SA’s biggest medical aid, Discovery Health, refuses to pay for voluntary male circumcision, despite experts saying its helps reduces HIV infections.
Tree shrews that thrive on fermented nectar suck up amounts that would inebriate a human but seem to have no such ill-effects themselves.
South Africa has the world’s fourth-highest TB burden and the national response is in many cases a shambles.
Last year’s bitter public sector strike lives on in the unexpected multibillion-rand increase in the civil service pay bill announced this week.
South Africa’s rural doctors have been thrust into the spotlight by the cases of Colin Pfaff, who sourced funding for antiretroviral drugs for pregnant women when the politicians failed to do so.
Marius Schoon, father of the murdered Katryn Schoon, died in February 1999 of lung cancer at the age of 61. He had still not forgiven Craig Williamson, a man he once considered a friend. After returning to South Africa from exile in 1991 Schoon spent his final years working at the Development Bank of South Africa.
Apartheid killer Craig Williamson was declared bankrupt by the Johannesburg High Court last week, in the only form of legal justice he will probably ever face. His nemesis is the 26-year-old son of one of his victims, who as a toddler saw his mother and sister blown apart by a parcel bomb in their Angolan home in June 1984.
Craig Williamson applied for amnesty for the murders of Ruth First in Mozambique in 1982 and of Jeannette and Katryn Schoon in 1984 in Angola. He also applied for amnesty for his role in the bombing of the ANC’s offices in London in 1982. In 1971 he had been recruited into the intelligence arm of the police.
When a class of 40 newly graduated Swazi nurses left the country en masse a few years ago, the government decided it had to find an effective way to stem the loss of this precious human resource. The solution was to create the Swaziland Wellness Centre, a place where healthcare workers receive medical attention themselves.
The Human Rights Commission has been asked to investigate the KwaZulu-Natal minister of health after she used her budget speech to the provincial parliament to allege that rural doctors in the province were racist and had abused staff. In her speech this week health minister Peggy Nkonyeni detailed seven allegations against Mark Blaylock and some of his colleagues at Manguzi Hospital.