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Mail & Guardian

Public Health Crisis

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Oblivious: The report found that mistreatment has become so normalised that two-thirds of those abused did not recognise their treatment as abuse. Photo: DC Studio
BIRTH TRAUMA

Shocking toll of maternity ward abuse

Survivors speak out as a landmark birthing survey reveals the scale of obstetric violence, with lasting physical and psychological consequences

  • Sheree Bega
7 min read
‘Unsupervised, unstructured, non-standardised, unsafe and altogether substandard.’ This is what was said about the care at two public hospitals in the Northern Cape last year. But is the way quality is measured a fair test? (Delwyn Verasamy)
HEALTH

Unsafe and substandard. Is that what public healthcare in SA looks like?

Claims of poor standards at South Africa’s government health facilities are often bandied about — and get hackles raised when the National Health Insurance is mentioned, to boot

  • Linda Pretorius
  • Jacques Verryn
8 min read
The impact of the Trump administration’s slashing of over half of South Africa’s HIV and TB projects funded by the US government, transcends reduced access to HIV testing and HIV prevention and treatment drugs. Treatment for diabetes, high blood pressure, cervical cancer, depression and anxiety will become harder to come by too. (Flickr)
ANTIRETROVIRAL THERAPY

Trump’s HIV funding cuts will also hit diabetes, cervical cancer and depression hard

As government clinics take on HIV patients who were previously treated by Pepfar-funded projects, the treatment of conditions like diabetes and heart disease will come under…

  • Zano Kunene
10 min read
Why are so many newborns and foetuses being abandoned in landfills and velds in SA? We asked leading forensic pathologist Shakeera Holland what her team found. (Nicole Ludolph)
ABANDONED FOETUSES

Why so many newborns and foetuses are abandoned in landfills and the veld

Researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand have gathered data from the Diepkloof Forensic Pathology Service in Soweto to better understand why so many women turn to…

  • Bhekisisa Team
7 min read
Data governance provides evidence-based decision-making that improves the quality of service delivery
2008 GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS

Without an effective data governance strategy, decisions are nothing but guesses

Data governance provides evidence-based decision-making that improves the quality of service delivery

  • Ferdinand Steenkamp
5 min read
Late last month, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a state of disaster after six children from Soweto died from eating chips. Could a single agency that monitors food safety be the answer? (Canva)
AGRICULTURAL CHEMICALS

How a single body could make South Africa’s food safer

Researchers say part of the problem is the lack of coordination across the nation’s sprawling multi-agency system

  • Zano Kunene
7 min read
Peking: A woman in a blue coat takes a throat swab from a woman for a Covid-19 test. Before the People’s Congress in China, participating media representatives had to have a Covid test. (Photo by Johannes Neudecker/picture alliance via Getty Images)
CHINESE VACCINES

Global health equity undermined by US propaganda against Chinese Covid-19 vaccines

Six months before the first jabs arrived, an online survey in January of 2021 showed that nearly 60% of the 7 193 respondents were confident in a Covid-19 vaccine made in the US…

  • Tian Johnson
6 min read