- PRETORIA -- South Africa's
health minister claimed in a press conference on July 4 2007 that the
country was urgently recruiting some 1,000 doctors from Tunisia, Cuba
and elsewhere -- and also trying to 'lure back' back South African medical
professionals from Britain and elsewhere. She wants to reverse the country's
self- inflicted 'brain drain' which is hobbling its health system. (see
the picture below this article).
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- LINKS
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- http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php? set_id=1&click_id=125&art_id=nw20070704232518736C442852
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- http://www.sabcnews.com/audio_ram/0,1574,32560,00.ram
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- The South African health minister often cites the so-called
'brain drain' for the steady collapse of her health-care system, which
is increasingly unable to cope with the country's twin TB+HIV killer
epidemics -- which have already claimed at least 2,6-million lives since
2003 according to World Health Organisation records.
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- However, this woman is lying through omission: Mrs Manto
Tshabalala- Msimang completely fails to ever mention that this 'brain-drain'
is entirely due to the ANC-regime's own racist hiring policies which
dictate that only 2% of all the health-care jobs in the country (private-sector
and public sector alike) may ever be filled with so- called "White"
or Asian" health care professionals. For this reason alone, thousands
of South African-born doctors, nurses, lab technicians and medical assistants
were already forced to leave the country of their birth to find employment
abroad since 1994. (see the picture below this article).
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- The Sunday Times of Johannesburg reported recently that
these racist-hiring policies actually leave many hundreds of health-care
jobs vacant because 'white' and 'Asian' medical experts who applied for
them, were deemed racially-unacceptable for most of the country's public-sector
and private-sector health jobs. See: South Africa's self-inflicted brain-drain:
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- LINK: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Article.aspx?id=481544
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- For instance at KwaZulu-Natal province's 64 state hospitals
-- the province also most afflicted by the XDR-TB epidemic -- only 15
hospitals have doctor vacancy rates of under 50 percent -- and not a
single hospital in the province has every one of its doctors' posts filled.
Gauteng hospital is also being dealt a double-whammy because the regime
has decided to reduce its number of 'public service doctors' considerably:
- LINKS:
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- http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php? set_id=1&click_id=125&art_id=vn20070705023040519C991133
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- http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php? set_id=1&click_id=125&art_id=nw20070627142953374C295047
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- The health minister failed to mention in her press conference
whether foreign health-care professionals are being fully informed about
the very real dangers of their job in South Africa: among the very first
XDR-TB deaths officially reported in 2006 were five previously healthy
nurses who had died within just a few weeks of contracting XDR-TB: four
in KwaZulu-Natal and one nurse at Pollsmoor Prison Hospital in Cape Town.
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- LINKS:
- http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php? set_id=1&click_id=125&art_id=vn20070618104701176C119063
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- http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/tuberculosis/tb_programs.cfm
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- 2,6-million deaths since 2003 from TB+Aids - the 'terrible
twin' epidemics
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- South Africa's health care system is overloaded with
dying patients: more than 1,000 people a day die from the deadly twin-
epidemic combination of Tuberculosis and Aids. The country's current 7-million
Aids-infected people (12 % of the population) are also rapidly developing
a resistance to all drugs due to the fact that they are being medicated
with the wrong medicines in SA health care facilities.
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- Thus most of the TB+HIV infected patients in SA now aredying
of the unique South African mutated strain (SA-1) of XDR-TB.
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- Listen to a 2006 radio news report about XDR-TB in KwaZulu-Natal
province on LINK:
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- http://www.npr.org:80/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6479589
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- Prof. Robin Wood, a top SA infectious diseases expert,
warned that the regime's official statistics of XDR-TB deaths are being
grossly understated: "If you look for it, you find it...' he told
Reuters news agency on June 17. Contact him at: robin.wood@hiv-research.org.za
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- Also listen to the Jeff Rense radio expose in 2007 about
the threat this deadly SA epidemic poses to the rest of the world:
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- LINK:
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- http://rense.gsradio.net:8080/rense/special/rense_XDRTB_060507.mp3
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- Over the past ten years, the country already hired a
large number of Cuban doctors under a contract deal in which Cuban doctors
basically earn slave-labour wages -- because the Pretoria-regime sends
most of their paychecks back to the Cuban government. These Cuban doctors
leave South Africa as quickly as they can get their families out of Cuba
and find jobs in Western countries.
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- Once these new medical recruits arrive in South Africa
from Tunisia, they are set to work in rural public hospitals and clinics,
the health minister said today. Many rural hospitals do not have fulltime
doctors - thus the nurses and medical assistants often have to administer
primary care for which they were never trained.
- Isolate XDR-TB patients to prevent a global epidemic
warns SA expert
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- One South African doctor who has been warning the regime
for the past two years to isolate the (very infectious) XDR-TB patients
away from all other vulnerable patients, Dr Jerome Singh, head of the
country's Ethics and Health Law department at the Centre for the AIDS
Programme of Research -- this week again repeated his call to isolate
these patients to prevent a global epidemic.
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- Due to the ANC-regime's anti-isolation policies, many
suspected XDR- TB patients are now being treated as outpatients at clinics
and general hospitals where they often share wards with people being
treated with less-virulent strains of TB -- thus potentially- curable patients
at being placed at risk of also being infected with XDR-TB, he noted.
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- Dr Singh writes:" Seen in this context, isolating
XDR-TB patients - involuntarily if needs be - is a reasonable and justifiable
measure to protect the health interests of the wider population."
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- LINK
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- http://www.scidev.net:80/gateways/index.cfm? fuseaction=readitem&rgwid=4&item=Opinions&itemid=637&language=1
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- Despite the steadily-spreading XDR-TB epidemic which
now has been identified all over the country, the South African regime
nowever still remains adamantly opposed to any mandatory isolation of
infected individuals. The country's (medically-untrained health department
officials who take these decisions) seem unaware that XDR-TB patients
cannot be treated with any known medicine and thus remain highly infectious
to all those around them. Thus the regime 's own stubborn behaviour is
causing the epidemic to spread unhindered all over the country -- and
eventually, the rest of the world.
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- See the ANC regime's policy against enforced isolation
of XDR-TB patientson this YouTube video: LINK:
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- http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zz5lI3Hc5Xc
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- Singh also reported that the SA government was 'considering
flying in emergency supplies of a 'vital new TB drug, capreomycin,' from
Indianapolis in the US because it is not yet registered in South Africa
- despite the application having been filed seven months ago.
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- However, there are medical warnings against Capreomycin
( brand name Capastat Sulfate) as it has some very toxic side-effects
on the kidneys, the liver and the central nervous system -- and also
should not be used with other injectable Tuberculosis medications such
as streptomycin, as "they (capreomycin drugs) will add to the hearing
and kidney problems ('nephrotoxicity') that can occur."
- This drug also has never been tested to determine whether
the drug is excreted into breast milk and could thus pose a serious health
risk to babies of mothers being treated with it.
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- Professor Tommie Victor of Stellenbosch University, whose
team discovered the SA-1 TB+HIV mutated strain of XDR-TB in 2003, already
warned a full year ago that their own field-research proved that drug
resistance may be an even bigger problem than previously thought among
the Western Cape's TB-patients they had tested: these patients often harboured
two different strains of TB simultaneously and they have found that their
drug-resistant strain was actually made made more powerful by their being
prescribed the wrong -- (cheaper) line of TB-drugs because of the ANC-regime's
cost-saving policies.
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- LINK:
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- http://groups.msn.com/crimebustersofsouthafrica/alertsonhealth.msnw?
- action=get_message&mview=0&ID_Message=3379&LastModified=
- 46756270285395 35880
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- Picture: front page of Sunday Times article which shows
how racial hiring policies are cripping the South African hospitals. The
front picture shows heavily-armed public health workers protesting during
their month-long health-workers' strike which started on June 1 and caused
many deaths when hospital wards and emergency units were forced, often
at gun-point by the strikers, to close down.
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