Page 76 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Positively into the New South Africa: The MRC, 1995–2012

Eastern Cape Cancer Registry with the assistance of the Burden of Disease Research
Unit, the new research unit now added epidemiological, molecular biological and
genetic dimensions, giving the unit a strongly multidisciplinary character, a feature
too of the two other new cancer-related research units to which the MRC gave its
support in these years, the CANSA–SAIMR Cancer Epidemiology Research Group
at Witwatersrand University and the Oncology Research Unit at the University of
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KwaZulu-Natal. In effect this meant that all three MRC-backed cancer units opened
between 1998 and 2007 overlapped in their approach to the disease and, noticeably,
lacked a clinical orientation. In fact, in 2002 CANSA withdrew its funding from the
unit at Witwatersrand University for its lack of clinical work. Not for the last time
were their particular emphases to be a source of criticism.
The second thrust among the 13 new ‘public health’ research units was investi-
gating social problems which had long afflicted black South Africans but which were
little researched, like addiction and anxiety disorders. The latter were at the centre
of the Stellenbosch University–MRC Anxiety and Stress Disorders Research Unit’s
attention from its inception in 1997, especially post-traumatic stress disorders because

What does cancer look like? An in-your-face display of liver cancer, with an explanation
being given by Professor Vikash Sewram, director of the Oncology Research Unit, at the
Eding Science Festival in Polokwane, April 2010.

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