JOHANNESBURG, Sep 17 2010 (IPS) – With five years left till the Millennium Development Goals 2015 deadline, civil society groups say South Africa has made progress on some goals but regressed on others.

Pal Mfunzana is one of millions of South Africans with reasons to be sceptical of the govt s claims it will meet all 8 MDGs on schedule Credit: Chris Stein/IPS

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Dingaan Mithi

LILONGWE, Oct 11 2010 (IPS) – For HIV-positive Tereza Chatsilizika, the monthly cash grant of 10 dollars she receives means that she can educate her disabled daughters and put food on the table.
Chatsilizika lost her husband in 2000 to an HIV-related illness, only to be diagnosed with HIV a few years later. Since then she has struggled to look after her two daughters, Aida, 14, and Eneless 12. Both girls are suspected of having contracted polio and as a result cannot walk. And because of her ill health, Chatsilizika was unable to work and support her family.

Both of my children were not able to go to school and there was very little food on the plate, says Chatsilizika of life before receiving the grant. But when a social cash transfer programme was pil…

Christi van der Westhuizen

ACCRA, Nov 12 2010 (IPS) – The resurgence in religious fundamentalism and the inordinate influence of certain church leaders over public health policy present major obstacles to the prevention of needless deaths and injuries of women from unsafe abortion on the African continent.

The growth of evangelical religion is reflected in ubiquitious religious imagery and texts. Credit: Christi va…

Timothy Spence

SEIBERSDORF, Austria, Dec 17 2010 (IPS) – After successfully suppressing scourges of fruit, tsetse and screwworm flies in the Americas, researchers are exploring whether the same sterilised insect technique can be used to control malaria, which kills some one million people every year, many of them in Africa.

Malaria, the Silent Killer in Africa Credit: John Robinson/IPS

In the 1950s, scientists searching for ways to eradicate invasive insects that attacked fruits, vegetables and farm animals began using bursts of radiation to re…

Ignatius Banda

BULAWAYO, Feb 2 2011 (IPS) – The southern Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo has not been spared the heavy rains that have fallen across Southern Africa; the water is welcome in this semi-arid part of the country, but the coming of the rainy season has provoked fresh memories of the 2008 cholera epidemic.
The city s water and sewage infrastructure is still in poor condition. Though Bulawayo mayor Thaba Moyo insists the frequently brown water from the city s taps is safe to drink, many Bulawayo residents are falling back on their own resources to protect themselves against waterborne diseases.

Sikhulekile Banda, who lives in Tshabalala, a crowded low-income township, uses makeshift sand filters for both the rainwater she harvests and the brown water she gets sp…

Pavol Stracansky

BELGRADE, Mar 13 2011 (IPS) – Russia and the Ukraine have been warned they are lagging behind the rest of the former Soviet bloc in introducing a simple and inexpensive public health measure that has curbed the incidence of mental disabilities among children across the region.
UNICEF says that the two countries, whose populations are the largest in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS, a grouping of ex-Soviet states) region, are using spurious arguments rooted in business concerns to resist introducing mandatory laws making all edible salt iodised and helping prevent mental retardation in children.

Anatoly Karpov, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador who has worked extensively in former Soviet Union countries to…

Pavol Stracansky

BEIRUT, Apr 5 2011 (IPS) – A pioneering drug substitution programme in conflict-wracked Afghanistan has been hailed as a resounding success as local doctors and international health organisations battle soaring heroin addiction rates and an HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Doctors on the programme, which gives patients controlled doses of methadone to help them control their heroin addiction, say its results show the benefit harm reduction treatment can have in tackling the spread of blood-borne diseases among injecting drug users and help often ostracised addicts reintegrate into society.

In a setting like Afghanistan, where there are no referrals possible to a social worker or a psychosocial counsellor and where you need to integrate everything in the same progr…

Mitch Moxley

BEIJING, May 6 2011 (IPS) – In China, where a growing demand for organ transplants coupled with a dramatic shortage of donors has fuelled a rampant black market trade, selling your organs for cash is a mouse click away.
An Internet search reveals a website offering kidneys for sale and the contact information of those able to procure them. A young woman, posing for IPS as a migrant worker from Hebei province, calls a man who has advertised on the website, identified as Mr. He.

I need money, she says over the phone. Do you want a woman s kidney?

Mr. He asks her age. Twenty-five, she replies.

Of course we want your kidney.

Mr. He tells the woman to travel to Xuzhou city, Jiangsu province, where somebody will be waiting when her t…

Charles Mpaka

BLANTYRE, Jun 9 2011 (IPS) – As government prepares to roll out the expensive new antiretroviral treatment regime recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) this month, there are fears about the programme s sustainability after two recent proposals for funding were rejected by the Global Fund.

The antiretrovirals government seeks to change. Credit: Charles Mpaka

In November 2009, the WHO recommended new antiretroviral treatment (ART) guidelines aimed at reducing HIV-related deaths. The global health body dire…

Portia Crowe

NEW YORK, Jun 20 2011 (IPS) – As the world marks 30 years since HIV/AIDS was first identified, vaccine researcher Dr. Peter Hotez hopes intervention programmes can begin to incorporate treatment for some lesser-known ailments called neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs.
In a co-authored by economist Jeffrey Sachs, Hotez explains that neglected diseases like schistosomiasis and hookworm geographically overlap with HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. He points to the massive global effort to fight the more notorious afflictions, and notes the possibilities for operational synergies in fighting NTDs as well.

This August, Hotez will have the opportunity to advance his ambitions when he serves as the of a new School of Tropical Diseases at the Baylor Colleg…