Nursing staff at the Empilisweni Clinic in Zwelethemba are making sandwiches at their own cost to feed patients in the community. Myrtle Pietersen, a staff nurse at the clinic who mainly works with patients with Tuberculosis (TB) explains that they had patients coming in for treatment who did not have anything to eat. Some patients...
by: Nicci Botha | 17 Aug 2015 When Dalene von Delft started working as a doctor, she knew there were risks. But what she didn’t bargain for was contracting a life-threatening disease. She contracted multi-drug-resistant TB (MDR TB), basically a strain of tuberculosis that is difficult to cure because it does not respond to most...
by Jamie Petersen on August 3rd, 2015 In 2010 then 19-year-old Phumeza Tisile, from Port Elizabeth, was told she had tuberculosis. What she did not know was that she had contracted extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), the deadliest form of the disease. Tisile had been misdiagnosed and therefore given the wrong medication. As a result, she...
“I’m dying Ma, the doctor confirmed that treatment is just not working for me and I’m getting sicker.” The mother called her other daughters. This was not the first time they’d heard the treatment wasn’t working, but each time the doctors adjusted the medication and the family hoped she would get better. It had been...
By Bailey White, CBC News Posted: May 25, 2015 Tuberculosis in Nain doesn’t usually make news. That’s not because it doesn’t exist — there have been 14 cases of TB in the small community since last October. It’s precisely because TB is so common that it doesn’t make news. Compare that to St. John’s, when a student...
By Michelle Linnert. Wednesday 08 July 2015 Dr Dalene von Delft advocates for a new MDR TB drug that has shown its effectiveness in patients like herself. A medical doctor from Stellenberg almost went deaf from TB medication after contracting the dreaded multi-drug resistant (MDR) strain of the disease. Now she is advocating for cheaper,...
Medical interns are leading the battle to reduce the dangerously overlong working hours that compromise the safety of patients. All around South Africa, patients in public hospitals are being treated by young doctors so fatigued that some can’t even manage to stay awake at the wheels of their cars on their way home. It is...
