Page 32 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Aanmatiging (Self-Assertion): The MRC, 1969–1985

the condition still continues today. 39
Outside the homelands, in ‘white’ South Africa, MRC-backed research into
diseases and conditions specifically prevalent among Africans was infrequent in these
years. In Durban iron deficiency causing anaemia among Africans and Indians was the
object of research by a small MRC–Natal Nutritional Anaemia Research Group, while
at Baragwanath Hospital the head of Paediatrics, Professor John Pettifor, was able to
persuade the MRC to back a Paediatric Mineral Metabolism Research Unit to look
into bone deformities which he had come across among groups of African children
admitted there from the same rural area. With this support, his research unit was able
to determine that a calcium-poor diet in their home districts lay at the root of their
condition.
Research into diseases or conditions not seen at this time as peculiar to one racial
group (e.g. TB, malaria, bilharzia, diabetes, acute liver failure, hepatitis, cirrhosis,
pneumoconiosis and dental caries) was certainly not ignored by the MRC. These
were far too common and serious to be neglected by a body which constantly sought
to demonstrate that it was the country’s premier institution of medical research.
Accordingly, between 1969 and 1985 it readily approved the creation or renewal of

PROMEC research project against oesophageal cancer in the Transkei, 1983. The project’s
Sister A. Makaula (right) briefs inhabitants of the Kei River Valley about the need for
cytological testing and for determining the effects of dietary supplementation.

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