Page 31 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

MRC-UCT Porphyria Research Unit laboratory, 1972. Enzymes in liver tissue of a
porphyric patient being measured, with the results being continuously recorded by the
recorder on the right.

38
among them was one of the highest in the world – came under the purview of
the MRC’s Research Institute for Nutritional Diseases. Suspecting fungal toxins on
mealies to be responsible, the Institute set up a Programme for Experimental Health
and Toxicology (later renamed the Programme on Mycotoxins and Experimental
Carcinogenesis, or PROMEC). Its research pointed firmly in this direction and it put
forward preventive measures to curb the occurrence of the pathogenic toxin on grain.
This explanation was hailed as an aetiological breakthrough and won the PROMEC
research team, led by Walter Marasas, international acclaim in mycotoxicological
circles. Indeed, in 2002 they were named by the Institute for Scientific Information
as among the world’s top 15 most-cited scholars in the fields of agricultural sciences
and plant and animal science.
Also with the MRC’s encouragement, the National Institute for Nutritional
Diseases undertook nutritional surveys for the Bantustan governments in the Transkei
and Ciskei, while in KwaZulu it investigated the very localized occurrence in Mseleni
of a rare joint disease (unyonga in isiZulu) which severely crippled those so affected.
Initially the researchers thought that adding vitamin B to the maize meal eaten there
would solve the problem, but time proved this not to be so. Research into the origin of

24