Prof Glenda Gray: On the front line battling pandemics

Professor Glenda Gray is a scientist working around the clock to stem the impact of HIV-Aids in the country.

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Gray is a senior HIV clinician and scientist at Wits University who has been at the forefront of the fight against the pandemic for many decades.

“I trained as a medical doctor at Wits University and specialised to become a paediatrician. “As a young paediatrician, I witnessed HIV exploding in pregnant women and young children at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in the 1990s.

“I felt compelled to turn to clinical research to try to find ways to mitigate HIV in children.

“So, I began my career in science as a clinical researcher. “I was then approached by the South African Medical Research Council and asked to join its team that was responsible for developing South Africa’s first two HIV vaccines.”

Picture: Supplied

The Covid war

Over the decades, she has learnt how hard it is to find an HIV vaccine.

During Covid, she was one of the experts tasked to co-lead a Covid vaccine study taking place on three continents.

The Sisonke study established the value of a single dose of the Ad26 Sars-CoV-2 vaccine to prevent Covid-related admission to hospital, hospitalisation requiring critical care unit or intensive care unit admission and death in health care workers.

Almost 500 000 health care workers were vaccinated. It also established the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine against emerging strains of Sars-CoV-2.

After the pandemic, she went back to focus on HIV vaccines and related matters.

“I am also lucky enough to support Biovac, a bio-pharmaceutical company in their clinical development of the first end-to-end vaccine made on this continent, the Oral Cholera Vaccine.”

In her daily job as an HIV clinician and scientist, she faces the scientific hurdles of trying to outwit the virus by equipping the immune system through vaccines.

People join studies to make a difference, either because they are living with HIV or because they want to contribute to the scientific journey, she said.

“Our trial participants also face the problems of unemployment, gender-based violence and mental health issues, so we need to make sure we can facilitate their care.

“Every day, we are confronted with the struggles that our participants are going through in life.”

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Test for HIV

South Africa has one of the highest numbers of people living with HIV in the world. She encourages people to do HIV tests regularly and emphasises the importance of getting onto treatment and staying on it.

Because of the high numbers of HIV-positive people and the fact that not everyone is on treatment, transmission occurs to sexual partners and infants during pregnancy, labour and delivery and via breastfeeding, Gray said.

“So we need interventions to prevent this as well, hence the importance of prevention modalities such as oral and injectable antiretrovirals, to try and prevent transmission in our high-burden country.

“We also need to continue to research an HIV cure, therapeutic vaccines, as well as preventive vaccines.”

Since the middle of 2000, the country has managed to get people onto treatment, increasing life expectancy.

However, she said that because not all people know their diagnosis or stay on treatment, transmission continues.

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Losing funding

She is aggrieved about the loss of the USAid/Pepfar funding, which she says will affect testing, retention in care and treatment and the ability to diagnose HIV in children.

One of her worries is that men are less likely to access care, less likely to get tested and less likely to get treatment and stay on treatment, so they are more likely to die compared to women, who interact more frequently with health care, get access to testing and subsequent care.

“Women will continue to get HIV because the men they are with may not know they are infected and will continue to transmit the virus to their partners.

“We need to offer regular HIV testing and rapid access to care if found to have HIV and, if positive, support with access to oral and injectable antiretrovirals to stop transmission.

“We need to address the socioeconomic drivers of HIV, like unemployment, patriarchy and gender-based violence that spur the epidemic on.

“We need better health care to keep people in treatment programmes and in prevention programmes.

“We need to invest in ongoing research to find that preventive vaccine and to continue to fund research that looks at an HIV cure.”

The professor said that through political and economic will, the epidemic can be controlled.

ALSO READ: US aid cuts continue to threaten South Africa’s HIV progress

Away from the lab

When taking a break from fighting the pandemic, Gray likes to walk, hike and swim.

“I love cold water swimming, and when I am in Cape Town, the waves are good.”

Picture: Supplied

The mother of three was born and grew up in Boksburg, Ekurhuleni, with six siblings.

“We did not come from a rich family, and we lived in poor neighbourhoods, where my parents had to scrape together the means to get through the month.

“My dad died when I was 16 in a car accident, and my mother was left to raise the three children who were still at home and in high school.”

She said her mother, who died a few years ago at the age of 90, was a hard worker and often had to go to her boss in the middle of the month to ask for a loan on her salary.

“She had to set aside her pride to ensure she could get food on the table and pay for transport.”

Her mother was not educated at the time and had to travel by train from Boksburg to Jeppe, Johannesburg, to work.

She later attended Bible college and became a church leader in the Eastern Cape.

“Coming from a poor household and living in a working-class suburb taught me about the struggles that poor people face in their everyday lives.

“My parents always emphasised the importance of education to improve your prospects, and so as children we always knew that education would get us out of the ghetto, so to speak.”

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