Orlando Matos
HAVANA, Apr 17 2006 (IPS) – A television series which reflects on and portrays sexual behaviours and touches on the question of AIDS has provoked unusual public controversy in Cuba.
Amanda, an uninformed, sexually precocious teenager under the strict control of her parents, becomes infected with HIV, the AIDS virus. The central character in one of the series episodes, her story drew a negative reaction from quite a number of viewers of the prime time show.
Josefa Rodríguez was more indignant about the programme showing youngsters who are virtually children sleeping together, than over its references to AIDS itself. It seems to offer an invitation to teenage sex, the 47-year-old Havana telephone company technician told IPS.
Rodríguez was not con…
Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Jun 6 2007 (IPS) – A new U.S. government report acknowledges that coca crops expanded last year in Colombia, despite the heavy herbicide spraying carried out under Plan Colombia, which has been loudly protested by neighbouring Ecuador for causing damages to human and animal health and food crops in border areas.
Credit: Acción Ecológica
Coca will never disappear, said a woman sitting in a bus ridden by this reporter from the Pacific port city of Buenaventura to Cali, in the western Colombian province of Valle del Cauca. The driver and passengers sitting nearby nodded.
Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 18 2008 (IPS) – The agriculture industry in Argentina is enjoying the boom in demand for soybeans and other commodities and the subsequent high prices, which are also fattening the state coffers. But the question of the unsafe handling of pesticides and fertilisers has basically been ignored amidst the collective euphoria.
According to the Secretariat of Agriculture, the latest harvest set a new record of nearly 95 million tons of grains, half of which were soybeans.
This year, the harvest should exceed 100 million tons, and the state expects to take in 7.5 billion dollars in tax revenue as a result.
Last year, farmers purchased more than 5,000 tractors, a similar number of sowing machines and 2,000 harvesting machines. But as…
Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 26 2009 (IPS) – Doctors at the forefront of the battle against the H1N1 influenza virus in Argentina point out that the number of cases is far larger than the official figures reflect. But they also stress that the mortality rate, as a proportion of the much higher number of cases, is lower than people assume.
The Health Ministry is still issuing a daily report on the number of cases of what is popularly known as swine flu, and the number of deaths. The latest statistics are 1,488 confirmed cases and 23 deaths, representing a mortality rate of 1.3 percent.
The media seize on these numbers with alarm, comparing them with the statistics from other countries.
As of 20:32 on Jun. 24 there are already 21 cases of H1N1 flu, said th…
PARIS, Oct 20 2009 (IPS) – The possibility that a vaccine could soon be developed to fight the deadly HIV virus has the scientific community brimming with hope and excitement, but there is also disagreement about how effective it could be in the global war against AIDS.
Michel Sidibé, executive director of the United Nations AIDS agency (UNAIDS), says the surprise announcement in Thailand last month of the first successful experimental test of an AIDS vaccine was a significant milestone despite some noise about how to interpret the data.
Speaking at the annual AIDS vaccine conference here Monday, Sidibé told more than a thousand scientists who had gathered from around the world that they should not lose sight of the big picture.
The efficacy results of the Thai …
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…
Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Dec 29 2010 (IPS) – As a peer educator at a local HIV/AIDS organisation, Ahmad (not his real name) has taken care to teach his own wife anything and everything he knows about the disease.
Intravenous drug users are the last in line to get support from government-run AIDS programme. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS
But there is something that Ahmad is hesitating to tell her, and it is a fact that is cruci…