end in a trial and conviction were
low. Such telling data was central to the shaping of the country’s National Strategic
Plan on GBV and Femicide (2020).
More direct and immediate in impact was the research in the laboratories of
several other existing research units which produced pharmacological, scientific
and instrumental innovations in these years. In this, the units involved in TB and

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