Data shows what works
NOBODY knew her name.
Nobody opened the door when she knocked with a weak and bloody hand after her rapist had given chase and slit her throat.
Hendrika Long, the emergency worker who certified her dead, is haunted by how a trail of red mapped the woman’s search for help in a terrified community: bloody handprints on door after door.
“I didn’t want to look at her eyes,” she said. “It was like they would show what she had seen in her last minutes.”
That night, the woman from Delft near Cape Town became a statistic: one more life lost to the second-biggest cause of premature death in Gauteng and the Western Cape — “interpersonal violence”.
The Medical Research Council has released a study that shows what is killing people prematurely in different age groups across each province.
Not surprisingly, according to the Second National Burden of Disease Study, HIV/Aids is the main culprit countrywide. But as you move through the list of killers, each province has its own cross to bear.
MRC head Professor Glenda Gray, who presented the findings to parliament this week, calls it “beautiful data” because it gives each province the best idea of what needs to change.
Mpumalanga is the only province where road accidents are second to HIV/Aids. In the Eastern Cape and Northern Cape, it is TB; in Limpopo and the Free State, pneumonia and other lower respiratory-tract infections.
In KwaZulu-Natal and North West, strokes (and similar conditions) take a heavy toll.
Other big killers in the top five across provinces are heart disease and diarrhoea.
Victoria Pillay-Van Wyk, who led the research, said it showed each province’s most dire needs for intervention.
She said that in the violent Western Cape and Gauteng, “other sectors” needed to get involved. Violence can’t land on one department alone.
Limpopo “needs to focus on improving quality of care in health services and improving water and sanitation to address the large burden from infectious diseases”.
Death patterns differed, she said, because “cultural variation, the prevalence of alcohol and drug abuse, and gang or syndicate activity” played a role.
A 2015 study by fellow MRC EARLY mortality statistics are not all doom and gloom — they also show what we’re doing right.
“We can now say for sure that tobacco control has reduced lung cancer, and this is evidence that controls translate into outcomes,” said Professor Glenda Gray, head of the Medical Research Council.
And while interpersonal researcher Richard Matzopoulus and his team found that about 45 out of 100 000 people were victims of homicide in metro areas. In non-metro areas violence was still high, it had come down, and this was evidence that the Firearms Control Act was making a difference, she said.
Showing the links between control, legislation and outcomes “sheds light on the potential of things like the upcoming sugar tax, as well as the rate was about 33 out of 100 000.
Said Gray: “In the Western Cape we have to look at gang violence [while] Gauteng, which salt regulation which has seen hypertension coming down”.
Also, while HIV and TB were “still significant causes of death, rates are coming down thanks to the right medication being rolled out”.
Noncommunicable diseases are on the increase due to lifestyle issues and factors like sugar, alcohol and obesity.
“Data is critical to us because it informs policy,” Gray said. is our most economically active province, levels of alcohol and criminal activity are high.”
In Mpumalanga, a contributing factor to road deaths was the