Page 52 - 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

Prompted by what they had seen and heard about the dire HIV/AIDS situation
in Zimbabwe when they had attended an AIDS conference there in 1988, CERSA
staff undertook a pilot survey of HIV/AIDS knowledge among older school pupils
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in South Africa – they found it ‘scant’ – and so pressed for local AIDS preventive
strategies to focus on lifestyle change. In terms of treatment, CERSA recommended
home-based care, based on what a survey by its Natal branch found was acceptable to
communities there.
CERSA was also in the vanguard of those at the MRC pushing for a coherent,
inclusive framework within which research into HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment
should proceed. This persuaded the MRC to create its own National AIDS Research
Programme in 1991 as one of its new, composite research programmes to provide
such overarching scaffolding. One of the National AIDS Research Programme’s
first initiatives was thus to begin the publication of a quarterly AIDS Bulletin to
offer authoritative and up-to-date information about the disease to the many sectors
involved in countering it, as ‘the field is so multi-faceted no one programme can hope
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to cover all aspects and interventions’.
Not that this Programme was the MRC’s only response to HIV/AIDS. On the
laboratory side, already in 1987 it had established as one of its external research units
an AIDS Virus Research Unit at the National Institute of Virology in Johannesburg.
This multidisciplinary unit included virologists, immunologists, molecular biologists
and clinicians, initially in trying to isolate and characterize the causative virus and set
up a central reference centre for it, and then in improving testing and monitoring HIV
prevalence in the population. These findings, along with those of other HIV/AIDS
researchers at the MRC and delegates to a national conference on AIDS organized by
the MRC in 1988, fed directly into the making of South Africa’s first National AIDS
Plan in 1994.
To another topical social problem, trauma, the MRC responded even more
promptly, both because of its high visibility and because many perceived it as
directly linked to rapid urbanization. With trauma cases in Cape Town from assaults
and car accidents reaching record levels in global terms, in 1988 the MRC created a
National Trauma Programme to devise a uniform framework for research into this
issue. It facilitated data collection and analysis, the results of which were steered to
local planners tasked with advising health service providers on trauma prevention.
For instance, on the basis of such empirically founded data, Cape Town’s Emergency
Services were reorganized in 1993. ‘The real joy is that health planners are calling
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for our data’, the Programme’s head reported with delight. In CERSA-like style,
this success story was written up prominently as an example of research-into-policy
in the Programme’s Trauma Review magazine.

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