Lisa Söderlindh
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 18 2006 (IPS) – A quarter century into the HIV/AIDS pandemic, researchers fear that a lack of preparedness for large-scale social changes, driven by factors like armed conflict and climate change, could lead to explosive new outbreaks affecting millions of people.
Since cases of a severe pneumonia affecting gay men were described for the first time in a U.S. public health report in June 1981, more than 65 million people have become infected with HIV and 25 million have died, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), which estimates the current number of people living with HIV at 37 to 45 million.
We should not accept living with this epidemic at the level it has reached, Paul DeLay, director of monitori…
SYDNEY, May 22 2006 (IPS) – Revelations of horrific levels of sexual abuse and violence suffered by women and children in Australia s aboriginal communities have surfaced, even as the fifth session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) is underway in New York.
A leaked confidential briefing paper by Nanette Rogers, government prosecutor in the Northern Territory, exposes how indigenous culture and close-knit kinship ties have helped create a blanket of silence over rampant violence against women and children.
But activists and people in authority are also blaming government inaction and neglect for a tragedy that has its roots in racist subjugation by European colonisers. Disruptive policies have included forcible separation of tens of thousand…
Moyiga Nduru
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 23 2006 (IPS) – South Africa is phasing out ageing and ill-maintained minibus taxis to pave the way for new, and hopefully safer, vehicles. Minibuses are a common means of transport in the country, where they serve between seven and nine million passengers a day, according to the Department of Transport.
Under our plan, 10,000 taxis will be scrapped by December 2006, Collin Msibi, a spokesman for the department, told IPS.
In all, 140,000 minibuses are to be taken off the roads within seven years, and replaced at an estimated cost of just over a billion dollars. The new vehicles will come in three sizes, with carrying capacities of nine, 17 and 35 passengers respectively according to transport minister Jeff Radebe.
We are on cou…
Adrián Reyes
MEXICO CITY, Aug 8 2006 (IPS) – Mexico has the highest proportion of people considered overweight or obese 20 percent of children and 70 percent of adults in the world, surpassed only by the United States.
We have to leave behind the idea that a chubby child is a healthy child, Gisela Anaya, with the non-governmental Mexican Diabetes Federation, told IPS.
Emilio Fernández, head of the independent Platícame (Talk to Me) Foundation of Children and Adults with Diabetes, told IPS that the weight gain among the population is the result of the drastic drop in consumption of fruit and vegetables over the last five years and the rise in consumption of junk food and fast food rich in carbohydrates and sugars.
Obesity is one of the factors that predisp…
Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Sep 9 2006 (IPS) – To be a health worker along Burma s eastern borders, home to the Karen and Karenni ethnic communities, is to court death, injury or imprisonment, say doctors working in the area.
Even midwives have not been spared. One in her mid-50s was arrested and tortured, they add.
Such abuse by Burma s military regime on health workers are only part of a grim picture in the border areas that have been laid waste by the junta s policy of crippling the health and food distribution systems where the ethnic minorities live.
This continuing abuse has created a humanitarian crisis that places the Karen and Karenni victims on par with, or even worse than, victims in war-ravaged African countries like Rwanda, Somalia and Sierra Le…
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Ragnarok: Monster World เป็นเกมที่นำมอนสเตอร์จาก Ragnarok มาพัฒนาเป็นเกมแนว RPG …
Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Oct 3 2006 (IPS) – Washington s embargo against Cuba also has an impact on the United States economy and prevents millions of U.S. citizens from benefiting from Cuban medical progress, according to a report released by the Cuban foreign ministry.
The text of the report will be presented at the United Nations General Assembly, which on Nov. 8 will be examining for the fifteenth consecutive year the need to end the embargo imposed by Washington on Havana more than four decades ago. The document states that because of the blockade regulations it has been impossible to begin clinical trials in the U.S. with TheraCIM, a Cuban pharmaceutical product for treating brain tumours in children.
TheraCIM is produced by the Molecular Immunology Centre, which …
Diógenes Pina
SANTO DOMINGO, Nov 9 2006 (IPS) – Early sexual initiation and a lack of prevention policies are sowing the seeds of AIDS proliferation, warns a UNICEF study carried out at locations straddling the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
Field surveys at Ouanaminthe (Wanament), a Haitian town 245 kilometres from Port-au-Prince, and Dajabón, 300 kilometres from Santo Domingo, found that 61.9 percent of those interviewed said they knew an HIV-carrier, 30.3 percent had a friend who was infected, and 14.6 percent had a close relative living with HIV.
The study by the United Nations Children s Fund (UNICEF) and the community organisation Catholic Relief Services also found that 93 percent of those interviewed had heard about AIDS and other sexually …
Sabina Zaccaro
ROME, Dec 7 2006 (IPS) – About half of the parliamentarians in Rwanda are women; many other African countries have more women in parliament than some western ones. It s taken some doing, as Gertrude Mongella knows and as she tells IPS in an interview.
When she was appointed Secretary-General for the fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, Gertrude Mongella already had a long political history. A graduate from the East Africa University College in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanznia, she has strongly supported advancement of women in the African continent in her 34-year career.
She was member of the East African Legislative Assembly in the seventies, minister of state in her country Tanzania ten years later, and Tanzanian high commissioner to India in …