Health e News
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Pope Benedict XVI is in Africa this week (17th-23rd March) on his first trip to the continent as Pontiff and is already angering AIDS activists with his anti-condom stance.
Despite a health crisis in the Free State caused by a funding shortage, the provincial health department has granted 160 health workers who are members of the ANC-aligned National Education Health and Allied Workers’€™ Union (NEHAWU) paid leave for six months to do election campaigning for the ANC.
The humanitarian medical aid agency, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), has reported an increase in rape cases reported to its various clinics in South Africa and worldwide. MSF recently released a report detailing the nature of cases patients present their aid workers with.
First Aid is a very well known and important procedure in society. But, Mental Health First Aid is something new in this country. It was imported from Australia where it was developed. South African experts identified the need for this program as a result of rising numbers of cases of patients with mental illnesses.
The National Health Department has for the first time taken firm steps against vitamin seller Matthias Rath by confiscating consignments of his flagship multi-vitamin VitaCell in Durban and Cape Town and opening criminal cases for his alleged contravention of the Medicines Act.
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In this opinion piece Nathan Geffen and Paul Booth make the case for the male circumcision debate to put to rest and for the urgent development of an ethical national voluntary male medical circumcision policy.
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A lecture given at the 16th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) held in Montreal, Canada, recently highlighted the extent to which Antiretroviral therapy (ARV) has become central to today’€™s attempts to prevent HIV infection.
Apart from the physical, psychological and emotional pain that comes with being raped, survivors still deal with being stigmatised and cast out of their families and communities. A report by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reveals that sexual abuse victims, especially in countries facing humanitarian crises, do not receive emergency medical attention.
The AIDS epidemic in our country, over more than 10 years, has had sadly many more downs than ups.
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Somewhere around 1 November 2008 the death penalty was reintroduced in the Free State. Quietly, with the stroke of a pen, an official in the Department of Health in Bloemfontein signed a memorandum introducing a moratorium declaring that no new patients should be put on anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. This was to be for the next five months ‘€“ until the new financial year, April 1 2009 — when the funds would return.
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SA NGOs condemn statements made by former health minister at UN session of the Commission on the Status of Women looking at caregiving in the context of HIV/AIDS
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JOHANNESBURG:(PlusNews) – 2009 might just be the year that HIV prevention finally takes centre stage in South Africa. Years of workshops and speeches in which AIDS experts and politicians talked about the need to prioritise prevention are, at last, translating into action.