Inspired by her gifts to give back - Dr Fikile Mabena

That and the random acts of kindness by her nursing sister mother, Mathlakane, have since become her touchstone. Dr Mabena recalls how her mother stopped after dark to give a woman carrying an infant, a lift home. She also worked half days at an orphanage in her retirement.

Born in Mamelodi and the daughter of "Bra Joe", an indomitable petroleum company merchandiser whose glaucoma rendered him blind a decade ago, Dr Mabena learned to take nothing for granted by working hard to excel in the classroom and on the athletics field.

It paid off. At the end of Grade 10 she received a scholarship to attend Kyalami's elite St. Luke's Senior College where the classes were small and the teachers were diverse, highly qualified and specialised.

"I have an older sister and a younger brother and although we lived in the township, we had a relatively comfortable life my mum did a lot of community work, too" she adds.

Turning values into action

Besides her current paediatric sub-speciality in infectious diseases, Dr Mabena and her now equally successful St Luke's College alumni friends started a foundation to give back in 2019.

After qualifying as a medical doctor at the University of Pretoria, she did her internship at Livingstone Hospital in Port Elizabeth. She qualified in 2002 and received her preferred choice for her community service year at Mamelodi Hospital.

"Unexpectedly, I saw a lot of rape cases there and in retrospect I think I got depressed, so afterwards I took two months off and stayed home. It was a very traumatic year for young doctors and, we had little support, so it took a lot out of us," she recalls.

The journey to paediatric infectious diseases

She then joined the 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria and was deployed on a peacekeeping mission to Burundi for four instructive months. She returned to register for radiology at Steve Biko Hospital in Pretoria, but then realised that she preferred more patient contact than radiology would offer. She left to work for several cutting-edge paediatric NGOs focussing on HIV and palliative care before starting her paediatric registrar time at Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital.

"I think the combination of paediatrics and HIV steered me towards infectious diseases, which is why my PhD is around the epidemiology of community and hospital-acquired invasive infection in infants, from birth to three months old," she says.

It is for this important research that Dr Mabena has received a 2021 Discovery Foundation Academic Fellowship Award.

"I've been given an opportunity to give back"

She explains her passion for public health: "I feel like I've been given an opportunity to get educated so I can return and give back. It sounds clichéd, but I'm doing exactly what I went to school to do. It's satisfying and very fulfilling.

"You learn so much from your patients and I'm so often humbled by how giving everybody is. When you ask permission to include their babies in research, they inevitably say, 'if it will help someone else, I'll do it.'"

Finding the causes of infections in young infants

While vaccines, antiretroviral medicine and prevention of mother-to-child transmission have had a dramatic impact on under-five mortality over the past 20 years, Dr Mabena says neonatal mortality has not dropped at anywhere near the same rate.

"Infections in young infants are a big cause of death, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, so we need to zone in on the causes so we can intervene," she says.

Dr Mabena is married to her "best friend", Pallo, who is a medical doctor, too. They met at university and have four children between the ages five and 17 years old. They enjoy travelling and live in Midrand.