South African medical journal = Suid-Afrikaanse tydskrif vir geneeskunde
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Personal information in health research commands utmost protection while also preserving the growth of health research. This paper aims to establish which legislation applies when processing personal information for health research. South Africa regulates health research on human subjects through a network of Human Research Ethics Committees. ⋯ Section 2(3)(b) of POPIA provides that POPIA does not apply where other legislation creates 'more extensive' conditions for the lawful processing of personal information than Chapter 3 of POPIA does. We show that the provisions of the sectoral legislation on health are more extensive than the conditions in Chapter 3 of POPIA and hence the sectoral legislation prevails. This simplifies the regulation of health research. One of the implications of this finding is that the definition of broad consent in the sectoral legislation for health research should be applied to the exclusion of the consent provisions in POPIA.
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Upon the addition of the numbers corresponding to various cancer anatomical locations in the report published by Statistics South Africa (StatsSA), the absolute number and proportion of deaths due to all cancers increased from 36 726 (8.0%) in 2013 to 40 460 (8.5%) in 2015. These high figures suggest that malignant neoplasms were in fact the second-most frequent cause of death in South Africa (SA) in 2013, and moved to the first rank in 2015. ⋯ Cancer mortality rates have increased since 1997, regardless of gender. Overall, there was a decline in YPPLL for cancer in the young population, while it increased in the adult population. A significant reduction in cancer deaths could be achieved by broadly applying effective interventions.