Health

Deadly disease that’s curable if you’re rich

Around the world, 180 million people are infected with hepatitis C. But you would be forgiven if you asked, “What is hepatitis C?”.

Dr Mark Sonderup

News | 15 April 2014

“ËśA place where we ought to love one another’

Emasithandane home, founded in 1994 in Nyanga, currently looks after 39 children, most of them HIV infected and affected. 20 years later, it is still going strong despite financial constraints.

Bulelani Ngovi

News | 14 April 2014

Where do political parties stand on health issues?

The People’s Health Manifesto is an initiative of the Treatment Action Campaign. With elections upon us, the TAC wanted to know what political parties proposed to do for healthcare. They put 11 questions to them. This is what they discovered.

Brent Meersman

Opinion | 7 April 2014

Our Kind of People

In Our Kind of People, novelist Uzodinma Iweala reflects on the damaging misconceptions which shape the way the world sees HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Joshua Maserow

News | 7 April 2014

Mbeki nostalgia

As we head into elections, the ANC boasts about successes in the fight against AIDS and South Africa’s large antiretroviral treatment programme.

Nathan Geffen

Opinion | 3 April 2014

Beyond HIV: How we die in South Africa

Reports published this month by Stats SA and the Medical Research Council (MRC) provide interesting information on how South Africans are dying.

Nathan Geffen

News | 1 April 2014

South Africans living longer but drug-resistant TB a threat

Two government reports published in March show that the nation’s health is improving dramatically, but more people are getting sick from forms of tuberculosis that are difficult to treat.

Nathan Geffen

News | 31 March 2014

The week in political activism - March 26, 2014

This week we cover the TAC’s march on Khayelitsha Hospital and an alert put out by Lawyers for Human Rights on the unconstitutionality of draft immigration regulations.

Brent Meersman

News | 26 March 2014

Fighting the white plague

Today is World TB Day. More people die of tuberculosis in South Africa than from any other disease. The HIV epidemic is to a large degree responsible for that. Dealing effectively with the one epidemic typically improves the outcomes of the other.

GroundUp Staff

News | 24 March 2014

Government slams HRC water report - and lawyer slams government

On Tuesday 11 March, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) officially launched their 2014 report on water and sanitation. But the Department of Water Affairs has called the report “outdated, baseless and misleading”.

Martha Sithole and Jacques van Heerden

News | 14 March 2014

Are sugar daddies bad for your health?

“Sugar daddies destroy lives” say billboard adverts in Kwazulu-Natal in big bold black and red letters. The same message is echoed in radio adverts played across the country.

Nathan Geffen

Opinion | 11 March 2014

Inside the mind of a seasoned donkey smuggler: How an alternative medicine dealer plans to evade new regulations

Last year the health department gazetted changes to the Medicines Act which, over about five years, will require complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) to be registered with the Medicines Control Council (MCC).

Koot Kotze

News | 4 March 2014

Landmark silicosis case reaches a milestone

The Legal Resources Centre (LRC) hosted a special event on 5 February 2014 to highlight its landmark silicosis case and the implications for future legislative and policy reform in South Africa.

Sibusiso Tshabalala

News | 6 February 2014

South Africa’s water wars

Ma Gladys Mphepho hovers over a pot on a two plate cooker in her shack in Papamani, an informal settlement outside of Grahamstown. “We do not have dignity,” she says, stirring the rice, flavoured with beef stock, that is her family’s Sunday lunch. “We do not know what it means to have dignity. Forget about any question of dignity,” says Mphepho.

Mandy de Waal

News | 5 February 2014

Mother and daughter: alive, productive and healthy on antiretrovirals

Nandipha Madolo, from Khayelitsha’s Litha Park, has experienced much in her life, with HIV playing a major part. She watched her brother die from meningitis due to HIV. Her HIV-positive husband abused her. Her youngest daughter contracted HIV, and Madolo found out that she too was HIV-positive. But today Madolo has a healthy daughter, a steady job, and she is a public speaker.

Mary-Anne Gontsana

News | 29 January 2014

Leaked email: companies intended to campaign against government policy

A leaked email shows that a plan for a campaign to scuttle the South African government's draft intellectual property policy was about to proceed, despite a denial by the pharmaceutical industry that it had approved the campaign.

GroundUp Staff

News | 21 January 2014