Page 82 - 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

Pathogen Research Unit researchers that in 1998 they set on foot a continent-wide
African Rotavirus Network to spread the rollout of the vaccine beyond South Africa.
It is estimated that by 2014 this had prevented 21,000 rotavirus deaths in sub-Saharan
Africa and 135,000 hospitalizations. 106
Paralleling this accomplishment but in respect of two other big paediatric killers,
pneumonia and meningitis, was the success of the slightly older Pneumococcal Disease
Research Unit at Witwatersrand University in having the conjugate vaccines it had
been testing against these two diseases also included in the revised South African
Childhood Immunization Schedule from 2008. The proof of their efficacy was in
the marked reduction in the incidence of these diseases among children under its
surveillance in Gauteng. However, this did not stop the MRC Board from upbraiding
Professor Keith Klugman, the director of the unit (now relabelled, more accurately,
the Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit), ‘about the singular lack of
black scientists in the Unit’ in 2004. Peremptorily he was told to come up with ways
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to rectify this situation. Recognizing the way the wind was blowing and its growing
strength, he did.
A third external research unit created by the MRC in these years, the Inter-
University Cape Heart Unit, was unusual in that it was multidisciplinary, straddling
the usual clinical–laboratory divide among MRC-supported units. In the face of
the increasing incidence of cardiovascular disease in the country, especially among
Africans – Mbewu termed it ‘a raging epidemic’, which was responsible for 18 per
cent of all deaths – from 2000 it sought to harness the diverse perspectives and
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skills of cardiologists, cardiovascular surgeons and lipidologists at UCT, geneticists at
Stellenbosch University, and a physiologist at UWC to try to understand better the
mechanisms involved in the development of ischaemic heart disease and heart failure.
Their work helpfully informed the Cardiovascular Risk in Black South Africans
(CRIBSA) Study begun in 2009 by the MRC’s Chronic Diseases of Lifestyle Research
Unit as a follow-up to the BRISK Study nearly two decades earlier. 109
The 16 other research units or groups newly supported by the MRC in these years
were especially (but not exclusively) grounded in laboratory work. They represented
either cutting-edge disciplines employing new technology like genetics, genomics,
bioinformatics and medical imaging, blossoming niche fields like bone regeneration
and receptor biology (which now perceived receptors as physico-chemical realities,
not just abstract physiobiological entities), and fields deemed pertinent to the current
health needs of South Africa and its neighbours. Among these were units focusing on
cardiometabolic diseases, especially diabetes, the molecular basis of TB and potential
drugs against it, allergic diseases like asthma (which had become the third likeliest cause

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