🔅 Can You Accept a Sick Note from a Traditional Healer?
An Ant Trafficking Bust
Good morning from… can you guess where? (Answer at the bottom!)
Bugged and Busted: Queen Ants Are the New Ivory
Kenya’s wildlife cops didn’t expect to find a luxury ant farm when they raided Jane Guesthouse near Hell’s Gate National Park… but that’s exactly what they got.
In early April, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) intercepted two Belgian teens, a Vietnamese man, and a Kenyan national, who were caught red-handed with royalty: 5,440 queen ants from giant African harvester colonies. Think exotic wildlife trafficking, but make it entomological. Street value? About $9,300 in Kenya. But had they made it to ant collectors in Europe, the haul could’ve fetched nearly $1 million. Yes, million.
Why the buzz? Queen ants are the Beyoncé of the bug world: essential, rare, and pricey. They birth entire colonies, and in the ant-collecting scene, they’re housed in chic glass formicariums where fans study their drama-filled social lives.
But there's a darker side to this tiny heist. Experts warn that trafficking these queens can obliterate wild colonies, endangering ecosystems where ants, not elephants, are the true keystone species. As insect guru Dino Martins put it: "If we lost elephants, we’d mourn. If we lost ants and termites, the savannah would collapse."
And while the young defendants pleaded naivety (“We’re 18, not criminals!”), wildlife authorities aren’t buying it. The case, they say, shows a shift in global trafficking: from tusks and horns to insects and microbes.
Should You Accept a Sick Note from a Traditional Healer? Here's What the Law Says
South Africa is finally putting some legal weight behind its age-old healing traditions. The Traditional Health Professional Regulations, 2024 (still in draft form) could soon formalise traditional healers’ role in the country’s medical and employment landscape. And yes, that includes sick notes.
Here’s the gist, for anyone wondering if a sangoma’s sick note is HR-approved:
Soon, it might be – but only if the healer is registered.
The new regulations (set to bring the 2007 Traditional Health Practitioners Act into full force) aim to professionalise and standardise traditional health practices. That means registered traditional healers will be officially recognised, not just culturally, but legally.Not all sick notes are created equal.
Only healers registered with the Interim Traditional Health Practitioners Council of South Africa will be allowed to issue sick notes that employers must legally acknowledge. If your healer isn’t on the official registry? Your boss can still say no.Employers: time to update those sick leave policies.
Companies will need to adapt their sick leave procedures and HR systems to account for these changes, especially as more workers may start handing in traditional sick notes.
So, bottom line: a registered traditional healer's sick note can be recognised, and we’re here for it. Cultural legitimacy just got a legal upgrade.
Africa’s Cancer Crisis Meets Its Match
When immunologist Yaw Bediako lost his father to liver cancer, he did what few others do: he researched. What he uncovered was staggering: Africa loses 700,000 lives a year to cancer, yet has barely a paper trail to show for it. And that’s how Yemaachi Biotech was born, a Ghanaian company trying to do what no one else has: build the largest database of African cancer genomes on the planet.
Founded in 2020, Yemaachi is staffed by a young, pan-African team (many of them women, by the way) and is currently creating the African Cancer Atlas, a first-of-its-kind tool for understanding how cancer behaves across the continent’s wildly diverse gene pool. The data, gathered from up to 7,500 patients, will be free for African researchers to use.
And now? Big Pharma is starting to pay attention. Swiss giant Roche is backing the project with cash and tech support, and there's growing interest from other global players. But Bediako, ever the realist, isn’t starry-eyed: “We wouldn’t have any drugs without them,” he says, “but we also know not everything they do is in people’s best interest.”
Africa has a cancer conundrum: While children in high-income countries have an 80% survival rate for cancer, in many African nations that number drops to 30%. One reason? Less than 2% of the human genomes sequenced globally are African, even though the continent holds 17% of the world’s population—and its most genetically diverse.
That data gap has consequences: drugs tested largely on European genomes may not work as well on Africans. Ghanaian women, for instance, are more prone to triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive and hard-to-treat variant. But without local clinical trials or genome data, oncologists like Dr. Patrick Kafui Akakpo are working in the dark.
Bediako doesn’t mince words: racism and structural inequality have long shaped which genomes get sequenced. It’s why he sees his work as not just science, but justice—giving African people the data they’ve been denied.
His dream is that one day, a cancer drug used around the world will be made possible because of research that began in Africa. In the meantime, they’ll continue sequencing DNA and building databases.
Food for Thought
“It is better to be poor in youth than in old age.”
— Zimbabwe Proverb
And the Answer is…
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