Interview with HIV/AIDS activist Gracia Violeta Ross Quiroga

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 11 2008 (IPS) – As the United Nations winds down a major two-day conference to take stock of the global response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the problem of persistent discrimination against people living with the virus has been high on the agenda.

Gracia Violeta Ross Quiroga Credit: The Fig Tree

This is somewhat ironic, civil society groups say, in light of the fact that HIV-positive delegates wishing to attend the meeting at U.N. headquarters in New York were themselves forced to apply f…

Soma Basu

MADURAI, Tamil Nadu, Jul 10 2008 (IPS) – Ponni, 27, lay quiet on a missionary hospital bed in this small town, groggy from the anaesthetic administered to her for a caesarean delivery a couple of hours earlier.
By her side were no female attendants, a departure from the norm in India where the paternal or maternal grandmother is usually on hand to greet the newborn.

Instead, Ponni s husband, Sakthi, sat by the bedside patiently waiting for her to wake up and hold their first baby, a daughter.

Both Ponni and Sakthi are government employees, leading ordinary lives in this conservative town famous for its Hindu temples. What set them apart from the thousands of other couples in the town was their rather unusual decision to limit the size of their family…

Zofeen Ebrahim

MEXICO CITY , Aug 7 2008 (IPS) – Dealing with transgenders (TGs) can be confusing. Even the organisers of the 17th International AIDS Conference underway in this city failed to accommodate the third gender by providing them separate toilets.

A stall in the Global Village. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

I went to the male toilet only to be told I should go to the female one, where again I was told to try the male one! Agniva Lahiri, 28, expressed her indignation while talking with IPS at the Global Village the most happening and animated plac…

Haider Rizvi

NEW YORK, Sep 27 2008 (IPS) – With the presidential polls just over a month away, tens of thousands of U.S. war veterans are still wondering whether or not they will be able to vote for the candidate of their choice.
About 100,000 former soldiers who are currently residing in government-run facilities can no longer vote because they cannot register without assistance from volunteers due to disabilities and serious illnesses.

Rights groups say they want to help war veterans with the registration process but officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) are creating hurdles for them.

They keep putting bureaucratic roadblocks in our way, said Sharon Kufeldt, vice president of Veterans for Peace. There are very few weeks left to register voter…

Kristin Palitza

BAMAKO, Nov 19 2008 (IPS) – Health experts and activists have heavily criticised African governments for failing to collaborate with civil society organisations (CSOs) on health research and health policy development.
Governments tend to perceive CSOs as a threat because they are independent, often critical of government and see their role as holding politicians accountable, health activists said during the World Health Organisation (WHO) Global Ministerial Forum for Health Research in Bamako, Mali. As a result, many governments ignore calls for public participation.

Civil societies are a missing voice in health research, said Thelma Narayan, public health consultant at the Centre for Public Health and Equity in India. Without inclusion of CSOs, Afric…

Dahr Jamail

MARFA, Texas, Jan 16 2009 (IPS) – But the [George W.] Bush administration was never seriously interested in helping veterans. The sorry state of care for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans is not an accident. It s on purpose.
Journalist Aaron Glantz makes this stunning statement in his recently released book, The War Comes Home: Washington s Battle Against America s Veterans (UC Press).

And his controversial claim is backed up by an extremely well-researched overview of the dismal state of care provided by the government for this new generation of war veterans.

Glantz, an IPS correspondent who has been covering the U.S. occupation of Iraq for years, including several months of reportage from inside Iraq, provides a devastating overview of the pligh…

Mario Osava

SANTARÉM, Brazil, Mar 3 2009 (IPS) – On his fourth trip to Brazil, Prince Charles plans to visit a project in the Amazon jungle that has cut infant mortality and illiteracy nearly in half by organising poor communities to get involved in their own development.

Ideal community in Santarém. Credit: Courtesy of PSA.

The Projeto Saúde and Alegria (PSA Health and Happiness Project) has won a number of prizes, both within the country and abroad, and has been visited by a number of prominent personalities. But the Mar. 11-15 visit by Brit…

But Cristina de la Sotta, executive director of the Fundación Chile Unido (United Chile Foundation), an independent private organisation that supports women with unwanted pregnancies or who have had an abortion and regret it, told another story.

The women who come to the Foundation for help were unable to get over the impact of having an abortion, de la Sotta told IPS.

They tell us the abortion was a solution, but a bad one, she said. With the Foundation s support, many pregnant women decide not to terminate their pregnancies, because they discover that the feelings behind maternity and motherhood run deep, she added.

Nevertheless, she believes abortion should not be a crime for the woman involved, because she is a victim of circumstance, rather than a perpetr…

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, May 5 2009 (IPS) – Poor countries facing the greatest threat from the spread of the H1N1 flu virus popularly known as swine flu will begin to receive shipments of Tamiflu, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced.
The global health agency, which reported last week that it planned to provide poor nations with 2.4 million doses of the flu medicine, said Tuesday that it had dispatched Tamiflu from the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Switzerland.

So far, most of the cases of the new H1N1 flu have been reported in North America, although the epidemic is still in a very early stage, said acting WHO assistant director-general Keiji Fukuda.

We have concerns about the infection traveling to the southern hemisphere, because th…