Arsène Séverin

BRAZZAVILLE, Aug 26 2010 (IPS) – I came here out of curiosity, but I ended up taking an AIDS test. I have the results, Gerard, 30 years old, told IPS. He adds, right before leaving: The results are negative.
My brother and I knew that the van was coming here and we came as volunteers, says Judith, one of the few women in the ranks of those who came to be in Kinsoundi, a neighbourhood in south Brazzaville, the Congolese capital.

We have already done over 50 tests, and there s still a crowd waiting, Dr. Wilfrid Hervé Poaty pointed out to IPS. Hervé manages the mobile screening unit, a van purchased in December 2009 by the National Council Against AIDS (known by its French acronym, CNLS) in Congo.

Each of the van s appearances in public plac…

TSHWANE, South Africa, Sep 17 2010 (IPS) – Without contributions from well wishers and government grants of between 68 and 104 dollars per month per child, the House of Mother and Child in Ennerdale, south of Johannesburg, would barely be able to provide for the 18 vulnerable children who call the place home.
Ear to the ground: MP3s on MDGs
, says development economist John Rook.
Brian Moonga takes a look at .
, reports Grant Fuller.
Lansana Fofana reports on .
Eunice Wanjiru speaks to women in rural Rwanda about .
Mustapha Muhammad considers the practice of .
, says continent’s Millennium Campaign chief
(To listen to more IPS Africa audio, .)
The safe house is home to 18 orphans, of which seven are AIDS orphans, while others are surviv…

Peter Boaz

WASHINGTON, Oct 11 2010 (IPS) – With the number of hungry people growing to more than a billion last year, the world is nowhere near reaching the objectives outlined in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), according to the latest Global Hunger Index (GHI) released Monday.
The first MDG to halve the proportion of hungry people between 1990 and 2015 is an unlikely hope, says the 2010 GHI report.

Though the percentage of undernourished people fell from 20 percent in 1990-92 to 16 percent in 2004-06, recent global events have reversed that progress. The widespread economic recession and lingering effects of the 2007-08 global food crisis saw the number of undernourished people surpass one billion in 2009.

The GHI, a multidimensional measure of globa…

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 11 2010 (IPS) – One of the world s biggest health threats is also one of the least recognised more than 100 million people who literally breathe and eat toxic pollutants like lead, mercury, chromium every day, according to the first-ever detailed assessment.

Kids playing in contaminated tannery scraps. Credit: Courtesy of the Blacksmith Institute

By contrast, global attention and billions of dollars are focused on AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, which affect comparable nu…

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…