More healthcare news snippets June 2011

70 000 SA children living with HIV
SAPA, 17 April 2011

About 70 000 SA children live with HIV/AIDS and need antiretroviral treatment, according to Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi. He was visiting the Pelonomi regional hospital in Bloemfontein for discussions with local health officials.

Motsoaledi said his visit's focus was to establish whether government health programmes, such as the ARV programme, were implemented at ground level. Motsoaledi said HIV/AIDS was South Africa's single biggest health problem. The Free State had the third largest number of people living with HIV/Aids after KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga. The Minister said South Africa had R4.2 billion for its programme. Children born with HIV/AIDS immediately go onto a treatment programme.

New hope for lung patients
Harriet McLea: The Times, 9 May 2011

The lung-transplant waiting list will be dramatically shortened when doctors start using a new method of preserving donated organs for longer. Lung-transplant specialist Paul Williams has about 30 patients waiting for new lungs but no suitable donors.

He said he was desperate to implement the latest technology, which has been tested in Canada. Instead of rushing to transplant a donated set of lungs within six hours, after which they will have deteriorated, doctors at Toronto General Hospital in Canada did 25 successful lung transplants with the lungs that had been removed from the donor for twice that time.

The new method, which enables doctors to preserve donated lungs for 12 hours out of a body, was published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. Donated lungs are connected to a ventilator and fluid is pumped through them. Williams said the new method was costly but would cut the waiting list for transplants. Nine out of 10 donor lungs are not suitable for transplantation.

Developing world is hardest-hit by non-communicable diseases
Netdoctor.co.uk, 6 May 2011

Non-communicable diseases such as cancer and heart disease are on the increase, with developing countries affected the most. According to the first World Health Organisation (WHO) global status report, more than 36 million people died from non-communicable diseases in 2008.

And of these, nearly 80 percent of deaths occurred in low and middle-income countries. Dr Margaret Chan, WHO director-general, said that these diseases delivered a "two-punch blow" to development. She said they caused billions of dollars in losses of national income, and they pushed millions of people below the poverty line, each year.

Chan said that for some countries, it was no exaggeration to describe the situation as an impending disaster. According to the WHO, around 80 percent of non-communicable disease deaths involve cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory disease or diabetes, and one of the common risk factors for these illnesses is tobacco use.

Water Snippets

Water Quantity Snippets
Rand Water Board website (WHO Newsletter)

• About two thirds of the human body is water. Some parts of the body contain more water than others, for example 70% of your skin is water.
• You can survive about a month without food, but only 5 to 7 days without water.
• For every cup of hydrating fluid, which includes tea, coffee and cold drinks, you loose approximately 2 cups of water, which needs to be replaced to ensure good hydration. Therefore water should be the fluid of choice.
• Of all the worlds' water, 97% is salt water found in oceans and seas
• In order to burn 100 g of fat you require the presence of 107 g of water
• You can refill a 250 ml glass of water approximately 15 000 times for the same cost as a six-pack of cold drink or beer
• In rural Africa 19% of woman spend more than an hour on each trip to fetch water. An exhausting and often dangerous chore that robs them of the chance to work and learn.
• Loss of 20% of body water may cause death; loss of only 10% causes severe disorders 
• The fluoride in your drinking water is adequate (0.2 mg/l) and in most circumstances the food that we eat contributes to your fluoride intake.