July 1st, 2020"Emotionally drained" are the words two nurses, who work in Groote Schuur Hospital's C27 ICU COVID Ward, have used to describe how they feel. "I'm emotionally drained from yesterday and now I have to face today," Verna Collins and Judith Parenzee...
March 4th, 2020
Wang Xiuying, a self-proclaimed pessimist who’s trying to self-quarantine in Wuhan, describes in London Review of Books how misinformation and disinformation dominates lives in a China trying to deal with COVID-19.
He writes: The new...
February 12th, 2020
A team of medical scientists in Sierra Leon, part of the Predict international network, is in search of a holy grail to virus hunters: the next deadly pathogen that could sweep across the globe, writes The Telegraph.
Gradually, plumes of bats...
January 29th, 2020
About 700 traditional ‘cutters’ in Sierra Leone have pledged to abandon and advocate against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) which is still not illegal in the country. According to the UN, Sierra Leone has one of the highest rates of FGM in...
January 15th, 2020
Australia's devastating wildfires are causing serious public health effects, especially for those with underlying lung and heart conditions. Hospitals have also seen an increase in people with anxiety and depression.
According to a WBUR report,...
January 8th, 2020
Nowhere is it more dangerous to be an albino than in Malawi, where they are captured by the albino-hunting gangs and either killed immediately or taken to places of ritual sacrifice.
For Malawi’s 10,000-odd albinos, being born with the...
December 4th, 2019
Zimbabwe's worsening health crisis is forcing desperate women to seek out traditional birth attendants, who often deliver babies using their bare hands with no sterilisation or post-natal care, reports API.
When her contractions became...
November 27th, 2019
The storming of an Indonesian hospital to retrieve the body of a baby claimed to have been held hostage over an unpaid bill, has sparked a renewed debate about the treatment of parents who can't afford to pay their medical bills.
A motorcyclist...
October 30th, 2019
The age-old practice of chaining the mentally ill to trees, to release them as "cured" after 40 days, persist in much of Afghanistan and Pakistan, reports The Daily Telegraph.
In a dusty graveyard behind nameless tombstones, six men sit with...
October 23rd, 2019
Zimbabwe's hospitals are the site of "a silent genocide", accepting all referrals but lacking most basics - gloves, bandages, even Paracetamol, writes Nomatter Ndebele in Maverick Citizen.
Ndebele writes that Dr Peter Magombeyi, the doctors'...
October 9th, 2019
Eastern Cape ambulance drivers drove in convoy through Port Elizabeth townships last week, appealing to residents not to attack the people who serve the sick and injured in their communities.
But while EMS staff and their assistants are...
October 2nd, 2019
Julia Patterson recalls clearly the moment she decided she had to quit two things she treasured – practising medicine and working in the UK's National Health Service (NHS) – in order to safeguard her own mental health. “I loved my job,” she...
August 14th, 2019Massive levels of violence — the number of gunshot wound patients admitted to Groote Schuur has doubled in the eight years — coupled with abusive patients, is taking its toll on medical staff and emergency workers.
The Times reports that the...
July 31st, 2019The bullet-riddled victims who end up on the operating table of seasoned trauma surgeon Professor Andrew Nicol's team at Groote Schuur Hospital are casualties of a bloody civil war playing out on the Cape Flats, reports News24. Up to 90 victims a...
July 31st, 2019
For a child hermetically sealed in a bio-secure unit, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola treatment centres are a terrifying place to be, reports The Daily Telegraph. However, Ebola survivors, known as lullaby singers, are on hand to...
July 3rd, 2019Highlighting again the unsafe conditions in SA's public hospitals, police and security guards allegedly fled while a gunshot-wound patient was being violently assaulted. Separately, a gang attack at a Gauteng clinic has caused nurses to refuse to do...
