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Justine first became involved in the UCT Division of Chemical Pathology during her second year of medical school, when she began attending the academic meetings in the division. She later joined the division formally, as a PhD student, and worked on a lipidology project under the co-supervision of Prof. David Marais and Dr. Dee Blackhurst. When a registrar post became available in the division 2 years later, Justine was invited to apply, and decided to convert her PhD to an MMed and embark on this adventure.
In April 2018 Ms Surita Meldau attended the Care-for-Rare conference thanks to a travel award received from the Care-for-Rare Foundation in Munich.
In South Africa we have a single genetic referral laboratory that offers diagnostic testing for mitochondrial genetics as part of a larger repertoire of metabolic disease tests. The inherited metabolic disease (IMD) laboratory at GSH in Cape Town is run by a single medical scientist and one medical technologist and is responsible for the entire repertoire of metabolic disease genetics in the country. As a highly specialised service (and the only one in Southern Africa), contact with other experts in the field requires extensive collaborations and communication with overseas laboratories and specialists. This has however been lacking until recently.