Erroneous tweet about heart disease – 24 July

On 24 July, we erroneously sent out a tweet with the statement/headline: “Heart disease is the leading cause of death in SA, four times more than murder”, with an accompanying link.

As pointed out by AfricaCheck (on Twitter at the time, and in a subsequent article today), and other Twitter users, this statement is definitely incorrect.

While “Heart disease is not THE leading cause of death in SA, four times more than murder” is most definitely incorrect, it would have been better to say “Heart disease is A leading cause of death in SA, four times more than murder”.

Even then, that would have been based on 2015 statistics, and no longer relevant.

The tweet mentioned above was deleted, as indicated, but not related to the matter above.

While we acknowledge that the statement was incorrect, and we should not have tweeted it, the tweet was also curated incorrectly – the headline and associated link were not related.

Once we discovered that we deleted immediately.

We will continue to endeavour to take care with any information we post on social media.

Any further queries can be sent to feedback@health24.com.

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