Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler
HAIFA, Northern Israel, Dec 16 2010 (IPS) – At the Rambam medical centre here in Israel s third largest city just 30 odd kilometres from Lebanon, they are working around the clock, racing against time.
Israel is building the largest underground emergency hospital in the world. The 100 million dollar project is slated for completion in May 2012.
It is part of a national effort aimed at protecting hospitals against what officials hope medical emergency facilities will not ever have to endure a conventional, chemical, or biological missile attack.
Ariye Berkovitz, head of the Rambam engineering department, supervises the unusual project: There s no such structure anywhere in the whole world. In regular times, this will serve …
Laura Lopez Gonzalez
JOHANNESBURG, Feb 2 2011 (IPS) – Delays in drug registration by the country s Medicines Control Council (MCC), contribute to depriving South African HIV patients of important fixed dose combination antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. But there are indications that the effects of the delays are being felt even farther afield.
In December 2010, South Africa announced a new, two-year tender for ARVs which halved drug costs for the national HIV treatment programme; The tender however failed to include many fixed dose ARV combinations, which although approved by bodies like the World Health Organization are not yet registered by the MCC for use in South Africa.
By combining multiple drugs into one, fixed dose combinations reduce the number of pills HIV patient…
Rousbeh Legatis interviews REINOU GROEN of Surgeons OverSeas
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 2011 (IPS) – Surgery saves the lives of millions of people around the world, but only a tiny percentage of them live in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where a shortage of skills, supplies and infrastructure can turn easily treatable accidents and illnesses into lifelong disabilities and even death.
Reinou Groen Credit: Courtesy of Surgeons OverSeas
The world s poorest receive only four percent of all major surgical operations worldwide, while 75 percent of surgeries …
Emilio Godoy*
MEXICO CITY, Apr 4 2011 (IPS) – Rather belatedly, Latin America is beginning to test products imported from Japan to check that they are not contaminated with radioactivity from the Fukushima nuclear power station that was severely damaged by the Mar. 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Authorities in Mexico and Brazil have begun to monitor foods and health supplies from the Asian country for radiation.
Japan is not a major food exporter, but monitoring is necessary because of the problem of exposure to radiation, Alejandro Calvillo, head of the Mexican organisation El Poder del Consumidor (Consumer Power), told IPS.
The National Commission for Nuclear Safety and Safeguards (CNSNS) and the Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks (COFEPRIS)…
WASHINGTON, May 5 2011 (IPS) – The Democratic People s Republic of Korea (DPRK) lived through a famine that killed, at conservative estimates, nearly a million people in the 1990s, and is now nearing the brink of a second food disaster, according to an extensive study conducted this year by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).
The Aid Sceptics
Not everyone is prepared to be so forgiving towards what many perceive to be an unyielding government in Pyongyang. In late February this year, the Washington Post reported that 15 years and two billion dollars worth of aid later, one in four pregnant mothers is undernourished, while one in three children is stunted.
Lack of transparency in the food distribution process, and a virtual absence of tangible ‘returns’ on aid, pr…
Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Jun 9 2011 (IPS) – If there s one thing positive that has come out of the violence in this part of Pakistan, it is that people have developed a culture of donating blood that helps save lives, say doctors in the northeastern city of Peshawar.
More now volunteer to donate blood. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.
Getting blood has become amazingly convenient, when it comes to saving the lives of victims of terrorism, says Dr Muhammad Hanif, a medical officer at the Khyber Teaching Hospital in Peshawar, the capital of Khyb…
Poindexter Sama and Jessica McDiarmid
FREETOWN, Jun 20 2011 (IPS) – There is a brief bustle and then a woman wails as the small body is wrapped in cloth and set on a cot by the door of the paediatric ward. Nurses in pristine white uniforms continue to pad quietly around the large room at Ola During Children s Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone s capital city.
Infants are crammed two or three to a bed, sometimes more. Since the introduction nearly 14 months ago of free health care for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five, the number of people coming to seek treatment has shot up. Staffing and equipment has not risen to match, leaving health workers struggling to deal with the influx.
Sierra Leone s ambitious plan to tackle one of the world s highes…
Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Jul 25 2011 (IPS) – We could enter the Guinness book of records for the longest running weekly sit- ins in the world, Nasser Farrah, from the Palestinian Prisoners Association, jokes dryly. Since 1995, Palestinian women from Beit Hanoun to Rafah have met every Monday outside the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) office in Gaza City, holding photos and posters of their imprisoned loved ones, calling on the ICRC to ensure the human rights of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel s 24 prisons and detention centres.
Jose Domingo Guariglia interviews MICHAEL RENNER, of Worldwatch Institute
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 26 2011 (IPS) – As the United Nations readies for a major international conference on sustainable development next June in Brazil, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are preparing to play a key role in the run-up to the summit meeting and are preparing a plan of action to be adopted by world leaders.
Michael Renner. Credit: Courtesy of Michael Renner
The Rio+20 conference will take place 20 years after the historic Earth Summit in Brazil in June 1992.
Asked ab…
Sujoy Dhar
BHOPAL, India, Oct 11 2011 (IPS) – Ajay Shrivastav from Bhopal, the central Indian city that witnessed one of the worst industrial disasters of the world in 1984 from a deadly gas leak, is an angry man seeking justice.
A year ago, Ajay learnt that his father Ramadhar Shrivastav, a victim of the toxic gas that had engulfed Bhopal in 1984, has been subjected to clinical trials in a hospital that was meant to treat the gas victims.
We were shocked. We are planning to move legally now against such unauthorised clinical trial, Ajay Shrivastav told IPS.
A Bhopal court last year sentenced eight former top officials of the Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide Corp (UCC) to two years imprisonment each for the 1984 gas leak that eventually killed about 20,000 …