Julio Godoy

BREMEN, Germany, Mar 15 2007 (IPS) – The European Union (EU) must substantially increase financial resources for research on a vaccine against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which causes AIDS, leading non- governmental activists say.
Ann Katrin Akalin, spokesperson of the German AIDS Foundation, says the EU is contributing only six percent of the world s total public financing for research on a vaccine. This is too little, Akalin told IPS.

The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) estimates that about 1.2 billion dollars are needed yearly for financing the research, Akalin said. As late as 2005, only 760 million dollars were available for this research.

In all 88 percent of this money was channeled by governments, mostly the United…

Pilirani Semu-Banda

BLANTYRE, Apr 17 2007 (IPS) – Five years after the famine in which more than 1,000 Malawians died and 8 million of the country s 12 million people suffered from hunger, the bitter memory of bad policy advice still lingers on.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were blamed for the tragedy that hit Malawi during the 2002 famine. The international human rights organisation Action Aid, for instance, indicated in a report in October 2002 that the IMF had instructed the Malawian government to sell the strategic grain reserve to repay a debt incurred by the statutory National Food Reserve Agency (NFRA).

The report, State of disaster: Causes, consequences and policy lessons from Malawi , also mentioned the World Bank. Action Aid blame…

Amina Barakat

NOUAKCHOTT, May 24 2007 (IPS) – Excess weight on women has long been considered something to aspire to in Mauritania, where it serves as a symbol of beauty and wealth. But, it appears these views are being called into question as awareness spreads of the health risks they entail for girls who are force fed to make them gain the desired weight.
Women risk developing serious cardiovascular problems, hypertension and diabetes. In instances of pregnancy, they suffer still more, and their babies with them, Fall Ould Abri, who heads up a medical practice in the capital of Nouakchott, told IPS.

Fortunately, this practice is in the process of disappearing.

Sociologist Aoua Ly-Tall reaches similar conclusions in her publication Force Feeding, a Practice…

Daniel Luban

WASHINGTON, Jul 26 2007 (IPS) – A nutritional supplement known as Sprinkles, which is a simple powder that parents can easily add to their children #39s food, reduces childhood anaemia by more than half, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Nutrition.

Packets of Sprinkles in different languages. Credit: Sprinkles Global Health Initiative

The study, conducted in rural Haiti by a team based at Cornell University in the United States and the International Food Polic…

Steven Lang

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 24 2007 (IPS) – Raw sewage flowing into Lake Chrissie is threatening to turn South Africa s largest natural freshwater body into a massive cesspool. Environmentalists claim that for seven years, local authorities ignored their pleas to upgrade water treatment facilities; officials only took action, they say, when local revenue was affected by the closure of tourism routes such as biking trails, as a result of pollution.

An eco-attraction at risk of ecological disaster. Credit: Gerhard Rhee…

Aaron Glantz

WASHINGTON, Sep 26 2007 (IPS) – On Mar. 19, 2004 Corporal Justin Bunce was on patrol in the Iraqi city of Husayba on the Syrian border when a bomb exploded in the wall of a cemetery.
The blast sent shrapnel into nearly every part of his body and knocked Bunce into a coma for four days. When he was airlifted to Landschtul military hospital in Germany, doctors found that some of the shrapnel had lodged in the left frontal lobe of his brain.

Because of my injury, making new memories is hard as hell, Bunce, now 25, told a recent gathering on war and brain damage in Washington. I ve been leaving myself a dozen voice mails every day.

More than 4,000 U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, most often from …

Helda Martínez

BOGOTA, Nov 21 2007 (IPS) – Local residents of shantytowns on the outskirts of the Colombian capital complain that sand, gravel and limestone quarries operating in the area pose serious risks to their health as well as the danger of landslides. But they are afraid to speak out.
The people of Ciudad Bolívar and Soacha poor, high-crime suburbs in the hills on the southeast edge of Bogotá who talked to IPS did so on the condition of anonymity.

Sand and limestone began to be extracted on a small scale in the early 1950s by local campesinos (peasant farmers), when the area was still rural. Since then, vast slum neighbourhoods have grown up in the hills, largely populated by tens of thousands of people displaced from their land and villages by the four-dec…

Philip Rouwenhorst

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 26 2007 (IPS) – In a six day hunger strike in cooperation with a Belgian and Swiss radio station, Dutch station 3fm raised 12.6 million dollars for clean drinking water and sanitation programmes around the world. Locked in glass houses on major squares in The Hague, Leuven and Geneva, deejays raised the money by auctioning artist memorabilia and having listeners pay to request songs.
Gerard Ekdom, deejay at 3fm, participated in the glass house event for the fourth consecutive year. Every year the Red Cross finds us something they say is a major problem in the world that so far has not been on the radar screen of world society and press. These are the so-called silent disasters . This year they chose the problem of clean drinking water an…