The Free State Health Department has lost almost a quarter of its doctors in the last year. At Welkom’s Bongani Regional Hospital, the strain is beginning to show with deadly consequences for Free State women.
There is an almighty struggle to get affordable, appropriate medicine for TB – particularly when one tablet to treat drug-resistant TB can cost R655.
Activists stormed representatives of the French multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi at the World Lung Health Conference. Organisations including the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) have accused the company of profiteering and charging South Africans up to almost ten times the global price for a much needed medicine to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB).
More than 300 former tuberculosis (TB) patients, activists and health experts have demanded that countries like China, Brazil and India increase TB research funding as the bacteria continues to hundreds of thousands of their citizens in the ground each year.
More than 30,000 children develop tuberculosis (TB) each year in South Africa. For these children, cure comes in the form of six months of daily, bitter pills made for adults more than twice their size but new, better treatment may be on the way, according to research non-profit the TB Alliance.
South Africa may see an estimated 469,000 new HIV infections annually, and young women between the ages of 15 and 24 remain hardest hit by new infections, according to the country’s latest HIV survey. Now a young Khayelitsha artist is using the stage to take HIV prevention to the streets.
A staggering 80 percent of people living with disabilities globally live in poverty, according to the National Department of Social Development.
It was a hard, cold winter in the North West where hospitals reported everything from pillows to hot water was in short supply. The province’s financial crisis has left some patients out in the cold as moratoriums on everything from hospital maintenance to new appointments stretch the health system thin.
The latest UNAIDS report notes 15.8 million people were on antiretrovirals as of June and encourages more countries to heed the World Health’s Organisation’s call to roll out the “test and treat” approach.
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has received a R14 million pledge from Canadian non-profit organisation the Stephen Lewis Foundation that will save it from closing its doors, but will not save jobs already on the cutting board.
Factory farming and excessive pill-popping is driving the development of ‘superbugs’ able to evade our best medicines, making death from common infections possible once again. Now resistance to one of the very last effective antibiotics has been discovered.
Holiday lights and decorations are already popping up across South Africa. As children anticipate gifts and a holiday from school, families and friends will gather for meals together to toast the season. Tragically, the cooking of food is actually a gateway to a leading cause of child death, writes Keith Klugman.
From London to Diepsloot, the number of outdoor gyms in city parks in on the rise. We look at how Soweto’s latest outdoor gym in Phiri Park is helping get South Africans moving.
Gauteng businesswoman Mulalo Simeti grew up in rural Limpopo. When she recently read that her old primary school was in danger of collapsing and burying learners alive, she knew she had to do something.
Imagine if you had to crawl outside on your hands and knees to use the toilet every time nature called. For at least 19,000 South Africans living with disabilities, daily indignities like these are just part of normal life as disabled people remain largely left behind in the country’s quest for sanitation and water.
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