A young mother attends a training session on how to prepare ready-to-use therapeutic food with local and affordable ingredients. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS
DHAKA, Mar 20 2013 (IPS) – When nine-month-old Borsha was admitted to the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh last January, she was on the verge of death.
Suffering from a condition called severe acute malnutrition (SAM), which too many people in this South Asian country of 150 million are familiar with, Borsha was dangerously underweight.
Her 26-year-old mother, who had traveled 30 kilometres from her…
Shaheen Begum receives skills training at the PPC paraplegic centre in Hayatabad in northern Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
PESHAWAR, May 13 2013 (IPS) – Gul Shada thought it was the end of the road for her when she and her husband met with a road accident last year in the Nowshera district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of the four provinces of Pakistan. Not only did the mishap leave Shada widowed at the relatively young age of 37, she also sustained an injury to her back that immobilised her.
It was then that she came to the country’s sole paraplegic centre (PPC) at Hayatabad, to the southwest of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. And it was here…
Medical services are increasingly difficult to provide in Syria. Above, a field hospital. Credit: FreedomHouse/CC by 2.0
DAMASCUS, Jun 5 2013 (IPS) – It was nine in the morning when the shell landed in front of nine-year-old Hella al-Abtah s house in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus. Hella survived the initial blast but was critically wounded in the head, and her father rushed her to the Palestine Hospital, blood pouring from the laceration.
Doctors at the hospital managed to stabilise Hella, but the relief was short-lived. Because of a chronic shortage of critical medical supplies and frequent power cuts, they could not complete even routine pr…
Sixteen-year-old Parul, hailing from Dhaka’s Batara slum, is paid about 15 dollars a month for her work in a garment factory. Also in the picture are her younger brothers and a cousin. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS
GENEVA, Jul 13 2013 (IPS) – The decisions of the United States and the European Union to demand implementation of controversial labour standards in Bangladesh following the Sawa industrial tragedy pose a serious threat to the rule-based global trading system, says Dr Supachai Panitchpakdi, Secretary-General for United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
“Labour rights and standards are something very sensitive to all developing and least developed countri…
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 27 2013 (IPS) – When the United Nations commemorates the International Day Against Nuclear Tests later this week, the lingering question in the minds of most anti-nuclear activists is whether or not the existing moratorium on testing will continue to be honoured or occasionally violated with impunity.
John Loretz, programme director at International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, told IPS that since the 1990s the moratorium has been honoured by most states with nuclear weapons.
The exceptions, he pointed out, have been India and Pakistan, both of which tested nuclear weapons in 1998, but have not done so since then, and North Korea, which has conducted three very small tests since 2006.
When Pyongyang conducted its third test la…
A health worker explains the sexual transmission of infections at the family planning clinic in Yopougon. ARV shortages and long waits discourage women from starting or staying on treatment. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS
ABIDJAN, Côte d’Ivoire, Nov 8 2013 (IPS) – At the Cocody-Anono community health centre, south-east of the Ivorian economic capital of Abidjan, Bertine Bahi* regularly attends awareness sessions on Preventing Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT) for women living with HIV.
Bahi tested positive in her third month of pregnancy. In October, the 32-year-old was five months pregnant and still had not revealed her HIV status to her husband.
“Despi…
Zambian trader Dorothy Chisa sells caterpillars, a popular high-protein delicacy in the southern African country. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS
LUSAKA, Dec 17 2013 (IPS) – It is known as the land of copper to the outside world, but there’s another c-word that does a roaring trade in Zambia, albeit locally caterpillars.
On a street corner in the capital Lusaka on a scorching hot day, Dorothy Chisa, 49, is selling the insects, a popular high-protein delicacy in the southern African country. They come raw in different sized pots starting at five Zambian Kwacha (less than one dollar).”They come from other countries like Malawi, Zimbabwe, even South Africa to buy [the cat…
A man and his daughter return to Bor town, Jonglei state after the fierce fighting in the state and across the country largely ended in January. Credit: Charlton Doki/IPS
JUBA, Feb 27 2014 (IPS) – Gatmai Deng lost three family members in the violence that erupted in South Sudan on Dec. 15 and lasted until the end of January. And he blames their deaths on the government’s failure to use the country’s vast oil revenues to create a better life for its almost 11 million people.
When the country gained independence from Sudan in 2011, many hoped that their new government would provide them with the services that successive Sudanese governments had denied the South Su…
Naz Bibi is awaiting treatment for fistula at the Koohi Goth Women’s Hospital in Pakistan. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS
KARACHI, Jun 17 2014 (IPS) – The word on the street was that if there were one place on earth that could treat Mohammad Lalu’s wife, it would be the Koohi Goth Women’s Hospital in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi.
The 50-year-old stone crusher hailing from the remote village of Dera Bugti in the southwest Balochistan province had spent 30 years searching for a facility that would treat his wife, Naz Bibi, who suffers from obstetric fistula.
Sitting upright on a plastic sheet draped over one of the hospital beds, Bibi told IPS, It took us t…
Doctors examine internally displaced children from North Waziristan Agency at a free medical clinic in Bannu, a district of Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jul 21 2014 (IPS) – Some fled on foot, others boarded trucks along with luggage, rations and cattle. Many were separated from families, or collapsed from exhaustion along the way. They don’t know where their next meal will come from, or how they will provide for their children.
In the vast refugee camps of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, civilians who fled the Pakistan Army’s military offensive against the Taliban in the country’s no…