The National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS) is a dynamic organisation, creating news in the field of diagnostic pathology and research every day. The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), an institute of the NHLS, also alerts healthcare authorities and workers globally about infectious disease outbreaks requiring urgent and immediate attention.
Latest News
Innovative “invisible ink” detects TB
Professor Bavesh Kana and his team at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS), Johannesburg, together with international researchers have pioneered an innovative process to detect TB bacteria by adding [...]
The Outbreak Response Unit of the NICD provides support to all provinces for outbreaks of epidemic infectious diseases.
For more information contact the unit on +27 (11) 386 0545.
NEW COVID-19 VARIANT DETECTED IN SOUTH AFRICA
The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the National Health Laboratory Service, confirms that through collaborative efforts with private laboratories and the NGS-SA members, a new COVID-19 variant, B.1.1.529, has been detected in [...]
SARS-COV-2 VARIANT OF INTEREST, MU (21H / B.1.621)
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently (30 August 2021) classified the PANGO lineage B.1.621 (nextclade assignment: 21H) as a variant of interest (VOI) and assigned it the Greek name “Mu”. This variant was [...]
DETECTION AND FREQUENCY OF THE C.1.2 MUTATED SARS-COV-2 LINEAGE IN SOUTH AFRICA
The Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa (NGS-SA), which includes the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), KRISP at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), University of Cape Town (UCT), Stellenbosch University (SUN), the [...]