Page 47 - 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

monitoring mortality and morbidity in areas just beyond municipal boundaries. The
last-mentioned was a key element of the multidisciplinary Mamre Community Health
Project, which was begun in 1986 to monitor longitudinally the health status in this
village 48 km from Cape Town, ‘with particular reference to the effects of interventive
programmes and the rural–urban transition that the community is experiencing’.
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Even more innovative longitudinally was CERSA’s Birth to Ten study, launched
in 1990 to identify the factors affecting the health, during their first decade of life, of
over 3,000 children born in Soweto in that year. Stemming from concern about the

Birth to Ten Project poster, 1991.

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