A new andromonoecious species related to the eggplant and belonging to Solanum subgenus Leptostemonum from southern Africa is described. Solanum umtuma Voronts. & S.Knapp, sp. nov. is found in the eastern part of South Africa, and is sympatric with its close relative Solanum linnaeanum Hepper & P.M-L.Jaeger. It is morphologically very similar to Solanum cerasiferum Dunal of northern tropical Af...

Introduction Cancer is a leading cause of mortality worldwide,1 with lung cancer being the leading cause of cancer-related mortality globally. In developed countries national data are collected and collated into large databases detailing the incidence of all cancers; the incidence of lung cancer is then compared with other cancers in order to gauge its overall incidence. Lung cancer in the UK i...

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup L2 originated in Western Africa but is nowadays spread across the entire continent. L2 movements were previously postulated to be related to the Bantu expansion, but L2 expansions eastwards probably occurred much earlier. By reconstructing the phylogeny of L2 (44 new complete sequences) we provide insights on the complex net of within-African migrations in t...

BACKGROUND HIV and risky alcohol use are intertwined public health issues in sub-Saharan Africa. Research supports the association between alcohol and unprotected sex, but there is limited data using event-level analysis to examine this relationship. METHODS Using data from Demographic Health Surveys and AIDS Information Surveys collected in 8 sub-Saharan African countries (Kenya, Lesotho, Mo...

These guidelines are intended as an update to those published in the Southern African Journal of HIV Medicine in 2014 and the update on when to initiate antiretroviral therapy in 2015. Since the release of the previous guidelines, the scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in southern Africa has continued. New antiretroviral drugs have become available with improved efficacy, safety and robus...

This paper is a synthesis of land issues and land policy constraints in Southern Africa prepared for the World Bank Regional Workshop on Land Issues in Africa and the Middle East held in Kampala, Uganda, 29 April to 2 May 2002. It synthesizes key points made in commissioned papers, plenary comments, and facilitated discussions from a special Southern Africa Working Group attended by conference ...

The oldest contemporary human mitochondrial lineages arose in Africa. The earliest divergent extant maternal offshoot, namely haplogroup L0d, is represented by click-speaking forager peoples of southern Africa. Broadly defined as Khoesan, contemporary Khoesan are today largely restricted to the semidesert regions of Namibia and Botswana, whereas archeological, historical, and genetic evidence p...

Sphaeropsis sapinea is an endophyte and latent pathogen of pines, assumedly introduced to the Southern Hemisphere along with its host. There are at least three recognised forms of S. sapinea that differ from each other morphologically and can also be separated based on molecular characteristics. Pinus radiata is a native to California but has been used extensively for afforestation in the South...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY The succulent biome is highly fragmented throughout the Old and New World. The resulting disjunctions on global and regional scales have been explained by various hypotheses. To evaluate these, we used Thamnosma, which is restricted to the succulent biome and has trans-Atlantic and trans-African disjunctions. Its three main distribution centers are in southern North America...

The ability to digest milk into adulthood, lactase persistence (LP), as well as specific genetic variants associated with LP, is heterogeneously distributed in global populations. These variants were most likely targets of selection when some populations converted from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist or farming lifestyles. Specific LP polymorphisms are associated with particular geographic regio...