No image available
/ 25 November 2004
An inexpensive antibiotic often used to treat lung infections could help prevent deaths in children infected with HIV. A multinational research team tested the preventative effect of the widely-available antibiotic co-trimoxazole in 540 Zambian children between the ages of one and 14 years, The antibiotic cut Aids-related deaths such as pneumonia in the HIV-infected children by almost half at 43 percent.
No image available
/ 20 September 2004
"Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man," goes the old Jesuit saying — an advertisement, if ever there were one, for the virtues of preprimary education. Yet, a decade after the advent of democracy, South Africa appears to spend more on keeping convicted criminals in their cells than on keeping children off the streets and in preschool.
A young Zimbabwean scientist who has been championing the resurrection of a traditional African grain, sorghum, won a R100 000 fellowship at the second annual Women in Science awards in Johannesburg this week. It’s a welcome boost after five lonely years of study, when a series of supervisors abandoned her by emigrating, and petrol queues, inflation and food shortages became a fact of life in Harare.
The story of Sharpeville-born, Lesotho-raised Tebello Nyokong suggests that sometimes adversity is the best career counsellor. Nyokong won the Science and Technology category in this year’s prestigious 2004 Shoprite Checkers/SABC2 Women of the Year Award for her research in cancer diagnosis and treatment. Yet her path, from childhood, was strewn with obstacles.
Mathematicians have a reputation of being socially awkward creatures whose obscure work does not necessarily have a lot to offer the real world. However, Dr Gareth Witten is practically a party animal. He speaks understandable garden-variety English, plays beach volleyball and, last but not least, is using his skills for something extremely relevant: the fight against Aids.