Page 48 - 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

implications of rapid urbanization on the health of children, it sought to establish what
determined their survival or non-survival. It aimed, Yach explained, to ‘provide the
baseline knowledge which could lead to a better quality of life for our urban people’.
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Such innovative projects typified the community health research approach so
characteristic of CERSA. To Yach, its acceptance was a watershed in the MRC’s
history. ‘For the first time … community health research was given equal status to that
of laboratory/experimental research’, he enthused. It would have ‘repercussions for
the long term survival of the MRC’, he predicted accurately. 31
As was critical in CERSA’s approach, the findings of these projects were published
as soon as possible so they could prompt action. Yach spoke of pursuing ‘activist
style epidemiology’ in which ‘what data you presented and how policy change was
advocated was decisive … Mere publication was not enough.’ So, alongside the
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dozens of journal articles, an Introductory Manual for Epidemiology in South Africa,
the inauguration in 1989 of a regular Urbanisation and Health Newsletter, numerous

Putting research into action: Ms Fidelia Maforah, a researcher in the National Urbanization
and Health Research Programme at the MRC, showing a mother how to prepare an oral
rehydration solution to treat the effects of diarrhoea in young children at the Imizamo Yethu
informal settlement in Hout Bay, 1993.

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