Ebrima Sillah
NOUAKCHOTT, Aug 3 2009 (IPS) – Campaigners against HIV/AIDS in Mauritania face an uphill task to put their messages across, especially those that deal with safer sex and condom use. Campaigners have to cut corners in order to avoid angering the country s powerful religious clerics.
AIDS campaigner Correa Mint Sidi has been publicly condemned in her community for her work. Credit: Ebrima Sillah/IPS
With a pr…
Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Aug 24 2009 (IPS) – Before, Zimbabwean families would take their ill relatives to rural clinics where medication was readily available and payment plans lenient. But now they are taking them there to die.
Millions of Zimbabweans already have no access to basic health care, and the health services have been in decline over a number of years. But the three-week strike by doctors has only magnified their dire circumstances. The situation has forced many families to make these impossible life and death decisions about their loved ones.
In Bulawayo desperate patients go to hospital only to be attended to by trainee nurses. Already life-saving machines have stopped working and the intensive care units have become nothing but empty shells.<…
NEW YORK, Oct 1 2009 (IPS) – Pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline hold the future welfare of poor people living with HIV/AIDS in their hands, argues the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders, which is urging the companies to release their patents on specific HIV drugs into a collective pool that will increase access and affordability to treatment in developing countries.
Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF), has launched a new e-mail campaign to pressure pharmaceutical companies to share their patent rights of certain antiretroviral HIV/AIDS drugs.
Ideally, the patents held by different companies on specific HIV drugs would be made available to other companies for both production and development. The companies that own t…
José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Oct 17 2009 (IPS) – The Nicaraguan Red Cross is conducting an awareness-raising campaign to increase voluntary blood donations and meet hospital demand, in order to compensate for changes in blood collection practices and address a severe health crisis caused by outbreaks of dengue fever, pneumonia and H1N1 influenza.
According to the director of the Red Cross National Blood Centre, René Berríos, blood reserves began to wane in July following changes in blood collection practices. Under the old system, in place since the 1970s, patients undergoing surgery or in need of transfusions were required to have relatives donate a certain amount of blood.
The family members who donated blood would be given vouchers by the Red Cross, to be presented…
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 16 2009 (IPS) – As the World Food Security Summit got under way in Rome Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) disclosed that nearly one in six U.S. households went hungry at some time during 2008, the highest level since it began monitoring food security levels in 1995.
Altogether, 14.6 percent of households, or some 49 million people, had difficulty putting enough food on the table at times during the year , according to the report, Household Food Security in the United States, 2008 .
That marked a sharp increase from the 11.1 percent of households, or 36.2 million people, who found themselves in similar straits during 2007, according to the report whose lead author predicted that the percentage was likely to be higher in 2009 due…
Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas, Dec 7 2009 (IPS) – Kernan Manion, a psychiatrist who was hired last January to treat Marines returning from war who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other acute mental health problems borne from their deployments, fears more soldier-on-soldier violence without radical changes in the current soldier health care system.
Working for a personnel-recruiting company which was contracted by the Defence Department at Camp Lejeune, Manion became alarmed at the military s inability to give sufficient treatment to returning soldiers. He was also concerned by their reports of outright abuse meted out by some commanders against lower-ranking soldiers who sought help.
Manion told IPS that last April two Marines urgently sought his help…
Rachel Pratt and Garry Pierre-Pierre*
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 18 2010 (IPS) – Marjorie Louis was sitting in her kitchen eating dinner when she felt the house shaking, but she didn t get up.
With many of the city s structures left in ruins, including the presidential palace (background), residents pitch tents for tempo…