Lameck Masina
BLANTYRE, Malawi, Jan 3 2011 (IPS) – Health rights activists in Malawi are expressing concern over the recent rejection of the country s proposal for close to six hundred million dollars to the Global Fund to fight HIV, tuberculosis and malaria between 2011 and 2016.
But the government maintains there is no need for concern. Executive Secretary for Malawi Global Fund Coordinating Committee Edith Mkawa told journalists last Tuesday in the capital Lilongwe that the country s proposal has been refused again.
The proposal focused heavily on tackling transmission of HIV from mother to child by providing lifelong HIV/AIDS treatment to all HIV-positive pregnant women. Malawi had hoped to scale up its ARVs roll-out from 287,000 to 537,000 by the end of the fundi…
Cléo Fatoorehchi
NEW YORK, Feb 18 2011 (IPS) – Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are seeking to eliminate the federal family planning programme and cut funding from Planned Parenthood, one of the country s leading providers of reproductive health care to low-income women.
On Friday afternoon, the House voted to bar Planned Parenthood from all federal funding. The issue will go before the Senate in about two weeks time, and could still be reversed.
This is the most dangerous legislative assault on women s health in our history, and it cannot go unanswered, said a statement by Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood.
Women s groups and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have denounced the move as jeopardising the lives of million…
Laura Lopez Gonzalez
JOHANNESBURG, Mar 16 2011 (IPS) – As donors retreat from funding HIV prevention and treatment, the vulnerability of national programmes reliant on external funding has become apparent. Without long-term sustainability, the lives of millions could be at risk.
Kenyan nurse preparing ARVs for a patient in Kenya: activists are calling on gover…
Kara Santos
MANILA, Apr 14 2011 (IPS) – In a country where an estimated 4,500 women die every year due to complications during childbirth, the enactment of a reproductive health (RH) policy is said to be a measure that could save lives.
Catholics attend mass outside the Quiapo Church in Manila. 80% of the Philippines is Catholic, …
Yazeed Kamaldien
SANA A, May 17 2011 (IPS) – An estimated 2,555 women in Yemen die annually during childbirth because they do not have access to proper health facilities or experienced medical professionals.
Most of these women live in rural areas of the Arab world s poorest and least developed country. The National Yemeni Midwives Association (NYMA) said at a seminar in the capital city Sana a this month that the country would require at least 20,000 midwives women who are trained to help other women give birth if it is to combat these preventable deaths.
The association s statistics show that at least 365 women in Yemen die for every 100,000 who give birth.
Suad Qasem, president of the NYMA, which was established in 2004, said that it wants to ensure that th…
Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Jun 15 2011 (IPS) – After a newspaper that Prudence* (16) used as sanitary wear fell from her while she played with friends at school, she left and never returned.
The impoverished A-student could not handle the teasing or embarrassment. It was not the first time the Nkonyeni High School pupil was embarrassed by her period. But this incident proved to be more than she could bear.
This student would also find herself in the uncomfortable position of having blood flowing down her legs because her periods tended to be very heavy, said Todvwa Mnisi, a teacher at the school.
Prudence was too embarrassed to go back to school and eventually married ending her studies.
We were very sad to lose her because she was a very bright child …
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 27 2011 (IPS) – Sixty percent of all global deaths are now caused by non- communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancer, diabetes and lung disease, according to a report by the U.N. Secretary-General s office.
This represents 35 million deaths a year. The British medical journal the Lancet that cases of diabetes, a disease that is debilitating, difficult to treat and associated with obesity and a sedentary lifestyle, have doubled in the last three decades.
Although NCDs like diabetes tend to be associated with developed nations, the also found the majority 28.1 million or 80 percent occur in low- to middle-income countries.
This trend has been relatively unnoticed but is now becoming a global epidemic. In the words of Dr. Cary Adams, CEO of the ,…
Lily Hough
WASHINGTON, Aug 2 2011 (IPS) – The Barack Obama administration promised Tuesday that the U.S. would not prosecute relief agencies for delivering aid to parts of Somalia controlled by the Islamist insurgent group al- Shabaab, despite concerns that unrestricted aid in the failed state would be diverted to the wrong hands.
We have issued new guidance to allow more flexibility to provide a wider range of aid to a large number of areas in need, a senior administration official said during a conference call Tuesday with reporters. We hope this guidance clarifies that aid workers who are partnering with us to help save lives under difficult and dangerous conditions are not in conflict with U.S. law and regulations that seek to limit resources flowing to al- Shabaab.
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WASHINGTON, Sep 8 2011 (IPS) – The fight against oil and gas giants is heating up in the U.S., with new waves of protest and civil disobedience springing up across the country.
Empty Threats Unraveled
“It is deeply disconcerting that the industry not only has a swarm of lobbyists here in Washington, as well as in all the state legislatures where decisions about drilling are made, they’ve also got multimillion dollar advertising campaigns pushing their agenda and commissioning think tanks to put out reports in support of the industry,” Mitch Jones of FWW told IPS.
Dangling potential economic destruction and mass job losses as a result of clean energy practices is an old industry tactic.
In 1997, while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was attempting to secure …
WASHINGTON, Oct 21 2011 (IPS) – If the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear a case on gene patents, observers say the resulting face-off between a large genetics testing company and a vocal coalition of breast cancer patient advocates – will have a massive impact because of what is at stake: valuable information about the human genome.
Structure of the BRCA1 protein. Credit: emw/creative commons
Last week, the (ACLU) announced they will ask the Supreme Court to rule on the gene diagnostics company Myriad Genetics patents on isolated BRCA-1 and BRCA-…