Page 39 - 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

though always in a direction sanctioned by Brink and his executive so as not to tread
on the Government’s toes. Its formal award of MRC backing to an external research
group unit carried great prestige and was much sought after nationally. ‘Getting that
stamp of approval … from the national funder – it’s affirming, not just enabling’,
acknowledged a leading researcher. At its best, the research done by these units
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and their intramural equivalents within the MRC contributed directly or indirectly
to saving or ameliorating the lives of a diverse array of the country’s inhabitants,
though usually in racial disproportion to the country’s overall burden of disease. For
example, whites at risk from atherosclerosis, heart disease and porphyria, Indians from
diabetes and anaemia, ‘coloureds’ from TB and cirrhosis, and Africans in the Transkei
and Ciskei from liver and oesophageal cancer were all beneficiaries of racially tinged
research done under the MRC’s auspices. That in these years more South Africans
were affected by or dying from infectious diseases of poverty, which the MRC was not
focusing on, underlines how selective was the research it supported.

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