Interview with Pedro Cahn, outgoing president of Int’l AIDS Society* – Tierramérica
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 6 2008 (IPS) – A greater commitment to universal access to anti-HIV therapies and to the defence of health workers in impoverished countries are two achievements noted by Argentine physician Pedro Cahn as president of the scientific society that organised the XVII International AIDS Conference.
Dr.…
Daniela Estrada
SANTIAGO, Jun 29 2009 (IPS) – As a woman of childbearing age, I pay more than double what a man my age pays for the same health plan, 27-year-old Carolina Leyton told IPS.
Women waiting for treatment at a health centre. Credit: Daniela Estrada/IPS
Leyton is a subscriber of one of Chile s private healthcare providers, known as ISAPREs (Instituciones de Salud Previsional), which set different premiums depending on the risk associated with the beneficiary.
Since socialist Preside…
Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 18 2011 (IPS) – One of the potential impacts of climate change that arouses most concern is an increase in diseases transmitted by tropical insects, like Chagas disease, Argentina s main endemic illness.
However, while they are aware of shifting climate zones, experts consider the biggest threat of expansion of Chagas disease to arise not from global warming, but from inadequate control of its transmission vectors (insect carriers), which have already been eliminated in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay.
Vectors capable of transmitting the disease are present in 19 of Argentina s 24 provinces, epidemiologist Sergio Sosa-Estani, head of the vector-borne disease unit at the Health Ministry, told IPS. In some areas, the vectors are under contro…
Aline Cunico
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 14 2011 (IPS) – According to a special series in the medical journal The Lancet presented in New York Wednesday at the U.N. children s agency UNICEF, over 2.6 million stillbirths occur worldwide annually, affecting mostly African and Asian women who lack proper access to health care and facilities.
We need to be more aware, Dr. Ruth Fretts, a stillbirth expert and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, told IPS. We need to review all stillbirths systematically so that we can develop strategies for prevention. Stillbirths are a great burden to women, and are life- changing events.
Fretts added that lack of awareness and health access, affecting mostly pregnant women in developing countries, hamper attempts to reduce stillbirth…
The UN will be commemorating World Water Day on Monday March 22.
In northern Ghana some 50% of people lack access to safe drinking water. Credit: UNDP Ghana
EAST SUSSEX, UK, Mar 20 2021 (IPS) – In the midst of a global pandemic, when the presence of water in our lives has never seemed more important, its future availability has also never been more uncertain.
Water scarcity is now such a threat that it is even possible to trade in ‘water futures’ joining commodities like gold and oil on Wall Street, with traders .
So, while farmers and pastoralists struggle to know when the next rainfall will come, and women and children walk for hours to collect wate…
Patients wait for their COVID-19 vaccination at a health centre in Kabale District, Uganda. More than 5.7 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally, but only 2% of them in Africa, says World Health Organization (WHO) chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Credit: UNICEF/Catherine Ntabadde
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 20 2021 (IPS) – The 21-month-long corona virus pandemic has triggered three new phrases in the UN lexicon: “vaccine famine, vaccine apartheid and vaccine nationalism”.
And the largest number of victims facing the triple threats are from developing countries, mostly in Africa, as reflected in grim statistics.
Dr Richard Mihigo, coordinator for…
Andrés Cañizález is a Venezuelan journalist and Ph.D. in Political Science
A teenage girl covers her face with her hands in front of a laptop computer, frightened by the news she reads about the pandemic. Photo: Dusko Miljanic/Unicef
CARACAS, Aug 6 2020 (IPS) – Every era brings its own buzzwords or catchphrases along with it. The term du jour is ‘pandemic’, namely ‘coronavirus’ and ‘COVID-19’; but alongside these words, speculation and forecasts over the post-pandemic world are flourishing. There is a proliferation of pieces and commentary on what our daily lives or the economy will be like once the epidemic is under control, that i…