This week is Hospice Week in South Africa. To mark this, we look at the work of a few hospices. When it first set up in Mofolo, Soweto, in a corrugated iron structure nine years ago, Mofolo Hospice had only two nursing sisters and less than 40 patients. Today, the centre has a staffing complement of 20 and over 500 patients in its books.
Brooklyn Chest Clinic is unable to cope with the increase in patients with multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extreme drug resistant (XDR) tuberculosis, and Western Cape health workers are calling for patients to be treated in the community.
Leading environmental scientists say unfavorable weather conditions caused by global climate change could fuel the spread of malaria in areas where it has never been experienced before.
A publication looking at health and human rights would be incomplete without a focus on HIV/AIDS. The recently-published Health & Democracy is one such book.
The Treatment Action Campaign has publicly called on the deputy president and the acting health minister to settle the court case involving the civil society Aids group, doctors, government and vitamin salesman Matthias Rath.
Rape survivors are not getting the healthcare they need.
The Democratic Nurses'€™ Union of South Africa (DENOSA) is calling upon the Health Department, to strengthen safety measures to protect nurses from the highly infectious Multi-Drug and Extremely-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis
The World Health Organisation has called on governments to include a childhood vaccine, known as Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine, which acts against pneumonia and meningitis in their national immunisation programmes. Pneumonia is the leading cause of death in children globally, and more so, in countries with a high burden of HIV.
The detention of patients with extremely drug resistant (XDR) TB should only be considered as a last resort when all other voluntary measures have failed, according to the South African health department. By Chris Makhaye & Kerry Cullinan.
Refugees, asylum seekers, economic and undocumented or illegal migrants all flock to South Africa for particular reasons. Often, locals believe that these are to steal away what belongs to South Africans, such as health care. Two refugees who benefit from the South African health care system explain that when they fled their countries of origin, it wasn'€™t to seek antiretroviral therapy.
As with every citizen, refugees have rights, including the right to health care. In line with that the Southern African HIV Clinicians'€™ Society and the United Nations'€™ High Commission for Refugees recently launched a policy to guide health workers in the region on providing antiretrovirals to refugees.
From April 1st, insurance companies belonging to the Life Offices'€™ Association, will no longer deny policy holders life, disability or funeral cover benefits should they become infected with HIV.
Medical experts say that lack of education about TB among patients is contributing to the development of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB).
Not much good news tends to emanate from Khayelitsha. More often than not the sprawling Cape Town township is associated with high levels of violent crime, poverty, disease, unemployment and a lack of basic services and housing. But the township has made huge inroads in tackling TB, a curable disease that mostly infects people living with HIV and poor people.
A much larger TB drug resistance problem exists than researchers previously thought. New global data on TB, published this week by the World Health Organization (WHO), highlight serious weaknesses in many national TB programmes, increasing the potential for widespread TB drug resistance. How did we reach this precarious state?
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