Morning Briefing

VOA News features a five-part series on South Africa's rural public health sector, which the news service writes is "plagued by a high burden of infectious diseases, severe doctor and nurse shortages, lack of medicines and essential medical equipment and incompetent management," resulting in high patient death rates. "Eighty percent of South Africa's population of about 50 million people depends on public health care," the news service notes. In the first part of the series, VOA writes that "international health care monitoring groups ... consistently rate South Africa's public health sector among the worst in the world," "despite the fact that the government gives more than 100 billion rand ($13.3 billion) every year to state health -- one of the biggest expenditures on such services in the developing world."