Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE , Feb 24 2010 (IPS) – Every Tuesday you will find 70-year-old Precious Dlamini under a tree, weighing children and babies from her local community as she monitors their health and nutrition.
Most of Swaziland s caregivers have no formal training. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS
Though she may not have any official qualifications to do so, Dlamini is a retired teacher, she devotes much of her time to caring for the orphaned children in her community and educating people about a health…
Wambi Michael
ARUSHA, Tanzania, Apr 1 2010 (IPS) – East African countries risk not attaining the millennium development goal (MDG) on universal treatment of people living with HIV and AIDS, malaria and other diseases if the region s parliament adopts the anti-counterfeits policy and bill currently under consideration.
Civil society representatives, government officials and intellectual property experts warn that the region would not meet MDG six if it adopted the proposed policy and bill as they would block the production and importation of generic medicines used by healthcare services to treat diseases. The countries affected are Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Kenya.
The draft bill and policy could erode recent gains in the scaling up treatment of people livin…
Dr Kone Vanormelingen, UNICEF representative in Angola, believes good progress is being made in the country s fight against the disease, which is financed in partnership with the Angolan government and ministry of health.
He said Angolan malaria statistics were unreliable, especially because as services have improved, so has reporting. But through monitoring indicators such as distribution of bed nets and medication, pre-emptive treatment of pregnant women and indoor residual spraying, a positive pattern was emerging.
International evidence has shown that with 80 percent coverage with mosquito nets and treatment of cases with combination therapy, then morbidity (number of cases) is reduced by 50 percent and mortality by 20 percent, he explained.
Dr Vanormelingen…
Adrianne Appel* – IPS/IFEJ
BOSTON, Jun 13 2010 (IPS) – A radical, underground movement is growing in the suburbs of the United States.
Homeowners, corporations and schools are catching on to the idea of creating a wild space where nature can thrive. Credit: Adrianne Appel/IPS
From coast to coast, eco-concerned homeowners are ripping out their manicured, chemically-treated lawns and replaci…
Silvana Silveira
MONTEVIDEO, Jul 12 2010 (IPS) – The incidence of cardiovascular, respiratory and water-borne diseases is rising in Uruguay in tandem with climate change, while dengue fever and malaria lurk at the country s borders. Higher temperatures are encouraging the presence of insect vectors carrying diseases that were eradicated decades ago, experts say.
Increasingly frequent spells of extreme weather particularly affect the health of the poorest, who live in overcrowded conditions in precarious dwellings lacking sanitation, in the shantytowns that have sprung up at an exponential rate since the 1990s in the Montevideo metropolitan area. Many of them are on low-lying land exposed to flooding.
Diarrhoea, hepatitis A and leptospirosis are some of the most common…
Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Aug 4 2010 (IPS) – We swam the whole day to get hold of the elderly and women swept away by floodwaters, recalled 27-year-old Shahid Ali of Charsadda district, one of the areas in north-western Pakistan badly hit by devastating monsoon rains.
We five local swimmers saved eighteen persons, including eight women and six children, he said, relating just one of many stories of how communities are desperately trying to cope with one of Pakistan s worst natural disasters in recent memory.
While flooding is common in Pakistan during the monsoon season, the volume of rainfall has hit up to 300 millimetres in some areas, including in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where Charsadda district is located. This was the highest amount of rainfall recorded in …
Diana Mendoza
MANILA, Sep 2 2010 (IPS) – I felt scared. When I looked around, all the mothers had finished giving birth, while I was still there. The blood that flowed from me had already dried and caked onto my body, Lisa, a 19-year-old married mother of three, says, recounting her experience in post-abortion care at a public hospital here in the Philippine capital.
Lisa was haemorrhaging when she was rushed to the Gat Andres Bonifacio Memorial Medical Centre hospital, a week after suffering high fever, severe pain and bleeding as a result of her attempt to induce abortion by drinking brandy and vino de quina, a rice wine believed to induce post- partum bleeding.
Lisa was one of the Filipino women cited in Forsaken Lives: The Harmful Impact of the Philippine Criminal…
Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Sep 23 2010 (IPS) – More bottled water is consumed per capita in Mexico than in any other country in the world, according to a U.S. consultancy a fact that alarms non-governmental organisations because it highlights the lack of access to safe tap water.
Organised civil society also holds bottling companies directly responsible for the dependence on bottled water pointed out by the Beverage Marketing Corporation, a leading research, consulting and financial services firm dedicated to the global beverage industry
Annual per person consumption of bottled water in Mexico is 234 litres, compared to 110 litres in the United States.
A more conservative estimate by Mexico s National Institute of Statistics and Geography indicates that in 2008…
MAUN, Botswana, Oct 16 2010 (IPS) – Despite early warnings about higher-than-usual flooding of the Okavango Delta in 2010, homes, fields, latrines and boreholes in the delta were flooded.
Beginning in May, gradually rising waters destroyed crops, disrupted the water supply and sanitation facilities, threatening public health with increased incidence of malaria and diarrhoea.
The flooding marks a return to high water levels last seen thirty or forty years ago, and even with advance notice, local government’s disaster management strategy proved inadequate to the task.
Dr Piotr Wolski, Associate Professor at the Okavango Research Institute (ORI) of the University of Botswana in Maun, who is an expert in hydrology, says he warned government already in April of the ris…
Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Nov 18 2010 (IPS) – Two initiatives of the administration of President Mauricio Funes in El Salvador, aimed at increasing competition in the pharmaceutical industry in order to bring down the cost of medicines, are being fought by the opposition in Congress.
Lawmakers from the rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which governed El Salvador from 1989 to 2009, presented a draft resolution to modify article 14 of the Health Code, to make it clear that the Health Ministry and the Salvadoran Institute of Social Security (ISSS) must purchase only medicines that are registered in the country.
In October, the Health Ministry invited tenders from national and international companies for the procurement of 27 million dollars worth of me…