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 But the Department of Water Affairs has called the report “outdated, baseless and misleading”.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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
Far from the bustling streets of downtown Johannesburg, much of it built by the bounty of South Africa’s gold mines, thousands of former mineworkers suffer from painful diseases contracted on the job. These men labour to breathe, their lungs degraded by the occupational diseases of silicosis and tuberculosis.
Ryan Boyko, Seyward Darby, and Rose Goldberg
News | 20 January 2014
Mshengu’s blue chemical toilets have once again toppled over in Khayelitsha’s BM Section causing residents to defecate in the bushes.
Mary-Anne Gontsana
News | 15 January 2014
Seven boys were admitted to Stellenbosch Hospital on the evenings of 25 and 26 November. Two were dead on arrival. One had sjambok marks on his body. They were about 20 years old. They were the victims of an initiation school.
Jonathan Dockney
News | 9 January 2014
Do any of the members of the ANC's 1997-2002 NEC now regret the way they heckled and jeered Madiba at an NEC meeting in March 2002?
Roy Jobson
Opinion | 12 December 2013
While there are significant unmet health needs in many parts of South Africa, they are particularly acute in historically disadvantaged rural areas.
Tom Yates
Opinion | 3 December 2013
South Africa’s anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment programme is often hailed as one of the most important public health successes. It is the world’s largest ARV programme, with over two million patients initiated on treatment. But it has serious problems: many patients often go without medicines because of stockouts.
Koketso Moeti
News | 28 November 2013
Untested nonsense medicines and adverts to buy them are prolific. But after years of chaos in the alternative medicine market, it seems the Department of Health (DOH) is intent on fixing the mess.
Kevin Charleston
Opinion | 26 November 2013
Cassiem Mohammed is a 70-year-old retired boiler cleaner from the now-closed Athlone Power Station (APS). He was diagnosed with asbestosis (fibrosis of the lung) in the mid-1990s from exposure to asbestos while he was working at the APS.
Jonathan Dockney
News | 13 November 2013
Receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis in your early 50s is frightening. It is difficult to imagine what Mario Ambrosini is going through. That he wishes to beat cancer and that he is disappointed with medical science because it offers him so little hope is entirely understandable.
Nathan Geffen, GroundUp Editor
Opinion | 4 November 2013