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south-africa

Olympics-Pace becomes first women’s golfer to opt out of Rio

South African Lee-Anne Pace, citing Zika concerns, became the first women’s golfer to withdraw from the 2016 Rio Olympics on Wednesday, joining a growing exodus on the men’s side that includes the world’s top-ranked player. Pace, a nine-times winner on the Ladies European Tour who is ranked 38th in the world, said she was eager to represent South Africa at the Aug 5-21 Olympics but felt Zika was too big a risk to take. “After weighing up all the options and discussing it with my family and team, I have decided that due to the health concerns surrounding the Zika virus, I will not be participating,” Pace, 35, said in a statement.

South African health authorities wants Roche to reduce cancer medication prices

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – South Africa is negotiating with pharmaceutical company Roche to reduce the price of its breast cancer drug Herceptin, which cost 500,000 rand ($32,745) a year to treat one person and was unaffordable to most women, the health minister said on Tuesday. “I met the CEO in April and told him women won’t be able to afford this. Let’s talk, maybe something can come out of this,” minister Aaron Motsoaledi told reporters. ($1 = 15.2695 rand) (Reporting by Wendell Roelf; Editing by James Macharia)

S.African doctors perform world’s first penis transplant

South African doctors have successfully performed the world's first penis transplant on a young man who had his organ amputated after a botched circumcision ritual, a hospital said on Friday. The nine-hour transplant, which occurred in December last year, was part of a pilot study by Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town and the University of Stellenbosch to help scores of initiates who either die or lose their penises in botched circumcisions each year. For a young man of 18 or 19 years the loss of his penis can be deeply traumatic,” said Andre van der Merwe, head of the university's urology unit and who led the operation said in a statement. “There is a greater need in South Africa for this type of procedure than elsewhere in the world, as many young men lose their penises every year due to complications from traditional circumcision,” Van der Merwe said.

Industrialisation, WWI helped fuel TB spread

A virulent group of TB germs spread from East Asia in waves propelled by industrialisation, World War I and Soviet collapse to yield some of the drug-resistant strains plaguing the world today, a study said Monday. It evolved into several sub-lineages and strains, spreading eastward to Micronesia and Polynesia and westward to central Asia, Russia and eastern Europe. Among the toughest modern-day versions — two multi-drug resistant (MDR) clones, started spreading through eastern Europe and Asia on an epidemic scale about 20-30 years ago, “coinciding with the collapse of the public health system of the former Soviet Union,” study co-author Thierry Wirth of France's National History Museum told AFP.