Category: The Outlier
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Cholera outbreaks highlight the need for Africa to make its own vaccines
There is a worldwide shortage of cholera vaccines, and only one WHO-approved producer in the world, EuBiologics in South Korea. In February 2024, Doctors Without Borders, a medical humanitarian organisation, reported that the global cholera vaccine stockpile had been exhausted. Already in October 2022 a decision was made to temporarily reduce the dosage of vaccine…
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Freight failures: Transnet’s rail woes impact SA’s coal exports
Transnet transported 58-million fewer tonnes of coal, iron ore and other commodities in the 2022/3 financial year than it did 10 years ago, with coal making up a third of its freight. The state-owned entity attributes the reduced rail capacity to underinvestment in network rehabilitation, vandalism and sabotage as well as to disputes over locomotive…
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Tourism recovery: Visitors to Table Mountain, cableway are on the rise
The number of visitors to the Table Mountain National Park climbed to 2.8-million in 2023. A 56% increase on 2022, or an additional 1-million visitors. The national park, home to the iconic Table Mountain, had 3.2-million visitors in 2019. Also on the rise are visitors to the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway. Numbers shot up 44%…
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SA’s low-cost housing programme on shaky ground
Just 42,773 government-subsidised houses were built in South Africa in the 2023/24 financial year. That’s an 82% decline compared with the 235,635 houses built 26 years ago in 1998/99. About 10% of government-subsidised houses were recorded as having weak walls and roofs, according to Statistics SA’s 2023 General Household Survey. Mpumalanga and the Western Cape had…