PESHAWAR, Mar 4 2012 (IPS) – With no money to see a doctor, Gul Lakhta,50, had resigned himself to blindness when a ‘mobile hospital’ drove into his village in the Bajaur Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), on Pakistan’s rugged border with Afghanistan.
They operated on me the same day. Now, my eyesight is excellent, says Lakhta, a beneficiary of the Mobile Hospital Programme (MHP) started by the government in 2003 to provide healthcare to people in the war-torn areas of northern Pakistan.
After the United States-led coalition forces toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001 its leaders fled across the border to the FATA and adjacent areas, bringing with them their fundamentalist ideology and culture of violence.
Before lon…
FALLUJAH, Iraq, Apr 13 2012 (IPS) – At Fallujah hospital they cannot offer any statistics on children born with birth defects – there are just too many. Parents don’t want to talk. Families bury their newborn babies after they die without telling anyone, says hospital spokesman Nadim al-Hadidi. It’s all too shameful for them.
One among an unusually high number of children in Basra fighting leukaemia. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.
We recorded 672 cases in J…
May 18 2012 – Achieving the Millennium Development Goal of providing access to safe drinking water for its 160 million people by 2015 is a tough call for Bangladesh, which is caught between arsenic contaminated groundwater and diarrhoea-causing microbes in its ponds and rivers.
Queueing up for arsenic-free water in Bangladesh. Credit: NGO Forum
Yet, with a programme of using simple hand pumps and involving the women in affected communities, Bangladesh has managed to ensure that 98 percent of its rural population now has access to safe drinking water.
Despite widespread arseni…
Nurses taking to the streets demanding fair wages is now a common sight in many Indian cities. Credit: K.S. Harikrishnan/IPS
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India , Jun 28 2012 (IPS) – Nurses in India are up in arms against the deterioration of the nursing profession in the country, including unfair wages and the policies of private hospital managements.
Many exploited female nurses are leaving the country in droves, migrating to countries that offer better employment prospects and working conditions.
Those that remain are taking to the streets, demanding decent pay and the enforcement of labour regulations.
For two years now, thousands of nurses working i…
Fatoumata Yire Soro’s two-year-old daughter received treatment for malnourishment over the last two months. Credit: Robbie Corey-Boulet/IPS
KORHOGO, Cote d’Ivoire, Aug 14 2012 (IPS) – Salimata Coulibaly, director of a medical centre in the town of Korhogo in the northern Cote d’Ivoire region of Savanes, stood before a chart displaying before-and-after photos of local children – one taken when each child arrived at the centre, and one after he or she responded to treatment for malnutrition.
In recent weeks she has had no shortage of photos to take. The number of children brought to the centre for weighing is on the rise, having ballooned fro…
TOKYO, Oct 1 2012 (IPS) – According to popular belief, the world’s rapidly ageing societies face the risk of poverty, dementia and loneliness. But not necessarily so, says a United Nations publication unveiled in Japan Monday. Better management by governments can support a better life for the elderly, and lead them to becoming important contributors to society, it says.
The report ‘’ published by the United Nations Population Fund with HelpAge International, a leading non-governmental organisation, points out that ageing can be a cause for celebration if the elderly enjoy economic and social security.
“Longevity is a triumph of development,” Dr Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund told IPS. The elderly can make a social…
Aged women sitting in front of an old age home in Kanyakumari district in Tamil Nadu. Credit: K. S. Harikrishnan/IPS
NEW/DELHI/THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, Nov 9 2012 (IPS) – At midnight on Oct. 12, 91-year-old George Puthenveettil, a widower living in Kalanjur village in the Pathanamthita district of the southern Indian state of Kerala, was brutally tortured and ousted from his own house by his only son for “not earning any money”.
The nonagenarian wandered the streets of his village for hours before he reached a shelter in Pathanapuram with the help of neighbours. Police said the son had often beaten and harassed the old man, who was financially dependent on his s…
NEW YORK, Mar 8 2013 (IPS) – Peter “Pete” Seeger is a 93-year old U.S. folk legend who resides near Wappingers Falls in southern New York. He can be spotted occasionally on the traffic-heavy Route 9, flanked by world peace signs and armed with a banjo.
Activists behind a New York Police Department vehicle at an anti-frac…
The Agency Headquarters Hospital (AHH) in Bajaur Agency, shortly after a Taliban suicide bomb attack. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
PESHAWAR, May 1 2013 (IPS) – Akbar Shah was sitting with his sick wife in the gynaecology ward of the Agency Headquarters Hospital in Bajaur Agency, a division of northern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), when a bomb ripped through the facility, scattering patients, doctors and medical supplies.
“We immediately rushed my wife to Peshawar (capital of the neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province) because the doctors, paramedics and nurses were panicked and unable to look after patients,” Shah told IPS.
Hours lat…
UNICEF estimates that 3.5 million children in Pakistan suffer from acute malnutrition. The EU is helping the government to cut down the malnourishment rate by 25 percent by the year 2015. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
WASHINGTON, May 29 2013 (IPS) – In addition to the serious health problems it causes, child malnutrition is costing the global economy tens of billions of dollars a year by depriving its victims of the ability to learn basic skills, according to a released Tuesday by Save the Children (STC).
Based on a multi-year study in four countries, the 23-page report found that chronically malnourished children – about one of every four children born today a…