Paediatricians in Argentina are working to protect the environment in order to provide better child healthcare. Credit: Malena Bystrowicz/IPS
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 4 2013 (IPS) – A group of Argentine paediatricians has been combining work on environmental protection and child health for more than 10 years. It appears a basic principle to apply, but the task is turning out to be increasingly challenging and complex.
We can t clean up a river, or give a family a new house, but we can teach people to put chlorine in the water, Dr. Stella Maris Gil, the coordinator of the Environmental Paediatric Unit (UPA) at the Pedro de Elizalde Children s Hospital in the Co…
Residents of Clara Town, a low-income neighbourhood of Monrovia, Liberia, face sanitation challenges with the onset of the rainy season. Credit: Travis Lupick/IPS
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 19 2013 (IPS) – When the General Assembly unanimously adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) back in 2000, water and sanitation were reduced to a subtext never a stand-alone goal compared with poverty and hunger alleviation.
Now, as the United Nations begins the process of formulating a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for its post-2015 agenda, there is a campaign to underscore the importance of water and sanitation, so that the world body will get it r…
BUENOS AIRES, May 12 2013 (IPS) – Argentina is one of the countries in Latin America with the highest levels of vaccination coverage. But experts are concerned about the growing campaign by vaccine critics against immunisation.
Vaccines have saved as many lives as clean water. Risking not giving shots is like playing Russian roulette, Dr. Carlota Russ, secretary of the Argentine Paediatric Society’s Committee on Infectious Diseases, told IPS.
Russ said that in industrialised countries, immunisation coverage is in decline as the culture of vaccination weakens, creating a risk of re-emergence of diseases that have already been controlled, like measles.
Fortunately, in Argentina, the anti-vaccine movement is not strong, she said.
A woman collapses in front of a police barricade during one of the Occupy Gezi protests. Credit: Arzu Geybulla/IPS
ISTANBUL, Jul 13 2013 (IPS) – Among the many issues bringing protestors together at Gezi Park, the now-iconic site of struggle in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, is the demand for women’s liberation.
Coming from many walks of life and expressing a myriad of ideals and values, the women of the Occupy Gezi Movement have nevertheless voiced a collective desire: to fight the undercurrent of deeply entrenched patriarchal values and reclaim autonomy over their own bodies and lifestyles.
These demands are now coalescing around proposed legisl…
Sajja Bibi practically lives on the pavement across from the hospital so that she can have regular dialysis. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS
KARACHI, Pakistan, Aug 26 2013 (IPS) – Forty-year-old Sajja Bibi from Sukkur, 470 km from Pakistan’s port city of Karachi, has been camping on the pavement across from the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation for over two years now.
Every other day, she walks up to the 750-bed institute for dialysis, offered free of charge. A few hours later, she’s back on the pavement.
With her is a whole community, patients and families of patients with late-stage renal failure, undergoing regular dialysis and waiting endl…
Former child soliders in the DRC. Credit: Einberger/argum/EED/IPS
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 6 2013 (IPS) – Imagine an orphanage where over 300 children born out of rape have been abandoned because of the shame and stigma associated with sexual violence. Imagine a town where, in the last year, 11 infants between the ages of six months and one year, and 59 small children from one to three years old, have been raped.
What does the future of these children hold? The story of sexual violence in conflict is as old as war itself. It knows no boundaries location, ethnicity, religion, or age. We must be loud and clear: it will be prosecuted. It will be punished.
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A ferry boat on the Sesan River. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS.
RATANAKIRI PROVINCE, Cambodia, Dec 17 2013 (IPS) – “I prefer the dam to the fish,” says middle-aged farmer Ton Noun, when asked his opinion on a proposed 400 megawatt dam on Sesan river near his home in northeastern Cambodia. Then he chuckles and asks, “What fish?”
That’s because there are few fish in the brown, murky waters of the river, and he can buy them cheap from bordering Vietnam. On the other hand, electricity – which the dam promises – is costly.
“Electricity is expensive because the village doesn’t have it,” Ton tells IP…
The number of prisoners aged 55 and older nearly quadrupled between 1995 and 2010, marking a 218 percent increase in just 15 years. Credit: Bigstock
NEW YORK, Feb 26 2014 (IPS) – A nurse helps an old man up from his chair. Holding onto her arms, he steps blindly forward, trusting her to lead him to his spot at the lunch table.
One man breathes through a respirator. Another gropes on the nightstand for his dentures. Yet another calls out to a passing doctor that he cannot remember his own name.“I’m 69 years old. Without my cane I can’t stand. What do they expect me to do? Crawl through [the metal detector] on my hands and knees?”
This may soun…
The Rainbow Disability Theatre Group performs its play ‘The Child from Seaview’ at the Wan Smolbag Theatre in Vanuatu. Credit: Wan Smolbag
PORT VILA, Jun 16 2014 (IPS) – In the Pacific Island state of Vanuatu, 23 actors with disabilities, from youth to senior citizens, who have battled physical and social barriers all their lives, are now empowering themselves and others through socially engaged theatre.
Plays inspired by their personal experiences are impacting audiences in schools, urban communities and rural villages across this nation of 82 islands, home to more than 247,000 people, located west of Fiji.
“I am blind and th…
Syrian mother and child near Ma’arat Al-Numan, rebel-held Syria, in autumn 2013. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS
BEIRUT, Jul 19 2014 (IPS) – Gaunt, haggard Syrian children begging and selling gum have become a fixture in streets of the Lebanese capital; having fled the ongoing conflict, they continue to be stalked by its effects.
Most who make it across the Syria-Lebanon border live in informal settlements in extremely poor hygienic conditions, which for many means diarrhoeal diseases, malnutrition, and – for the most vulnerable – sometimes death.
By the end of Janua…