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 …

Paul Carlucci and Henrietta Abayie

Buruli ulcer is a tropical disease reported in about 30 countries, including Ghana, where doctors are this year predicting about 1,000 cases. Credit: Paul Carlucci/IPS

GREATAER ACCRA WEST DISTRICT, Ghana, Nov 24 2011 (IPS) – For the past 10 years, Buruli ulcer has been eating Benjamin Essel s leg. The skin above his ankle is totally gone, and a swollen, pulpy and reddish wound rises almost up to his knee and wraps around his calf. Even still, this is an improvement over recent yea…

BUENOS AIRES, Jan 24 2012 (IPS) – Thousands of people in the northwest Argentine province of La Rioja are mobilising to stop an open-cast gold mining project in the Nevados de Famatina, a snowy peak that is the semi-arid area s sole source of drinking water.
La Rioja is a dry province and we have just enough clean water to live on, but not to share with miners, one of the protesters, Héctor Artuso, a resident from the small town of Villa Pituil, in the Famatina area, told IPS.

Residents of Famatina and neighbouring Chilecito have set up a partial roadblock at Alto Carrizal, a stop located 4,000 metres above sea level on a gravel road leading up to the highest point of this mountain chain, Cerro General Belgrano (better known as Nevados de Famatina), which stands at 6,250 m…

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…