Long Form

During this initiation season, we look back at what happened in 2013 when bungled initiations cost boys their penises.

The Earth is getting hotter and extreme weather events are becoming more common. It’s bad news for our lives. We break down how climate change links to poor health.

When a child is emotionally manipulated by one parent to hate the other, the legal system and therapists grapple with how to help families repair their relationships. Here’s why so-called parental alienation cases are contentious.

What makes the world’s most successful children’s TV programmes so addictive – and so strange? Linda Geddes explores the research on kids’ TV, what it’s teaching us about childhood development, and how that can help make programmes for the better.

Nine years after a Grade R learner, Michael Komape, drowned in a pit toilet at his school in Limpopo, 2 334 schools in the province still have these structures on their premises. Here are the hits and misses of the education department’s efforts to get rid of them since — and what they can learn from India.

South Africa’s medicines regulator will announce a decision on the approval of a two-monthly HIV prevention jab within days. If the shot is approved, the health department could start rolling it out on a large scale within nine months — but that depends on the injection’s price.

A new tool may help to keep workers who breathe in silica dust safe from silicosis — at less than R50 a prick.

From growing up without a telephone to her appointment as the chief director of digital health systems in the national health department, the sweep of Milani Wolmarans’s life story is as wide as it is inspiring. Sean Christie spoke to her in Tshwane.

Does sex work legislation have an impact on violence and the spread of HIV? We follow two women who operate in opposite worlds to find out.

Otlotleng Moolikwe fell pregnant after having sex with her boyfriend when she was 13 years old. And she’s not the only one. One in six South African teenagers between 15 and 19 years old have had a child. Here’s how to help them stay in school.

At a conference towards the end of last year, some of the great names in African public healthcare shared their lessons about what can — and can’t — work on the continent, from setting up new hospitals to implementing national health insurance. Sean Christie was there.

Cases of domestic violence tick up while shelters lose their income and scramble to get ready for the silent, second crisis of gender-based violence that research suggests will follow the coronavirus pandemic.

A stockout of the version of testosterone (made by Pfizer) used by state facilities and nonprofits is entering its second year. It’s left transgender men in South Africa, who use the hormone as part of gender-affirming treatment, with few options. Find out what lengths they’re forced to go to get the medicine.

Get to know sexual and reproductive rights activist and doctor Tlaleng Mofokeng with our reporter Sean Christie.

Pharmacy expert Andy Gray is the “insider’s insider” in South Africa’s public health sphere. Get to know him better here.

Many Ugandans were once refugees themselves. Now, they are 'paying back the good' and making their country one of the best in the world for refugees.