High blood pressure is one of today’s silent killers. Often overlooked, or not noticed at all, high blood pressure (or hypertension) is one of the world’s leading causes of premature death, contributing to 9 million deaths worldwide each year. As with many conditions, having your blood pressure tested is an essential first step in in…
Sustainability is word that is often thrown around in the non-profit sector. In fact, we get asked about the sustainability of our Roadside Wellness Centres quite often. Since mobile workers, like truck drivers, are constantly on the move, it can be challenging to incorporate income generating activities to help offset the cost of some of…
Last November we featured the launch of an exciting and innovative pilot project aimed at delivering important health and safety information to 75 truck drivers in South Africa. The pilot, which ran for two months between November and December 2011, reached truck drivers via text messages covering a range of topics with one SMS per day,…
On April 25th, North Star staff and 48 participants met to discuss a range of topics covering malaria personal prevention, environmental management, symptoms and recognition, and actions to be taken when signs of malaria appear.
The following post was written by Thabsile Sithole, North Star Alliance Peer Educator at the Ngwenya Roadside Wellness Centre in Swaziland I want to share this as you know that today is World Malaria Day. I’m Thabsile Sithole, the peer educator at North Star Allaince’s Ngwenya Wellness Centre in Swaziland. As a peer educator I want to…
“Welcome to Lagos” is the best documentary on Africa I’ve seen. When the BBC first brought it out two years ago they presented it as the first of a series on life in mega cities. Sadly, they must have had second thoughts (or, more likely, budget cuts) because I’m still eagerly awaiting the next instalment….
Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease that newly infects millions of people each year, with low- and middle-income countries facing the brunt of the epidemic. It is a disease, however, that is both preventable, and curable, and one which the international community has made tremendous strides to combat over the past two decades. Today, on World TB…
North Star Alliance and Fleet Forum have announced ‘NSEWA’, an initiative to close the gap between health services and road safety through specially designed driver safety training and health-related programmes aimed at the Road Freight Industry.
Good day. Welcome to North Star SMS wellness support. If you want to stop getting the SMSs, send a please-call-me at any time. This month, North Star Alliance and Cell-Life, a not-for-profit organisation that provides technology for the management of HIV, launched an innovative SMS-based pilot programme designed to deliver important health training information to…
A flurry of articles, posts, blogs and columns of print the past few weeks talk about non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and their impact on global health. After a decade of (not unwarranted) attention on HIV/AIDS and malaria, public health officials backed up by organisations such as WHO, are recognising that preventable, mostly “lifestyle diseases” like diabetes and hypertension, are not just problems in affluent nations, but they are killing more people worldwide than infectious diseases.
