Health care in South Africa

Abstract

Every person who is at least somewhat familiar with the history of medicine knows the name of Christiaan Barnard, cardiac surgeon who performed the first successful heart transplant. This happened on December 3, 1967 at a hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. A man suffering from an incurable heart disease had a healthy organ transplant from a 25-yearold girl who died in a car accident. The patient lived for two weeks and died from complicated bilateral pneumonia, however, this case marked the beginning of a new era in transplantology giving hope of saving hundreds of patients. What do we know about health care of the Republic of South Africa, one of the most developed countries on the African continent? How much does the present situation allow the government to be classified as a world leader in healthcare? Unfortunately, according to the World Health Organization newsletter, South Africa at the present stage tops the sad ranking of countries by the number of HIV-infected and AIDS patients — about 7 million out of the 58 million people are infected with a dangerous virus. Unlike developed countries, where the main cause of death is pathology of the cardiovascular system, strokes and malignant neoplasms, three quarters of patients in the Republic of South Africa die due to infectious processes. Speaking about the heterogeneity of medicine, we were almost for the first time confronted with the fact that health services can be divided not only into health care for the «rich and poor», but also for the «white and black».