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…

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…

Mitch Moxley

BEIJING, Feb 16 2011 (IPS) – Five years ago China pledged to ban smoking in all indoor public places by January of this year. That promise remains unfulfilled and is today symbolic of the lack of progress made in the fight against tobacco use in China, where up to a million people die of smoking-related complications each year.

Smoking is becoming a serious killer in China. Credit: Mitch Moxley

More than half of Chinese men smoke, and a total of 301 million adults currently use tobacco, according to a study by China s Cen…

Kanya D’Almeida

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 15 2011 (IPS) – Day five of Japan s post-earthquake, post-tsunami life dawned dismally Tuesday, with soaring radiation levels from the Fukushima Daiichi power plants and a relentlessly rising death toll in the four worst-affected prefectures.

The U.S. Navy is delivering supplies and conducting search and rescue operations in mainland Japan. Credit: U…

WASHINGTON, Apr 13 2011 (IPS) – While the curtain was being raised Tuesday on a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) initiative to pour one billion dollars of federal funding into the Partnerships for Patients Act – a new project designed to save thousands of lives and millions of dollars – the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) held a media briefing here simultaneously presenting studies from their theme issue on Infectious Diseases and Immunology .
A day prior to the release of JAMA s Apr. 13 issue, which addresses an expansive array of diseases and medical and biological immunity, top-dogs from the medical community gathered here to share endeavours at combating the global proliferation of various diseases.

Christian Liendhart, a senior …

Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, May 13 2011 (IPS) – In spite of the potential risks posed by unwanted or uncontrolled radioactive materials, Mexico lacks comprehensive mechanisms to keep track of these orphan sources, originally used in medicine or industry, and to prevent them going astray.
One example of the problem is a sealed unit of Cobalt-60, a substance dangerous to the environment and to human health, inside a Picker 3000 radiotherapy machine, that is no longer in use and was found in the northern town of Ciudad Juárez, on the U.S. border, IPS learned.

The material was located and removed as part of a programme for recovering lost or obsolete orphan sources, implemented by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The IAEA contracted a U.S…

Naimul Haq

DHAKA, Jun 15 2011 (IPS) – The ship breaking companies of Bangladesh continue to import highly toxic foreign vessels despite a two-year-old ban, and are also defying a court order to ensure workers safety and implement environmentally sound practices, a group of lawyers says.

At a shipbreaking yard. Credit: Mahmud/map

The lawyers are blaming state regulators including the Department of Environment and the Ministries of Shipping and Labour for failing to protect coastal ecosystems and to monitor these companies compliance with safety precautions.

We still have evid…