Home-based HIV testing offers families the opportunity to understand and face the virus together. This is a new phenomenon in South Africa, having first been introduced in certain districts of the Mpumalanga and Free State provinces.
Governments around the world are leaving hundreds of millions of cancer patients to suffer needlessly because of their failure to ensure adequate access to pain-relieving drugs, a new international survey reveals.
A vaccine candidate which showed that it can protect against HIV infection by up to 31% when tested in Thailand three years ago will be further tested in South Africa as soon as next year.
Films that feature characters with cancer have become a familiar sight for movie-goers in recent years, but they rarely portray the patient's chances of survival accurately, according to Italian researchers.
He cuts a lone figure in the fading dusk light, clutching a laptop bag in one hand and an oversized grass basket in the other. His salt and pepper hair slightly disheveled after a long day, the Eastern Cape health's head honcho Siva Pillay looks over his shoulder and grins: 'I should have come in my other bakkie, I could have shown you those bullet holes'.
South Africa's Medicines Control Council (MCC) has confirmed that it will continue to deny compassionate access to a TB drug that for many drug resistant patients is their last hope.
People living with HIV/AIDS are at an increased risk of developing oesophageal and stomach cancer as well as non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHLs), according to a new study published in the journal Gastroenterology.
An international AIDS vaccine conference held in Boston, in America, discussed the importance of community participation in the search for a preventative AIDS vaccine. But how do people feel about participating in scientific clinical research? Ayanda Mkhwanazi, of Health-e News Service, sought their views.
The Eastern Cape Health and Treasury MECs have been given an ultimatum to either reply to a set of questions related to the staffing crises at Madwaleni and Livingstone hospitals, or face litigation.
CAPE TOWN - Health Director-General Precious Matsoso has launched a strong appeal to the private health sector to come up with good 'contracting models' whereby the state could as an example partner with private doctors to deliver services.
'Doctor, am I going to die?' It is a question no doctor enjoys answering, especially when is involves an 11-year old. Yet, this is something Dr Lindsay Farrant and her colleagues from the Big Shoes Foundation (an organisation serving the palliative needs of children) in Cape Town have to discuss with young patients and their families almost every day.
CAPE TOWN - A landmark daily janitorial service for communal toilets in the City's informal settlements - launched with great fanfare in May by Mayor Patricia de Lille - has come to a grinding halt.
Home-based HIV testing, which enables you and your family to have an HIV test in the privacy of your own home without having to go to a health facility, is one of the newest efforts to be introduced to get people to know their HIV status.
South Africa's drug regulatory authority is placing unreasonable hurdles in the way of desperately ill and dying patients with drug-resistant TB (DR TB), stopping them from accessing a new drug that offers their only hope.
Newborns that have been exposed to nicotine from mothers who smoke or who were exposed to secondhand smoke show poor physiological, sensory, motor and attention responses, according to a recent study published in the journal Early Human Development.
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