More healthcare news snippets

'Give children a sporting chance to lose weight'

South Africa tends to focus too much on high-performance sport, neglecting the physical education of those children who do not make the top teams at school, according to a sports scientist.

Speaking at a South African Science Journalists' Association meeting in Cape Town, Professor Hans de Ridder, director at North West University's School of Biokinetics, Recreation and Sport Science, said that the world was sitting on a ticking time bomb with obesity, which was linked to lack of exercise.

In the past 30 years, the incidence of obesity has more than tripled in the US, leading First Lady Michelle Obama to head a drive to encourage children to exercise and eat healthily. Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has intimated that he will be looking at legislating against the promotion and advertising of fast-food chains that sell unhealthy food.

De Ridder, however, believed such a move would have a limited effect and that it would be wiser to find a South African champion who was similar to Obama and to promote physical education in schools.

According to the World Health Organisation, more than 17 million children under five are overweight, with more than one quarter of children living in so-called first world countries overweight and almost one in 10 obese.

A South African study found that among children aged between six and 13 years, more than two percent of boys and almost five percent of girls were obese. Almost 20% of girls were overweight. De Ridder said this was due to a sedentary lifestyle, urbanisation, unhealthy diet, broken homes and the rise of the internet generation. He said it was critical to change the notion that sport was only for the top performers.

By Anso Thom (Health-e News): The Cape Times, 12 October 2011

Private healthcare is 'brutal'
 

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said over the weekend that South Africa has a "brutal" private healthcare system that has commercialised an essential service.

Speaking at a general practitioners' conference in Durban, he said the Government would not fold its arms when there was such rampant commercialisation in the healthcare sector. He said the use of a public good for excessive profit was unacceptable, which was why the state had proposed a National Health Insurance (NHI) Scheme.

The Minister is discussing national health insurance with general practitioners in a series of presentations in the provinces. In East London on Saturday, Motsoaledi said the NHI Scheme would be tested in 10 districts across the country. He said private hospitals and medical specialists were receiving most of South Africa's R84 billion a year in health spending.

Private hospitals received R31.1 billion and specialists R19 billion. Motsoaledi said R14 billion went to pharmaceuticals; R6.2 billion went to general practitioners and only about R14 billion was for public healthcare and non-medical expenses. He also said it was up individuals to decide whether they wanted private health insurance. Motsoaledi said he was not qualified to say how much the scheme would cost taxpayers, saying that was for the Minister of Finance to decide.

By Michael Kimberly: The Times, 10 October 2011

Breast cancer is high in SA

At 16%, South Africa has the highest number of women under the age of 40 with breast cancer. The survival rate is also low because of late detection. The international average is six percent.

Justus Apffelstaedt, head of the Breast Clinic at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town, says it was a myth that cancer in young women was on the increase. He said the only data available was from Eastern Europe and the US and South Africa had a different demographic from them.

Apffelstaedt said it was not that more young women were getting breast cancer, but there were more young women in SA. He said non-white women got breast cancer 10 years earlier than white women.

He said our figures were higher than anywhere else. The cancer was genetic rather than environmental and the survival rate in women younger than 35 was dismal and most of them died within two years of diagnosis.

Apffelstaedt said this is mostly because the cancer was discovered in the late stages, adding that doctors thought they were too young to have cancer and patients also felt the same. By the time it was discovered, it was too late.

Apffelstaedt says survivors often took themselves off therapy to get pregnant, but the cancer recurred and they died. But, he said women who completed the therapy and then had children, lived longer than those who did not have children. Apffelstaedt said that cancer in older women was a result of age, poor nutrition, obesity and a lack of exercise.

Sowetan, 10 October 2011

Injectable contraceptives may increase HIV infection

Injectable contraceptives may double a woman's risk of HIV infection and the risk of transmitting HIV to her partner, according to a recent study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

A hormone shot administered every three months is a widely used form of birth control in sub-Saharan Africa - roughly 12 million women between the ages of 15 and 49, or 6% of women in that age group, use injectable contraceptives.

According to the study, research was not yet clear as to the reasons for the increased risk. The study, led by researchers at the University of Washington, compared rates of HIV among 3 800 heterosexual couples in South Africa, Botswana, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.

Either the male or female partner was HIV-positive prior to the study. Researchers tracked the couples for two years, had them record their contraception methods, and measured whether the uninfected partner contracted HIV from the infected partner.

In a statement from the World Health Organisation (WHO), it said the weight of evidence had not presently indicated that hormonal contraception increased the risk of HIV acquisition among the general population. It did however have an impact on women who were at a high risk of HIV infection, such as sex workers, it said.

The WHO will convene in January to discuss whether evidence is strong enough to advise consumers of the risk. Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) spokesperson Caroline Nenguke said the study results were of concern because women taking the injectable hormone, as well as their male sexual partners, might be at a greater risk of contracting and transmitting HIV.

She said using a condom reduced the risk of infection, as did changing one's contraceptive method, but admittedly this was not an easy option for most women. Few women in the study used oral contraceptives and results were insufficient to draw conclusions about its association with HIV risk.

By Avery Carpenter: The Cape Times, 11 October 2011
 

One-third in SA will get mental problems

Between 15% and 30% of working South Africans will experience mental problems at some point in their careers.
Around 30% of those would suffer chronic mental health problems, according to Jacques Snyman, product development director at Agility Global Health Solutions.

He said that acting as a trigger to severe psychiatric conditions, such as depression, stress could also lead to acute psychotic episodes. The South African Stress and Health (SASH) study has ranked the country as seventh highest in the world for the prevalence of mood disorders and sixth for the prevalence of anxiety disorders.

Snyman said businesses should be concerned about these figures, as work stress was often ignored to the detriment of both the employee and employer. He said employers should adopt a more compassionate approach to their employees' well-being by allowing them time off work to proactively manage their mental health.

An Australian study conducted by Medibank found that stress-related absenteeism and "presenteeism" cost the country's economy 14.8 billion Australian dollars (around R115 billion) a year. For employers, the direct cost was estimated at 10.1 billion Australian dollars (around R78 billion).

SAPA, 10 October 2011