The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Larry Schwartz -
Not too long ago, homeopathic formulas were only sold in health food stores. You might have seen them: Little blue vials with tiny little pills in them. You might have thought good things come in small packages. Then homeopathy hit the mainstream, and became available in just about every drugstore. One of its biggest selling points is the lack of side effects, the way it works naturally with your body, how clinically effective it is. The lack of side effects is true enough—because there...
Wouldn’t you want to know if your doctor was a paid spokesman for a drug company? Or held personal beliefs incompatible with the treatment you want? Right now, in many parts of the world, your doctor simply doesn’t have to tell you about that. And when physician Leana Wen asked her fellow doctors to open up, the reaction she got was unsettling. There's a code of silence amongst doctors whose attitudes and behaviour challenge conventional notions of transparency and...
Glenn Ashton -
We are regularly reminded of the growing global blight of cancer by repetitive education drives during cancer awareness months. But surely we should pay more attention to the causes, rather than simply raise awareness? Perhaps we fail to do so because the commercial imperative makes it easier to fundraise around the impacts of cancer rather than analysing the root causes?
October was breast (and liver) cancer month, September prostate cancer and November is pancreatic, stomach, lung and...
Sierra Leone is pleading for more international help to fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. On Saturday, the country recorded 121 deaths in one of the single deadliest days since the disease appeared there more than four months ago. At least 678 people have now died in Sierra Leone, with the official toll for West Africa topping 3,400. Dr. Atul Gawande from Harvard Medical School argues, “The epidemic in West Africa is severe, and it’s getting worse fast…this is a...
Ayesha Jacub -
Sometimes it takes a crisis to test existing structures and expose all the fault lines. Ebola has been pummelling its way through West Africa and in addition to the lives claimed by the epidemic, it has exposed the state of Global Health’s leadership as well as the current paradigms through which we view health at the global level.
Leadership
When the first warning calls about the severity of the current Ebola epidemic came from the quarters of the NGO Medecins sans frontieres,...
Mandisi Majavu -
In his book, Infections and Inequalities, Paul Farmer writes that we live in a world where infections pass easily across borders, while resources, including cumulative scientific knowledge are blocked at customs. The recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa is a case in point. The World Health Organisation has warned that the number of Ebola cases could rise to 20,000 largely because the medical staff in these West African countries do not have the resources to deal with the rapid spread of...
