Page 46 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

On and over the Brink: The MRC, 1985–1994

[He] knows how to influence people. He is … very good as [a] leader.’ 28
With Yach as its first head from 1987, CERSA was soon itself embarking on or
supporting an array of over a dozen epidemiological research projects and interventions
rather different in conception from the narrower, disease-centred, laboratory-based
topics so common in the MRC’s first decade and a half. These ranged from establishing
the extent of measles vaccination among infants in Khayelitsha, identifying risk factors
for TB in a Cape Flats township, and demonstrating the urgent need for reform of
the existing abortion law, to trying to analyse the causes of death in each province
despite the deficiency of the data, probing the effects of violence in communities, and

Mamre Community Health Project, 1987: A CERSA researcher, Ms Judy Katzenellenbogen
(right), and a seconded MRC biostatistician, Ms Gina Joubert, filing the 870 Mamre
household questionnaires (covering 4823 residents) collected as part of the project.

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