Kathryn Strachan
JOHANNESBURG, Apr 29 2008 (IPS) – Each psychiatric patient leaving Tower Hospital in the Eastern Cape Province under a new project to integrate patients into the community is sent home with two piglets. While at the hospital, patients are trained to raise pigs, the hope being that they will use the piglets for breeding to develop a sustainable source of income once discharged.
But in following up with these patients at their homes in the surrounding hills and villages there is not a single pig to be found. They have all been eaten or stolen, says Tshedi Tshabalala, who runs the local community rehabilitation centre. And sometimes there is no food for the pigs.
The fate of the piglets highlights the challenges in transforming South Africa s mental hea…
Kathryn Strachan
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 6 2008 (IPS) – There is barely a path leading down the steep incline and through the dense bush to the Mabuyakhulu homestead. It would be easy to pass by without finding 13 year old Zanele* and her eight year old sister Andiswa who stay there on their own.
Their father died long ago and their mother is in hospital dying of AIDS. The two girls have been left completely alone to fend for themselves.
Their mother, Hlengiwe, is at the nearby Mosvold Hospital in Ingwavuma, situated in the far northern corner of KwaZulu Natal on the border of Swaziland, and she does not know what will happen to her children when she is gone.
Zanele has been fetching water and cleaning the house while Andiswa builds a playhouse out of stones. Earlie…
Ramesh Jaura
TOYAKO, Japan, Jul 8 2008 (IPS) – Three key documents on African development, food security, and corruption emerging Tuesday from the summit of major industrial nations leaders seem to have taken non-governmental organisations (NGOs) by surprise in delivering more than expected, even if they did not please all.
In a document titled Development and Africa the G8 countries (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, Canada and the United States) firmly committed (themselves) to working to fulfil their pledges on official development assistance (ODA) made at Gleneagles (three years ago), and reaffirmed at Heiligendamm, including increasing, compared to 2004, with other donors, ODA to Africa by 25 billion dollars a year by 2010.
And they went a step fur…
Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 5 2008 (IPS) – Developing countries are in need of large sums of money to fight diseases like HIV/AIDS, but international aid will not entirely cover their needs.
An example of the financial demand is the application by Latin American and Caribbean countries for 600 million dollars, submitted to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria during its round eight call for proposals, which ended Jul. 1. This is three times the amount requested in 2007, the Global Fund said in a press release.
This is a historic amount, when compared with recent applications, Michel Kazatchkine, the executive director of the Global Fund, told IPS at the 17th International AIDS Conference which opened Sunday in the Mexican capital.
Between…
Arkan Hamed and Dahr Jamail
BAGHDAD, Sep 25 2008 (IPS) – Not even the elevators work now at Baghdad Medical City, built once as the centre for some of the best medical care.
One of the ten elevators still does, and the priority for this is patients who have lost their legs and there are many of them. The rest, the doctors, patients and students at the four specialised teaching hospitals within the building complex, just take the stairs, sometimes to the 18th floor.
This is in a city that had been given dreams of great development five years back, around the time of the U.S.-led invasion. And much of the corporate-led media in the U.S. and Europe still insists that the situation in Baghdad has improved .
The improvement that such media sees, no one in Iraq does…
Danstan Kaunda
LUSAKA, Nov 15 2008 (IPS) – In an attempt to drastically reduce child mortality rates and boost maternal health, the Zambian government last year allocated a substantial budget to the public health sector. This move has resulted in a notable drop in child deaths, researchers say.
However, most progress has taken place in Zambia s cities, while in rural areas health service provision has improved little.
In its 2007/2008 national budget, the Zambian health department received the largest share 11.5 percent of the total national budget. The money has been used to scale up services in public health care sector, with focus on boosting paediatric care.
In Zambia, the main causes for high infant and child mortality are diarrhoea, malnutrition, malaria…
JOHANNESBURG, Jan 10 2009 (IPS) – The latest UNAIDS Report estimated that 33 million people around the globe are living with HIV; 22 million in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. Around 2.7 million new HIV infections occurred worldwide in 2007. However, encouraging new data suggests there have been significant gains in preventing new infections in several African countries with high prevalence rates.
According to the report, changes in sexual behaviour in Rwanda and Zimbabwe have led to a decline in the number of new HIV infections, while young people in countries such as Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Uganda and Zambia are waiting longer to have sexual intercourse.
There is a new emphasis amongst AIDS campaigners on knowing your epidemic , that is to say analysing the local…
Kristin Palitza
ROME, Feb 24 2009 (IPS) – Almost five million children under the age of five die of malnutrition every year in the developing world. Food aid which mainly contains nutrient-poor carbohydrates does little to address the absence of a diverse diet that would prevent the condition.
Food aid: meeting nutritional needs in the South, or disposing of subsidised grain from the North? Credit:…
Servaas van den Bosch
WINDHOEK, Apr 1 2009 (IPS) – Tax relief for lower income groups in Namibia should not conceal that the 2009/10 budget falls short in addressing structural problems in the economy, civil society organisations have charged.
A nurse in Katutura TB hospital in Windhoek…
Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 30 2009 (IPS) – Asia has long been touted as the world s largest and most populous continent with over 4.1 billion people, accounting for more than 60 percent of the global population.
But according to the recently-released Statistical Yearbook for Asia and the Pacific, fertility rates in the region have fallen below replacement level in 16 countries, including China (the world s most populous nation) Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Still, a number of countries have fertility rates above 3.0 children per woman, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India (the world s second most populous nation) Laos, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Tajikistan and Timor-Leste.
Since 2000, the region s annual population growth has fallen to 1…