Legal Articles and Guides

A Durban nurse says she is still battling to be compensated properly after she contracted HIV 13 years ago from a needle stick injury to her left thumb while attending to a patient at the private hospital where she worked, says a report in The Mercury. The nurse claims the hospital’s insurer, the Compensation Fund, deemed that she was only 15% disabled, and paid her accordingly, and is now rejecting her appeals to reconsider because of her declining health and inability to work.

The Constitutional Court has ruled against a US widow who lodged a R24m damages claim against owners of a shark cage diving operation after her husband drowned when the diving boat he was on capsized off Kleinbaai in 2008. Sarah Tallman’s application for leave to appeal a SCA decision exonerating a shark cage diving operation of negligence, resulting in her husband’s death, has been dismissed with costs, says a Cape Times report. Her husband Chris was one of three tourists who drowned after a White Shark Projects catamaran-hull ski boat, Shark Team, capsized after being hit by a wave off Kleinbaai on 13 April, 2008. Tallman instituted a R24m claim against skipper Grant Tuckett and White Shark Projects. In 2014, Western Cape High Court Judge Alec Freud found Tuckett and White Shark Projects to be liable on the basis that they were negligent, but the SCA overturned the ruling, deciding the experienced Tuckett could not have anticipated the ‘freak wave’ that did the damage.