Kurnel Plaatjies was having a bad week. He had been starved overnight, had a tube stuffed up his nose and fluid poured down it and sucked out. He had been forced to breathe strange mixtures and made to cough. And now strangers were trying to make friends when all he wanted to do was watch television. The indignant toddler is a volunteer foot soldier in the world’s most advanced attempt to create a vaccine to stop the spread of tuberculosis.

The Union World Conference on tuberculosis and lung health opens in Cape Town on November 9, with more than 3 000 scientists brainstorming new strategies to attack one of the most successful killers of human beings. This year the traditionally scientific and sober meeting looks set to develop a harder advocacy edge.

Nearly one in four inpatients in a rural South African area could be infected with the multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) by the end of 2012, while close to half would be carrying almost incurable drug-resistant XDR-TB strains of the disease. An article published in The Lancet last week used epidemiological modelling to predict the transmission of drug resistant TB in Tugela Ferry.

The world’s best hope for a malaria vaccine is still on track, with news this week that the RTS,S/AS02D vaccine appeared to cut severe disease by 58% among young Mozambican children. The researchers also reported that new infections of malaria among the one- to four-year-olds vaccinated appeared to be reduced by 65% — but warned that this figure should be treated with caution.

South African and international researchers are stripping the luxuries and costs from First World products to build independently powered technology that could save millions of lives around the globe. A wind-up foetal heart rate monitor is heading towards an initial production run.

A struggling behemoth hamstrung by bureaucracy and underfunding is how doctors at Chris Hani Baragwanath describe the country’s largest healthcare facility. Last week photographs of babies in a cardboard box at Bara prompted the national and Gauteng departments of health to announce the appointment of a surgical strike management team to look at ways of improving the running of the hospital.

A wakening giant is threatening to turn South Africa’s private health industry upside down. The Government Employees Medical Scheme (Gems) has seen sensational growth, which has taken it from little more than a pipe dream to South Africa’s third-largest medical scheme in just three years.

Health experts gathered in Johannesburg to probe a pathological, and potentially terminal, syndrome of private healthcare cost escalations recently. And they concluded that regulatory surgery was needed to save the patient. In a room packed with suits of varying degree of slickness, different interest groups prepared to spin, lobby and argue themselves out of the firing line at the private health sector indaba called by the department of health.

The Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund is hoping to build a children’s hospital in Johannesburg to provide specialist care for children from across Africa. The proposed hospital will complement the multimillion-rand development of a health precinct already under way in Hillbrow, which is part of Johannesburg’s R2-billion inner-city regeneration project.

The town with the highest known rates of foetal alcohol syndrome in the world is De Aar, which is roughly in the centre of South Africa in the country’s largest and most sparsely populated province. New research has confirmed that at least 12 out of every 100 children in the Northern Cape town have been damaged by alcohol while in their mother’s womb.