Anil Netto

PENANG, Jan 30 2006 (IPS) – Civil society groups worry that private sector interests will soon dominate the country s water and health care sectors and burden the public despite government assurances that these areas will be spared privatisation.
Authorities are busy revamping the way these two sectors are managed and financed, and the coming months will be crucial as blueprints and enabling laws are formulated.

Last June, following an intense civil society campaign, the minister responsible for water, Lim Keng Yaik, said the government had made an about turn and decided that total privatisation was not suitable for Malaysia. His remedy? We have cut out the word privatisation .

Similarly, senior health ministry officials have assured activists that …

Stephen Leahy* – Tierramérica

TORONTO, Canada, Mar 4 2006 (IPS) – Organic foods protect children from the toxins in pesticides, while foods grown using modern, intensive agricultural techniques contain fewer nutrients and minerals than they did 60 years ago, according to two new scientific studies.
A U.S. research team from Emory University in Atlanta analysed urine samples from children ages three to 11 who ate only organic foods and found that they contained virtually no metabolites of two common pesticides, malathion and chlorpyrifos.

However, once the children returned to eating conventionally grown foods, concentrations of these pesticide metabolites quickly climbed as high as 263 parts per billion, says the study published Feb. 21.

Organic crops are gro…

Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Apr 7 2006 (IPS) – A leading European parliamentarian is calling on the European Union to halt the brain drain of medics from Africa.
As the World Health Organisation (WHO) made health workers its focus for World Health Day Friday (Apr. 7), British Labour member of the European Parliament (MEP) Glenys Kinnock said the European Commission, the European Union (EU) executive, must end recruitment of health workers from sub-Saharan Africa, and press for a global code of conduct on ethical recruitment.

There are more nurses from Malawi in Manchester than in Malawi, and more Ethiopian doctors in Chicago than Ethiopia, Kinnock told IPS. Last year Kenya lost 2,998 graduate nurses to other countries mostly to the United States and Britain.

K…

Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO, Jun 6 2006 (IPS) – María Angélica is a Chilean woman who could not work in her profession as a chef for nearly two years, because she had to look after her mother, who was ill. Including this kind of unpaid women s work in national budgets is one of the big challenges Latin America faces in order to make progress in gender equality.
Experts brought together by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) have been working out methods of doing this at an International Workshop on Household Satellite Accounts: Gender and Health, which ended Tuesday in the Chilean capital.

This is the fourth time that experts from the region on the Systems of National Accounts (SNA) have me…

Alberto Cremonesi

NEW YORK, Jul 19 2006 (IPS) – When thousands of delegates from around the world gather in Toronto next month for the Sixteenth International AIDS Conference, a leading human rights group has urged them to consider the following cases.
The murder in June of Vivian Kavuma in Uganda by her lover after she disclosed that she was infected with HIV.

The brutal stabbing with a pitchfork of 15-year-old Isaiah Gakuyo last April in Kenya by his uncle simply because the orphan was HIV-positive. There were numerous witnesses to the attack, but none intervened.

The murder of in June 2005 human rights activist Octavio Acuña Rubio in a condom shop he owned in Mexico.

The arrests in December of five Zimbabwean AIDS activists commemorating World AIDS…