logo
Centurion community welcomes brave Eben back home from hospital

Centurion community welcomes brave Eben back home from hospital

The Citizen10-06-2025
Ten-year-old Eben Beukes received a hero's welcome back home from hospital on June 6 as he was welcomed by a convoy of emergency vehicles, community patrollers, Hennopspark school teachers and learners.
His arrival, embraced by his community, marked an emotional milestone for his family and neighbourhood that stood by him through his journey suffering a life-limiting condition.
Eben suffered severe medical complications in December during treatment, when he had contracted Covid-19.
Lyttelton CPF chairperson Merle van Staden said they have been with the family through every step, with father Hendrik being very involved in all his son's needs.
'When Eben got sick in January, Hendrik kept me updated. We visited Eben in hospital during his first operation in February. We prayed and supported them throughout. We continued to visit and stay in contact as Eben's condition changed,' said Van Staden.
She said that as the CPF, their main aim went beyond crime prevention, but also ensuring their involvement in serving and strengthening the community.
'This was not just a convoy, it was about showing Eben and his family that they are not alone, that we walk this journey with them.'
Following a public appeal for help in April, Hendrik said the response has been heartwarming.
'From strangers who donated R50 to corporates reaching out with offers of equipment, every cent and every prayer has mattered. Emotionally, the messages, visits, and check-ins have helped us not feel alone,' he said.
He was overwhelmed with emotion and gratitude on the day of his son's arrival.
'Eben finally came home permanently on June 6. It was a day filled with emotion and gratitude. It was incredibly emotional. As a father, I stood there holding back tears. Seeing the school teachers, friends, family, strangers, and neighbours line the streets for Eben reminded me that we're not alone. It was a reminder of humanity's beauty,' Hendrik said.
He said that having Eben home has brought peace and hope.
Hendrik explained that since coming home, Eben has been stable but still requires complex care, including suctioning, feeding through a tube, and close medical monitoring.
'He couldn't speak, but we could see it in his eyes. He knew something special was happening. His body reacted to the sounds and movement. There was a calmness and alertness we hadn't seen in a while,' he said.
He explained how they are adapting to the situation as a family.
'Ane, Eben's sister, has been a rock. She's mature beyond her years – strong, loyal, and deeply compassionate. We cry together, but we also laugh. As a family, we rely on faith and each other daily.'
Hendrik also acknowledged the CPF and EMS for their quick response throughout Eben's journey.
'We mentioned Eben's return on social media, and amazingly, the CPF and EMS reached out to us. They offered support without hesitation and co-ordinated the route and logistics. We didn't expect such a beautiful display of community spirit.'
He said this experience has taught him that parenting isn't about fixing things, but about standing firm, even when broken.
'Hope is not naive, it's a choice you make every morning, and without others, we wouldn't have made it this far,' he said.
He added that they have made progress with the support they have received, but are still short in covering long-term care.
'We also welcome any donations of medical supplies, nappies or time.'
Hendrik said they are still accepting donations through their official BackaBuddy page and corporate donations through Caring Daisies to supply tax certificates.
If you would like to reach out or help the family, contact Hendrik on 061 462 1420.
Do you have more information about the story?
Please send us an email to bennittb@rekord.co.za or phone us on 083 625 4114.
For free breaking and community news, visit Rekord's websites: Rekord East
For more news and interesting articles, like Rekord on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok.
At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
Stay in the know. Download the Caxton Local News Network App
Stay in the know. Download the Caxton Local News Network App here
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Revolutionising health research: lessons from the UK Biobank's scans of 100,000 participants
Revolutionising health research: lessons from the UK Biobank's scans of 100,000 participants

IOL News

timea day ago

  • IOL News

Revolutionising health research: lessons from the UK Biobank's scans of 100,000 participants

Since it launched in 2006, UK Biobank, a government-backed effort to transform medical research, has been building a vast database on the health and lifestyles of 500,000 people aged 40 to 69 when they enrolled. Image: AI generated/Ron One day last summer, Alison slipped off her jewelry, stepped into a hospital gown and lay down inside a full-body MRI scanner. As the machine issued calming instructions - breathe in, hold, breathe out - it captured thousands of images, from her head to her toes. A tech worker and mother of two in her 50s, Alison (whose full name cannot be shared under participant privacy rules) had joined a nationwide health study after spotting a flyer in her local library. Her mother died young of cancer, and women like her - of Caribbean background - were underrepresented in research and often overlooked. Signing up, she says, was a way to be counted, 'so that there's data from people like me.' What Alison didn't realize was that she was part of one of the most ambitious studies of human health ever undertaken. Since it launched in 2006, UK Biobank, a government-backed effort to transform medical research, has been building a vast database on the health and lifestyles of 500,000 people aged 40 to 69 when they enrolled. Blood and other biological samples are taken and physical measurements recorded. Participants provide key information such as their education level, location, ethnic background and living circumstances. Crucially, they also consent to long-term tracking of their health-care records. Since 2014 the project has also carried out a series of full-body scans on participants, which generate more than 12,000 images per person. The five-hour process, which scientists aim to repeat two or more years later, includes MRIs of the brain, heart, liver and abdomen; DEXA scans to assess bone density and body fat; and ultrasounds of the carotid arteries. With 100,000 participants scanned so far - and more still being invited - the study is offering scientists an unprecedented window into how diseases take hold, slowly and silently, years before symptoms appear. Its cloud-based platform is now used by more than 21,000 researchers across 60 countries, including early-career scientists and those in low-resource settings, who receive free compute time. To date, the data have fueled more than 16,000 scientific publications. 'This massive imaging project is making the invisible visible,' says Rory Collins, principal investigator and chief executive officer of UK Biobank. 'This is a study of the interaction of genes, environment and lifestyle,' all of which are 'determinants of disease.' The project has produced more than 1 billion images - more than 10 times the size of any previous undertaking - fueling breakthroughs in everything from AI-driven diagnostics to early disease prediction. One of the most striking demonstrations of UK Biobank's potential came during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thousands of participants had undergone brain imaging before and after the outbreak - allowing researchers to study the impact of infection. They found measurable brain changes even among people with mild Covid, including shrinkage in areas linked to smell, memory and emotion. The findings reshaped scientists' understanding of the virus's neurological toll and showed the unique value of repeat imaging, which allows scientists to observe how a disease unfolds. Funded by the government's Medical Research Council and charities including the Wellcome Trust, UK Biobank grew out of a realization at the turn of the century that understanding heart attacks or diseases such as dementia requires studying not just sick patients but huge numbers of healthy people over time. Collins and others had seen how smaller studies could give misleading results, especially for risk factors such as blood pressure. They saw huge value in pairing genetic data with long-term health tracking. The approach has already paid off with a better understanding of diagnosing and treating diabetes. Type 1 diabetes was long thought to affect only children, and doctors assumed that people who got the disease in middle or old age had Type 2, Collins said. UK Biobank research has shown that Type 1 occurs at the same rate throughout life. With clearer data, scientists realized that many older adults had been misclassified and given the wrong treatment. When combined with genetic, lifestyle and clinical data, the scans are also helping scientists detect diseases earlier, understand how they develop and, in some cases, rethink what health risk looks like. Take body fat. A person's body mass index, or BMI, has long been used as a rough proxy for health. But UK Biobank imaging shows that two people with the same BMI can carry fat in radically different ways - some in places that raise the risk of diabetes and heart disease, others in ways that may be protective. 'Body mass index is a very crude measure,' Collins said. 'The risk associated with different distributions is likely to be massively different.' Studies have used UK Biobank scans to spot early signs of heart damage, liver disease and even brain shrinkage linked to mild alcohol use. Another study found that 1 in 10 middle-age people, with no symptoms, had a buildup of calcium deposits in their abdominal aorta - the abdomen's largest artery - a dangerous condition linked to heart disease that often goes undiagnosed. Researchers are using AI to mine the vast trove of data, training models to predict diseases like Alzheimer's or to build a 'digital twin' of a patient - so researchers can establish a benchmark and compare how sick or healthy a person is. As the number of disease cases among the participants grows and more repeat scans come online, researchers say the most transformative discoveries are still to come. As Collins put it: 'We ain't seen nothing yet.' Alison says taking part in the research is one of the most meaningful things she's ever done. 'They are connecting things that people haven't previously even considered,' she says. 'It's laying the foundation for us to start seeing the deeper connections in the body and in our lives.' What UK Biobank is revealing, scan by scan and layer by layer, is that disease doesn't arrive out of nowhere. It accumulates quietly, shaped by genes, environment, and habits. By making those changes visible long before symptoms appear, researchers hope to catch illness in the act - and eventually, to stop it. It's a shift not just in medicine, but in mindset: from treating disease after it strikes, to understanding, and potentially interrupting, how it takes shape in the first place.

UK battles anti-vax misinformation after child's death
UK battles anti-vax misinformation after child's death

eNCA

time2 days ago

  • eNCA

UK battles anti-vax misinformation after child's death

UK - A child's death from measles has sparked urgent calls from British public health officials to get children vaccinated, as the UK faces an onslaught of misinformation on social media, much of it from the United States. Measles is a highly infectious disease that can cause serious complications. It is preventable through double MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) jabs in early childhood. Health Secretary Wes Streeting on July 14 confirmed to parliament that a child had died in the UK of measles. No details have been released, but The Sunday Times and Liverpool Echo newspapers reported the child had been severely ill with measles and other serious health problems in Alder Hey hospital in the northwestern city. Anti-vaxxers quickly posted unconfirmed claims about the death on social media. One British influencer, Ellie Grey, who has more than 200,000 followers on Instagram, posted a video denying the child died from measles. "Measles isn't this deadly disease... it's not dangerous," she said. Grey criticised Alder Hey for posting a video "really, really pushing and manipulating parents into getting the MMR vaccine". Her video was reposted by another British influencer, Kate Shemirani, a struck-off ex-nurse who posts health conspiracy theories. "No vaccine has ever been proven safe and no vaccine has ever been proven effective," Shemirani claimed falsely. Liverpool's public health chief Matthew Ashton attacked those "spreading misinformation and disinformation about childhood immunisations" in the Echo newspaper, saying "they need to take a very long, hard look at themselves." "For those of you that don't know, measles is a really nasty virus," he said in a video, adding that the jab is a way of "protecting yourself and your loved ones". Alder Hey said it has treated 17 children with measles since June. It posted a video in which a paediatric infectious diseases consultant, Andrew McArdle, addresses measles "myths", including that the MMR jab causes autism. This false claim comes from a debunked 1998 study by a British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, who was later struck off. But it sparked an international slump in vaccinations. - 'Lingering questions' - Benjamin Kasstan-Dabush, a medical anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told AFP there are still "lingering questions around the Wakefield era". He talked to parents who had delayed vaccinating their children, finding reasons included life events and difficulty getting health appointments, but also misinformation. "We're obviously talking about a different generation of parents, who might be engaging with that Wakefield legacy through social media, through the internet, and of course through Kennedy," he said. US President Donald Trump appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr as health secretary despite his promotion of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. Kennedy fired all 17 experts on a key vaccine advisory panel and appointed a scientist who warned against Covid jabs. In the United States, "misinformation is being produced in the highest echelons of the Trump administration", which "circulates across the internet", Kasstan-Dabush said. In a sign of how narratives spread, a Telegram group airing conspiracies called Liverpool TPR, which has around 2,000 members, regularly posts links to anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense once chaired by Kennedy. In the past few weeks the UK Health Security Agency has amplified its social media coverage on vaccinations, a spokesman said. In a video in response to the reported death, Vanessa Saliba, a consultant epidemiologist, explained the MMR jab protects others, including those "receiving treatment like chemotherapy that can weaken or wipe out their immunity". Take-up of the MMR jab needs to be 95 percent for herd immunity, according to the World Health Organisation. The UK has never hit this target. In Liverpool, uptake for both doses is only around 74 percent and below 50 percent in some areas, according to Ashton, while the UK rate is 84 percent. After Wakefield's autism claims, confirmed measles cases topped 2,000 in England and Wales in 2012 before dropping. But last year, cases soared again. The same trend is happening in other countries. Europe last year reported the highest number of cases in over 25 years; the United States has recorded its worst measles epidemic in over 30 years. Canada, which officially eradicated measles in 1998, has registered more than 3,500 cases this year. An Ontario infectious diseases doctor, Alon Vaisman, told AFP: "You're fighting against the wall of disinformation and lies."

Innovative Research Facility Enhances Local Skills
Innovative Research Facility Enhances Local Skills

The Citizen

time5 days ago

  • The Citizen

Innovative Research Facility Enhances Local Skills

'The Covid-19 pandemic taught us that we needed to do more to build skills to improve the resilience of our health system' The official opening of The Centre for Advanced Training and Innovative Research in Pretoria. Picture: supplied. South Africa has bolstered its fight against future pandemics and disease with the launch of a new training facility for the next generation of scientists. Thermo Fisher Scientific, South African Medical Research Council and Department of Science Innovation and Technology recently collaborated on the Centre for Advanced Training and Innovative Research (CATIR) in Pretoria. The centre will offer training in advanced molecular science and laboratory management. This move will enhance essential scientific skill within South Africa. The official opening of this training facility took place this week and will support future pandemic preparedness and local health system resilience. It will bridge the gap between academic theory and practical application, equipping future scientists with the skills to lead research and healthcare advancements relevant to local needs. ALSO READ: 'Renewed energy': New NYDA CEO gets to work as youth joblessness hits crisis point Advancement of students President and Chief Executive Officer at SAMRC, Professor Ntobeko Ntusi, said said the centre 'reflects the SAMRC's belief in the value of investing in the infrastructure and expertise that will help our country address local gaps in critical areas of science'. The first cohort of 20 CATIR students is scheduled to be trained by the end of 2025. Once fully operational, the Centre will have the capacity to train up to 160 students annually, with courses lasting five weeks. 'The Covid-19 pandemic taught us that we needed to do more to build skills in clinical and molecular testing to improve the resilience of our health system against the diseases of today and tomorrow. 'The opening of this important new educational facility is a landmark moment in our journey to achieving this important goal,' said Professor Ntusi.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store