Analysis by Rosemary Okello and Terna Gyuse

BRUSSELS and CAPE TOWN, Jun 30 2009 (IPS) – The right to the highest attainable standard of health: not the most fashionable of human rights, but the limits on people s enjoyment of their right to health often coincide with continuing inequalities behind claims of economic growth or political reform.

Women must gain greater involvement in shaping maternal health policies and p…

Patricia Grogg

SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Aug 5 2009 (IPS) – Arnoldo Ramón Virgilio s legs are of little use to him, but he has a way with words that more than makes up for any physical limitations. He s one of the outpatients at the América Labadí Arce Medical and Education Centre, which provides health care and rehabilitation for the disabled in this city in eastern Cuba.
I m president of the patients committee. I like poetry and making myself useful, Virgilio told IPS as he prepared the envelopes that will be used to pay the staff their wages at the end of the month.

And exactly what does the president of the patients committee do? Every once in a while, we meet with the Board to present our problems and needs, he explained. Right now our biggest problem is transportati…

Nergui Manalsuren interviews Catarina de Albuquerque, the U.N. Independent Expert on human rights, water and sanitation

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 28 2009 (IPS) – Some 1.6 million people die each year due to water and sanitation related diseases, millions of girls do not go to school because of lack of toilets, and prison detainees are denied access to adequate sanitation in some countries as a form of punishment, clear violations of the rights to health, education, and many other human rights.

Catarina de Albuquerque Credit: UN Photo

Yet the crisis is one of the least addressed by the …

Matthew Berger

WASHINGTON, Oct 28 2009 (IPS) – The story began almost 40 years ago, but when filmmaker Joe Berlinger saw villagers eating canned tuna fish because the fish in their rivers were too contaminated to eat, [he] knew [he] had to do something .

Cancer victim Maria Garofalo reflected in the stream behind her home in the Ecuadorean Amazon. From the film Crude . Credit: Juan Diego …

Susan Anyangu

MOMBASA, Oct 21 2009 (IPS) – The United Nation Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) claims that Kenya has more drug users than any other East African country. UNODC estimates there are 100,000 cocaine users, 200,000 using opiates like heroin and four million who smoke cannabis.
In the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya s main port, which has the country s highest concentration of substance abusers, Masudi Omar of Reachout Centre Trust, a drug addiction treatment centre, says it s vital that AIDS prevention programmes reach this demographic.

A research done by our partners USAID in 2005 revealed that 50 percent of injecting drug users who were tested for HIV were found to be positive. The challenge here is passing HIV risk reduction messages to drug and alcohol …