Chronic kidney disease

In his review article in the March 2015 edition ofCME, Prof. A M Meyers refers to chronic kidneydisease as ‘an important disease group that threatenshealth’. I fully concur with this observation andwish to go a step further and assert that kidneydisease, together with other related non-communicable diseases(NCDs), poses not only a threat to health but also to theoverall development of South Africa (SA). It is now almost 4 yearssince the adoption of the Political Declaration of the High-levelMeeting of the General Assembly on the Prevention and Controlof Non-communicable Diseases (September 2011), where itwas emphatically stated that member States that have signed theDeclaration (including SA) ‘Acknowledge that the global burdenand threat of non-communicable diseases constitutes one of themajor challenges for development in the twenty-first century,which undermines social and economic development throughoutthe world, and threatens the achievement of internationallyagreed development goals’

Discovery of an eclipsing dwarf nova in the ancient nova shell Te 11

We report on the discovery of an eclipsing dwarf nova (DN) inside the peculiar, bilobed nebula Te 11. Modelling of high-speed photometry of the eclipse finds the accreting white dwarf to have a mass 1.18 M⊙ and temperature 13 kK. The donor spectral type of M2.5 results in a distance of 330 pc, colocated with Barnard's loop at the edge of the Orion-Eridanus superbubble. The perplexing morphology and observed bow shock of the slowly expanding nebula may be explained by strong interactions with the dense interstellar medium in this region. We match the DN to the historic nova of 483 CE in Orion and postulate that the nebula is the remnant of this eruption. This connection supports the millennia time-scale of the post-nova transition from high to low mass-transfer rates. Te 11 constitutes an important benchmark system for CV and nova studies as the only eclipsing binary out of just three DNe with nova shells