Ramaphosa is said to be considering appointing former Gauteng health MEC Dr Gwen Ramokgopa or Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as the minister of health
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/ 6 September 2013
Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has promised to get state facilities running to the highest standards.
In the first of a two-part series about the NHI, Mia Malan reports on state plans to change the rigid reimbursement formula for private doctors.
South Africa has a lot to learn about efficient and effective ways to approach health research and policy, suggests John Ouma-Mugabe.
An industry-wide probe into private healthcare seems likely, but stakeholders fear a witch hunt.
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/ 14 February 2013
Mia Malan speaks to the health minister and others in the healthcare sector about the
guideline tariffs
Health professionals are finding the state’s planned guidelines for fees a bitter pill to swallow.
Chinese medical teams have fanned out across the earthquake zone, disinfecting makeshift camps and educating survivors, and on Monday the Health Ministry said it could guarantee there would be no epidemics. Where bodies could not be cremated, they had been been buried deep underground and far from water sources to prevent contamination
China stepped up the fight on Thursday to stave off disease among over five million earthquake homeless as it tried to boost morale with plans to bring the Olympic flame through the disaster zone. Ten days after the quake, China was faced with the challenge of how to reconstruct shattered communities after more than 74 000 people were confirmed dead or missing.
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang may be guilty of contempt of court for criticising a ruling that allowed the Sunday Times to comment on her health records, the Public Protector said on Wednesday. The Public Protector made this finding while investigating a complaint of misappropriation of funds against the Health Ministry.
Teenage smokers in Japan could soon be taking their last illicit puffs thanks to the introduction of cigarette-vending machines that can spot underage customers just by looking at them. The machines are equipped with a digital camera that can compare users’ facial characteristics with a database of more than 100 000 people.
Malawi lawmakers on Tuesday began examining draft legislation aimed at ridding the HIV/Aids-plagued country of quacks claiming to cure the pandemic through such remedies as sex with virgins, health authorities said. "When it passes into law, all traditional healers claiming to cure Aids will be dealt with," Mary Shaba, head of HIV/Aids issues for Malawi’s Health Ministry, said.
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/ 26 February 2008
The government is to intervene to curb rocketing private healthcare costs and prevent the sector’s ”demise”, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Tuesday. The health charter task team, among others, has been discussing the challenge of making healthcare more affordable, she told the National Assembly’s health committee.
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/ 20 February 2008
Uganda is officially free of the deadly Ebola virus, which killed 37 people in the East African country last year, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday. Forty-two days passed with no new infections — long enough to be sure that there were no cases still in the incubation stage, said the country’s Health Minister, Dr Steven Malinga.
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/ 20 February 2008
A magnitude-7,5 earthquake struck Indonesia’s Aceh province on Wednesday, killing at least three people, injuring several and sending thousands fleeing their homes and offices in panic, officials and local media said. The quake struck the province that bore the brunt of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
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/ 7 February 2008
The Mozambican government announced on Wednesday that it was scrapping a planned increase in bus fares as the death toll from riots sparked by the price hikes rose to three. Calm had returned to the streets of Maputo on Thursday after the riots, which residents said were the most serious since 1975.
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/ 3 February 2008
Heavy rains and high tides have caused chaos in Indonesia’s capital for three days, highlighting its ailing infrastructure as roads to the airport became impassable and thousands had to abandon their homes or cars. The flooding also led to flight delays elsewhere in South-East Asia.
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/ 3 February 2008
Millions of Chinese workers battled for a precious train ticket home on Sunday as authorities struggled to keep order here following a stampede for seats that left a woman trampled to death. Savage winter snows and freezing temperatures that have brought much of the nation to a standstill.
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/ 1 February 2008
Floods and landslides triggered by heavy rain have killed at least 12 people across Indonesia and the capital’s main airport was briefly shut on Friday as more than 40 flights were delayed due to low visibility. Scores of cars were stranded and people had to wade through murky knee-high water in many parts of Jakarta.
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/ 30 January 2008
Trade union Solidarity is introducing its own medical fund in a move against what it called "high medical rates", it said on Wednesday. "It’s a non-profit service. We don’t want to make millions out of the sick, but make private healthcare more accessible to the people of South Africa," said Jaco Kleynhans, Solidarity spokesperson.
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/ 18 January 2008
An eight-year-old Indonesian boy has died of bird flu, the Health Ministry said on Friday, bringing the toll to 97 in the nation worst hit by the H5N1 virus. The boy was the seventh person from the Jakarta satellite city of Tangerang to die of the disease since October. He died at 4am local time in a Jakarta hospital, the ministry’s bird-flu centre said.
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/ 17 January 2008
Health authorities on Wednesday reported the first known cases of virtually untreatable tuberculosis in Botswana. The Health Ministry said there were two cases of so-called extremely drug resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB, as well as 100 cases of the slightly more manageable multidrug-resistant TB, or MDR-TB.
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/ 10 January 2008
An estimated 151 000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the violence that has engulfed the country from the time of the United States-led invasion until June 2006, according to the latest and largest study of deaths officially accepted by the Iraqi government.
Cambodia suffered its worst-ever outbreak of dengue fever last year and it killed 407 people, most of them children, the highest toll in nearly a decade. Dengue, which causes fever had infected nearly 40 000 people since the first outbreaks last May, Ngan Chantha, director of the Health Ministry’s anti-dengue programme, said on Friday.
Some of Zimbabwe’s striking state doctors have returned to work on humanitarian grounds but most are still holding out for higher pay, the head of the doctors’ union said on Thursday. Amon Siveregi, president of the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors’ Association, said the industrial action had not been called off, contrary to reports in the state media.
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/ 28 December 2007
Rescue workers stepped up a hunt on Friday for victims of landslides and floods that claimed scores of lives on Indonesia’s Java Island and left thousands homeless, an official said. The landslides smashed through homes, burying families alive, in the early hours of Wednesday.
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/ 27 December 2007
Isolation wards for Ebola patients in western Uganda are now empty, a senior health official said on Thursday, voicing hope that the killer fever was finally receding. Sam Okware, who heads the national task force on the outbreak, said a patient admitted on December 22 was the only one in the Bundibugyo hospital’s isolation wards.
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/ 27 December 2007
Indonesian rescuers on Thursday hunted for victims of landslides and floods on Java Island that have left more than 130 people feared dead and tens of thousands displaced, officials said. Landslides hit two districts in Central Java in the early hours of Wednesday morning, engulfing entire homes and blocking roads.
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/ 14 December 2007
In an act that has sparked outrage among Egyptian women’s rights activists, a controversial Islamic scholar filed a lawsuit against the minister of health protesting against a recent ban on female circumcision, a practice referred to by rights groups as female genital mutilation.
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/ 7 December 2007
Uganda now has more than 100 suspected cases of the lethal Ebola virus and 350 more people are being closely monitored because they were in contact with those infected, the Health Ministry said on Friday. Twenty-two people have so far died of the fever.
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/ 26 November 2007
A 6,2-magnitude earthquake hit near the city of Iwaki in Japan on Monday, the United States Geological Survey said, revising it to a slightly stronger quake than it initially reported. Strong earthquakes have also hit Indonesia and India since Sunday, killing at least three people in central Indonesia.
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/ 13 November 2007
The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria has approved a grant of ,3-million to boost Kenya’s anti-HIV/Aids drive, the Health Ministry announced on Tuesday. The grant will finance programmes over the next five years, but an initial amount of ,1-million will be released in the first two years.