Health e News
Health workers save lives and we have to value them as an investment. That is the message from the World Health Organisation (WHO) to all governments of the world, this World Health Day.
A first in HIV vaccine trials is taking place in South Africa. A vaccine will be tested on people already infected with the HI-virus in the hope that it will delay or prevent their progression to full-blown AIDS.
Thousands of women in South Africa and elsewhere have volunteered for the world’s largest clinical trials to test the efficacy of a range of microbicides, that, if successful, could prevent at least 2,5 million new infections in the developing world, over the next five years.
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Thousands of child headed homes in the Eastern Cape suffer because they remain unidentified. These children only depend on their neighbours for living. But the neighbourliness soon wears off ‘ and the children are seen as a burden.
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The long duration of treatment and huge pill doses TB patients must take are seen as the major obstacles to patient compliance. It is for these reasons that scientists are working to discover new and better medicines to cure tuberculosis. We spoke to Professor Valerie Mizrahi, one of the research scientists at the forefront of this quest.
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It’s not about the physical pain. It’s about the emotional pain. That’s what I came to learn. When I was raped, they took something away from me. They took my dignity. They took something I can’t get back.
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Every week, a number of mineworkers who fall sick while on duty are laid off work. They are told to go home because they are no longer useful.
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As journalists, we are supposed to tell the stories of our time. Some of those stories we tell very well, others we do to death but many we simply ignore.
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A deadly new strain of drug-resistant TB presents an additional burden for overworked staff at KwaZulu-Natal’s only MDR TB hospital.
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In nearly three years, 18 000 newly diagnosed tuberculosis patients have passed through the TB Care Centre at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, in Soweto. Most of these people would not have known where to receive treatment.
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As HIV infection rates increase, it is projected that so too will the incidence of TB – the most common opportunistic infection in people living with HIV and AIDS. And the dual epidemic presents real challenges for the health system.