Mickeys

Two women paramedics were attacked in Durban Deep, west of Johannesburg, while attending to a toddler who had suffered burn wounds, reports said on Monday.

Senior Superintendent Noxolo Kweza said the two women were called out to Durban Deep in Roodepoort on Friday night after receiving a call from a desperate mother that her 2-year-old son had been burnt.

The Star newspaper reported that the two paramedics drove to a pick-up point along Main Reed road where residents are often asked to bring their patients.

The mother, her son and two men, who are family friends, waited for the paramedics there. At one stage, the mother returned home to get a jersey for her son.

“While they [the paramedics] were busy with the child in the ambulance, three armed men appeared from the bushes, threatened the two men and told them to run away, otherwise they were going to shoot them,” said Kweza.

“The two men ran down the road and the suspects took the women into the bushes.

“They raped one woman and attempted to rape the other one.”

The two men, who ran away, alerted the police and accompanied them to the scene to search for the women.

The assailants fled when the police arrived on the scene.

Beeld newspaper said the three men fled in the ambulance, which was later found abandoned in the area.

The two women had not yet made statements to the police because they had been too traumatised.

Both women were admitted to the Life Flora Clinic.

The boy was not injured in the attack and was admitted to hospital for treatment to the burn wounds.

taken from News24

South Africa is in danger of becoming a major hub for drug trafficking, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said on Thursday.

The office’s Jonathan Lucas said at the release of the International Narcotics Control Board’s annual report: “West African syndicates had recently become major drug traffickers after Central American cartels began using them due to difficulty with their traditional routes.

“Increased surveillance on traditional routes had made them become unprofitable.”

He said if these new routes through West Africa were successfully dealt with by the authorities, Central American cartels would again look for other alternatives.

“When they are diverted, will they come to South Africa? Maybe.”

There was also a danger the 2010 World Cup would worsen drug trafficking.

Law enforcement and customs officials would be under pressure due to massive tourist inflows during the tournament.

Central Drug Authority deputy chairperson David Bayever said: “We are aware it is going to be a big problem for us.”

He described trafficking cartels as “well-researched guys that know where the loopholes are”.

Despite these threats, SA’s drug problem remained primarily a domestic one, with alcohol and dagga use being well above global averages.

“Cannabis use was three times the global average in South Africa and its alcohol consumption put it in the top 10 of countries.”

Bayever said drugs and substance abuse problems were the underlying causes of such ills as HIV/Aids, violence and crime.

“It is not the result of these problems, but the cause of them. In order to deal with these problems we need to handle substance abuse.”

Most of South Africa’s cannabis was grown in Lesotho, Swaziland and South Africa, said the office’s national co-ordinator Johan Kruger. The region was actually a net exporter of cannabis to other countries.

Bayever said an additional problem would be the extension of school holidays during the World Cup. In addition to being at risk for substance abuse, children may also be lured into prostitution.

“Our youth are going to be on holiday and they are going to be targeted to become prostitutes,” said Bayever.

taken from News24

Baby Ashleigh Louw died on Friday, Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital clinical manager Dr Pungie Lingham said.

“Sadly, she has passed on,” he said. “Our condolences go out to the family.”

He said she died around midday but could not reveal the cause of death for privacy reasons.

“Baby Ashleigh was very ill and she’s been in ICU [intensive care unit] under very intense management both medically and otherwise,” said Lingham.

Ashleigh had an operation on January 17 after being born on January 9 with her heart outside her chest, covered only by a thin layer of skin.

The condition is known as Pentallogy of Cantrell which occurs in one in a million babies.

taken from News24

Mossel Bay – The owner of a Mossel Bay surfing school has described how he and two other surfers rushed into the sea to help three boys and a man who were in trouble in the sea at Diaz Beach on Saturday.

“We aren’t heroes,” said Llewellyn Whittaker, about himself and two other surfers, Michael Sheppard and Heinrich Engelbrecht.

Another two boys drowned in the incident. Only one of the two boys has been identified. He is 11-year-old Nkululeko Xaka from Kwanonqaba, according to Bernadine Steyn, Southern Cape police spokesperson.

At about 13:45 on Saturday, a group of boys went swimming at the beach. Whittaker described how he had started a surfing lesson on Saturday shortly after a development competition for juniors had finished at Diaz beach.

“I had barely started explaining to my student – a medical doctor whom I only know as Janine – how sea currents work, when I first spotted three people in the waves. It looked like they were in trouble.”

Whittaker dashed into the sea with the surfboard he was using for the lesson.

Initially he only saw a man and two boys in the ocean.

He pulled the man onto his surfboard and swam to the beach with one of the boys. “The boy wasn’t breathing.”

According to him, an unknown youth tried to pull another boy from the water, but the victim kept pulling the youth under.

“It was very bad – the youth (who tried to save the boy) was yelling ‘I can’t go on, I can’t go on’.”

Sheppard rushed into the surf after he heard Whittaker whistling and saw him waving his arms. He and Engelbrecht brought two more boys, who were lying face down in the water by that time, to the beach.

Steyn confirmed on Sunday that two boys (one who went swimming and one who presumably tried to save him) were still in hospital.

According to the National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI), the adult man was also taken to hospital. His condition was stable.

taken from News24

A 77-year-old Vanderbijlpark woman has miraculously survived after a robber assaulted her, leaving her lying tied up in her home for six days.

The bedroom in which Susan Grobler spent six days tied up.

Susan Grobler was severely dehydrated when Herman Leeuwner, a neighbour, found her in her bedroom at about 05:00 on Wednesday morning.

He was on his way to work and just about to get into his bakkie which was next to Grobler’s house, when he heard her mumbling desperately to herself inside.

“She said in a soft voice: ‘If I could just get my hands loose, if I could just get my hands loose’,” he said.

He approached two other female neighbours for help. They went to see what was going on when nobody could get an answer on Grobler’s cellphone.

Grobler is usually very security conscious, but the front gate was standing open, as well as the security gates at her front and back doors.

Inside the house, Leeuwner found her on her bedroom carpet with her hands tied behind her back and feet tied together with shoelaces. “Her feet were also tied to the dressing table with a rope,” he continued.

After cutting the rope and the ties, he immediately called for the police and emergency services. She was taken to the Sebokeng hospital by ambulance.

A severely weakened Grobler, her face covered in purple bruises, told from her hospital bed how she had been cooking a chicken in the oven last Thursday night, because her daughter, Carla Oosthuizen, was planning to visit.

Oosthuizen, who lives about six blocks from her mother, called to say her grandchild was with her for the day and she wouldn’t be able to come over.

She promised to come for a visit on Wednesday.

Shortly thereafter, Grobler went outside to put her rubbish bags on the pavement outside her house, when a man with a pair of scissors suddenly grabbed her by the arm.

“He forced me inside and gave me a hard slap in the face.”

The man insisted that she hand over her bank cards and threatened to kill her.

Soon thereafter, she lost consciousness and can only remember how he later hit her across the face again.

At one stage he removed her panties and sat on top of her, but thankfully didn’t rape her, she said.

Later he tied up her hands and feet and then tied her to the dressing table.

“The whole time I begged him to just untie my hands and feet, but he ignored me.”

For six days she lay like that – all alone, without food, water, or her chronic heart medication.

When Beeld visited her on Wednesday, the huge sores were clearly visible on her legs where her own urine eventually burned her. It’s a miracle that she survived, Oosthuizen said emotionally.

“Can you imagine? A whole six days without food or water? I believe it was God who kept her body strong.”

Kinnie Steyn, police spokesperson, said Grobler’s jewellery and bank cards are missing. The police are investigating a case of housebreaking.

taken from News24

The dramatic arrival of baby born at the doors of a hospital has been captured on CCTV footage.

The couple race through the first set of hospital doors

Caroline eech, 32, and her husband Mike raced to the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester for the birth of her third child – just in the nick of time.

As Mrs Meech stumbled into the foyer in the early hours of Tuesday last week, she found herself simply unable to take a step further and fell to the floor in the last stages of her labour.

Adding an element of the ridiculous to the situation, Mrs Meech found that every time she gave a push, the automatic doors would slide open.

Happily midwives came to her aid and within ten minutes her daughter Alice Harriet was born – just inside the doors, by the water cooler.

She weighed in at a healthy 8lb 3oz.

Mrs Meech, of Chandler’s Ford, near Southampton, told the Southampton Daily Echo: “I knew the baby was coming so I told Mike to take me to hospital. My waters broke in Hursley and I saw her head coming down, so I said ‘drive faster!’

Mrs Meech is felled by her contractions and sinks to the floor

“We screamed into the car park, managed to find a space. I was worried about leaving the car doors open.

“I pressed the buzzer and just made it through the double doors. The midwives came running down. They tried to persuade me to get in a wheelchair. But there was no way I could move.

“They asked me to move forward because every time I pushed, the automatic door opened. It was a comedy situation.

“Mike was brilliant. I was biting his thumb. He didn’t seem to mind. I couldn’t have done it without him.”

Mr Meech, 34, who works for IBM, said: “Caroline got in and the midwives came down and they were superb. It was all very exciting.”

taken from SkyNews

Five people have died and at least 12 have been injured in a gas pipe explosion at a power station in the US state of Connecticut, the local mayor has said.

The blaze on Acton Lane in Harlesden

The blast at the Kleen Energy plant in Middletown reportedly blew out a wall of the gas-fired station, sent flames and black smoke into the sky and shook houses several miles away.

“We know that 12 individuals have been injured. Five individuals are known to have lost their lives,” the mayor of Middletown told a news conference.

However, officials cautioned that because numerous contractors had staff working on the unfinished power plant, they were unable to account for everyone who had been at the site.

Some 11 casualties were transferred to the nearby Middlesex hospital, one with “extensive injuries”, spokesman Brian Albert said.

A search and rescue operation is being carried out for workers who may have been buried in rubble.

Emergency vehicles arrive at Kleen Energy plant after the explosion on Sunday

“There was a massive explosion, there are multiple injuries and possible fatalities,” said Middletown police officer George Yepes.

Earlier reports claimed that up to 34 people had died and 100 were wounded, Viktoria Sundqvist, managing editor of local newspaper The Register Citizen, told Sky News.

“As far as we know, crews have contained the fire and are trying to assess the scene,” she said.

Sky News US correspondent Keith Graves said the situation was confusing as the natural gas plant was still being built and an unknown number of construction workers had been there.

“Nobody seems to know exactly how many people were on the site and it’s posing difficulties for authorities trying to work out how many casualties there are,” he said.

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Simply Slim

The diet pill Simply Slim was recalled with immediate effect for safety reasons, the health department said on Friday.

“The Medicines Control Council suspended sales of the product,” health spokesperson Fidel Radebe said.

“It must be removed from shelves with immediate effect.”

Radebe said the product should have been registered with the MCC and it was not.

“People have been complaining about difficulties during and after using this product. It can be dangerous to use,” he said.

Beeld reported on Friday that the slimming product, which claims to be 100% herbal, contained sibutramine.

According to health regulations, any pill containing sibutramine must be registered as a prescription medicine and must contain no more than 15mg sibutramine.

Beeld, quoting Dr George van der Watt, a chemical pathologist at a Cape laboratory, said tests showed Simply Slim contained 27mg of sibutramine.

Simply Slim has maintained that these are falsified Simply Slim products.

Simply Slim is sold by agents who buy the product for about R350 and resell it for about R590, Beeld reported.

Side effects of sibutramine could include an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.

taken from News24

An Indonesian tobacco company has agreed to pay the medical expenses of a man who lost six teeth when a cigarette he was smoking exploded.

An Indonesian man smokes a cigarette in Jakarta where the blast happened

The cigarette blew up in Andi Susanto’s mouth while he was riding his motorcycle in Bekasi, near Jakarta.

He lost six teeth and received 51 stitches.

Mr Susanto told Metro TV in an interview from his hospital bed that cigarette producer PT Nojorono Tobacco Indonesia was paying for his medical treatment.

“The company’s officials have talked to my family and we agreed to settle it amicably, as an out-of-court settlement,” he said through bandaged lips.

“They will pay all the medical expenses.”

The cause of the explosion remains unknown.

Mr Susanto said he wasn’t chewing anything when he lit the Clas Mild cigarette, and didn’t notice anything strange about its odour, colour or taste.

The victim, who has been smoking since primary school, said he was shocked by the incident.

“It had been always fine. The incident was all so unexpected,” said the 31-year-old, who works as a security guard.

He admitted that he was traumatised by the incident and would try to quit smoking.

Tulus Abadi, from the Indonesian Consumer Protection Foundation, said there was only a small chance the explosion was triggered by the ingredients of the cigarette.

“From around 4,000 chemical substances found in a cigarette, there is one substance that is identical to a substance used to formulate rocket fuel,” Tulus told The Jakarta Post, referring to methanol.

“But although it exists in cigarettes, I think the amount is too small to trigger an explosion.”

Muhammad Warsianto, NTI’s senior adviser, confirmed that its products, branded as Clas Mild, did not contain any explosive materials.

Mr Warsianto said the company assisted with the medical bill as a form of sympathy to “a loyal customer”.

taken from SkyNews

Port-au-Prince – Haiti’s desperate earthquake survivors faced a new deadly threat on Friday as the United Nations reported a rise in cases of diarrhoea, measles and tetanus in squalid tent camps for victims.

Haiti

A vast foreign aid effort is struggling to meet survivors’ needs 17 days after the disaster, which killed around 170 000 people and left one million homeless and short of food, water and medical attention.

And with medicine running low amid efforts to treat hundreds of thousands of injured and homeless cramped into makeshift camps, officials and aid groups are scrambling to avoid a potential public health calamity that could push the death toll higher.

“Several medical teams report a growing caseload of diarrhoea in the last two to three days,” World Health Organisation spokesperson Paul Garwood said.

“There are also reports of measles and tetanus, including in resettlement camps, which is worrisome due to the high concentration of people,” he told journalists in Geneva.

UN agencies and Haiti’s government aim to launch a vaccination campaign against measles, tetanus and diphtheria next week. Just 58% of Haitian infants were immunized before the quake, Garwood said.

He highlighted a “critical” need for surgeons, with an estimated 30 to 100 amputations being carried out every day in some hospitals, while supplies of anaesthetics and antibiotics were also needed.

The 7.0-magnitude quake on January 12 decimated Haiti’s already meagre health system, creating conditions for disease to thrive in the cramped refugee camps.

Only one person in two among the Haitian population of more than nine million people has access to clean drinking water, and only 19% have decent sanitation.

On Friday, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa became just the second foreign leader to visit Haiti since the quake, lending his voice to international calls for more emergency relief and assistance with reconstruction.

“This is a tragedy, a humanitarian tragedy. Haiti at this moment represents the pain of victims but also hope,” Correa said.

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Rescuers pulled a 3-week-old baby girl alive from the rubble of a house more than a week after it was destroyed in Haiti’s devastating earthquake, a French radio station reported on Wednesday.

French rescuers found the girl in a hollow beneath the ruins of the house in Jacmel, a town in the south of the island, after spending five hours trying the get through to her, France Inter station said.

The baby’s uncle told the station that the girl, named Elisabeth, was 23 days old. The station reported she was in healthy condition and did not appear wounded and had been taken to an American field hospital nearby.

The United Nations said on Wednesday that 121 people had been rescued by international teams from the debris of collapsed buildings in Haiti since the January 12 earthquake.

taken from News24

London – Greek researchers called on Wednesday for more safety studies into electronic cigarettes, saying scientific knowledge of them was “very limited”.

E-Cigarette

Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, were first made in China and are sold mostly on the internet.

They are battery-powered devices which emit a “puff” or fine mist of nicotine into the lungs and are intended to replace normal cigarettes and help smokers quit.

The products are at the centre of a legal battle in the US between manufacturers and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates drugs and which wants to stop e-cigarettes from being imported into the US.

The FDA, which conducted research into e-cigarettes, has expressed concerns about their safety, and teams from Greece and New Zealand have also carried out studies into them.

But interpretations of the three reports vary, with the New Zealand study saying e-cigarettes should be recommended because they are safer than tobacco cigarettes, and the Greek study taking a broadly neutral stance.

“The limited information given in these three reports represents all the knowledge we currently have about e-cigarettes,” Andreas Flouris and Dimitris Oikonomou, of the Institute of Human Performance and Rehabilitation in Greece, wrote in the British Medical Journal.

“This may be one reason why the battle… between the FDA and e-cigarette manufacturers has been so heated.”

A US judge last week granted an injunction barring the Obama administration from trying to ban imports of e-cigarettes, saying the move was part of “aggressive efforts” by the FDA to regulate “recreational tobacco products”.

Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the world, killing more than five million people a year. A report by the World Lung Foundation last August said smoking could kill a billion people this century if trends hold.

Flouris and Oikonomou said that while “alternative smoking strategies are always welcome in an effort to reduce the threat to public health” caused by tobacco, safety was also vital.

“More rigorous chemical analyses are needed, followed by extensive research involving animal studies and, finally, clinical trials in humans,” they wrote.

taken from News24

Seven-day-old baby Ashleigh Louw will undergo surgery in the next 48 hours, said Professor Sithembiso Velaphi, head of Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital’s neo-natal unit on Friday.

“The operation would be done at this hospital and this would be the first part of the correction. The surgeons would close the defect in the abdomen wall, the defect in the diaphragm, and the defect in the sternum (breast bone),” he said.

“The defects inside the heart would be done later on.”

Ashleigh was born at the Soweto hospital with part of her heart outside her chest which is covered by a thin layer of skin. She has only half her ribcage.

Her rare condition is known as Pentallogy of Cantrell which is an extremely rare congenital abnormality of one in a million babies.

The condition consists of five associated abnormalities including structural abnormalities of the heart, a defect of the covering of the heart, a diaphragmatic defect, a sternal defect and a defect of the anterior abdominal wall.

According to academic literature, she had a 50% chance of survival. However, Velaphi said the baby’s chances of survival were hard to tell.

“If the baby had only one defect, we would be able to tell what her chances were, but this baby has a number of defects and therefore it is difficult to tell.

Earlier in the week, said Ashleigh was on oxygen. “The baby is in a high care neo-natal unit and is only on an oxygen machine. Reports that she was on life support machines are not true.

“She is sick but not critical. She is stable and only requires oxygen at this time.”

He said although Ashleigh’s condition was rare, it was not the first in South Africa.

taken from News24

Washington – Facebook launched a “Global Relief” page on Thursday that helps members assist victims of natural disasters such as the earthquake that hammered impoverished Haiti.

“The devastating earthquake in Haiti has underscored the internet’s critical role in connecting the world’s population in times of tragedy,” Facebook spokesperson Andrew Noyes said in a statement.

“In response to this and in anticipation of future disasters, Facebook has launched the Global Relief on Facebook page where our more than 350 million members can educate themselves and find out how to help.”

The Facebook spokesperson said that since Tuesday’s 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti, more than 1 500 status updates a minute have been posted to Facebook containing the word “Haiti”.

“Thousands of dollars have been raised through Facebook Causes and groups like the American Red Cross, Oxfam America and Partners in Health have mobilised supporters through their Facebook pages,” Noyes said.

“We hope the Global Relief on Facebook page will thrive as a resource for individuals, non-profits, governments and industry to raise awareness of the good being done for those in need around the world.”

The Global Relief on Facebook page is located at Facebook.com/globalrelief.

taken from News24

Reports this week claimed that Caster Semenya will indeed race in the local season, which starts in a few weeks. Health24’s FitnessDoc, Dr Ross Tucker comments.

Caster Semenya

As has been the case on numerous occasions in this ongoing saga, every day brings with it more denials and confusion.

First, the IAAF and Semenya’s own lawyers denied that any decision clearing her had been reached. To them, the matter is still under discussion and they will only comment once the decision is made.

Then ASA acted by distancing themselves from the issue, saying that it is a matter for Semenya and her family, and that they have not received any clearance from the IAAF.

Not suspended, and therefore eligible to compete

Legally, of course, the IAAF have not banned her.  No suspension was ever handed down, and so in theory, she can run, as ASA recognised at the recent launch of the local track season.

However, there is more to this than a simple legal issue, and were she to race locally, it would once again stir the hornet’s next of allegation and counter-allegation that erupted last year in August.

Unfortunately, people have not seemed to recognise that a failure of a ban is not necessarily an endorsement of her eligibility to compete.

Meanwhile, her coach has clearly decided that he will plan the season without factoring this in, and perhaps this is all he can do – the alternative is to sit around waiting for a verdict, by which time 2010 may be beyond salvation as a competitive season.

What’s best for Semenya?

So Semenya can go ahead and run, because legally, there’s no barrier.  Whether this is the best for her does not seem to factor in the decisions of those in charge.

Remember, prior to Berlin, the medical advice was that she should not run pending further testing, and this was specifically to protect her against the potential fallout.  That advice was ignored.

Now, five months later, a similar situation exists – there is no concrete reason why she should not compete.  But given the doubt, the enormous question mark over her, does it really make sense to put her back into competition?

Is it really in her best interests to run until the verdict arrives, or is the prudent, wise approach not to wait on that decision and then run without any questions at all (assuming this is possible)?

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