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/ 6 November 2007

Battle TB, Aids as one, says TB expert

South African medical authorities need to start thinking about tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/Aids as a single epidemic, rather than treating them separately, a TB expert said on Tuesday at a media briefing ahead of a major international conference on lung health, which begins in Cape Town on Thursday.

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/ 2 November 2007

Deadly TB, HIV merge into co-epidemic

Drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) and HIV have merged into a double-barrelled pandemic that is sweeping across sub-Saharan Africa and threatening global efforts to eradicate both diseases, according to a report released on Friday. Overburdened health systems are unable to cope with the epidemic and risk collapse, says the report.

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/ 31 October 2007

HIV rate declines in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe has registered a 2,5% decline in the prevalence of HIV to 15,6% of the population, the authorities revealed in Harare on Wednesday. The latest decline is from 18,1% of the population in 2006 to 15,6% this year, or one in every seven people, Health Ministry officials were quoted as saying.

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/ 16 October 2007

‘Gloomy’ outlook for Aids treatment

Only 60% of HIV/Aids patients in Africa still take the drugs they need to stay alive two years after starting treatment, researchers reported, noting a grim reason many stopped: death. Of the patients found no longer to be taking the drugs after two years, 40% died and the rest missed scheduled appointments.

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/ 12 October 2007

Nigerian children contract polio after vaccine

Sixty-nine children in northern Nigeria contracted polio following a vaccination against the disease, a World Health Organisation (WHO) official in Nigeria said on Thursday. ”They were vulnerable [to this type of virus against] which they hadn’t been vaccinated enough. These are extremely rare cases, however,” the representative said.

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/ 8 October 2007

Minister calls for protection of traditional medicines

African countries should make use of intellectual provisions to protect their innovations when it comes to African traditional medicines, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Monday. ”Africa should make use of intellectual-property provisions to protect its innovation with regard to indigenous knowledge and African traditional medicine,” she said Johannesburg.

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/ 7 October 2007

Malawi health service ailing from brain drain

For Malawian nurse Hilda Maganga, the financial pull of a spell in a ward in Britain is close to overwhelming her desire to tend to patients in her Aids-stricken and impoverished homeland. ”I would like to do a two-year stint in the United Kingdom, make my money and come back to retire for good,” says the 54-year-old.

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/ 4 October 2007

South Korea to host conference on condom size

Fresh from summit diplomacy with North Korea, South Korea’s government now faces an entirely new challenge — trying to set international quality and size standards for condoms. The five-day meeting, organised by the International Organisation for Standardisation and the Seoul government, will begin next Monday on the southern resort island of Jeju.

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/ 3 October 2007

Western sanctions hurt the poor, says Zim

Zimbabwe set out Wednesday to demonstrate that Western economic sanctions were hurting ordinary people, the poor and even the unborn. In its first detailed policy statement on sanctions, the central bank disputed claims from Britain and the United States that their ”targeted sanctions” — like travel bans on top officials — did not hurt most Zimbabweans.

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/ 22 September 2007

Ebola outbreak spreads in DRC region

Nine cases of Ebola virus have been confirmed in the West Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that is at the epicentre of an outbreak that has killed at least 174 people, a World Health Organisation official said on Friday. Symptoms of the epidemic were first seen on April 27.

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/ 12 September 2007

First World results on a Third World budget

A tropical sun rises over Havana and in the neighbourhood of Vedado, a maze of worn, bleached apartment blocks, a unique healthcare system limbers up for another day. In Parque Aguirre, a small plaza shaded by palms, two dozen pensioners form a semi-circle and perform a series of stretches and gentle exercises, responding to the commands of a spry septuagenarian.

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/ 11 September 2007

Ebola outbreak confirmed in DRC

An outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever, a deadly disease for which there is no treatment, has been confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday. Samples from five people have tested positive for the Ebola virus in the southern province of Kasai Occidental.

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/ 5 September 2007

New health scheme launched to help world’s poor

Seven developing countries in Africa and Asia will be the first to take part in a new global health campaign aimed at directing aid more effectively at the basic needs of poor countries. Health ministers from Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia, Cambodia and Nepal will take part in the launch of the initiative at British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s office later on Wednesday.

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/ 28 August 2007

Study: HIV impact on Zim less than feared

HIV has slashed life expectancy in Zimbabwe by up to 19 years for men and 22 years for women but births still outpace deaths, according to the first study to detail how the Aids pandemic has affected the country’s wider population. The study, led by Simon Gregson of Imperial College London, sought to gauge HIV’s impact on Zimbabwe to see if researchers got it right in 1989.