War Over but Not Gaza’s Housing Crisis
Members of Abu Sheira’s family in front of the tent they set up in the grounds of Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS
GAZA CITY, Sep 8 2014 (IPS) – “When the [Israeli] shelling started, I gathered up my family and headed for what I though was a safe place, like a school, but then that became overcrowded and lacked sanitation, so we ended up in the grounds of the hospital.”
Islam Abu Sheira from Beit Hanoun, a city on the north-eastern edge of the Gaza Strip, was speaking to IPS in front of what has been his family’s makeshift ‘home’ at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaz…
A UN High-Level Meeting May See Hopes to End Tuberculosis
Bobby John is a New Delhi based physician and global health advocate.
NEW DELHI, Sep 28 2018 (IPS) – In the early months of 1993, there was frenetic activity within the Geneva headquartered WHO’s Communicable Diseases program, to get Tuberculosis designated as a Global Emergency.
While countries like India had instituted TB Control programs as early as 1962, and Tanzania in the late 1970’s had shown field level evidence of programmatic innovations like directly observed treatment would reduce TB related mortality, the global reality was things were not going too well as far as reducing incidence and mortality for this age-old disease.
Frighteningly, for the western world at least, the disease had made a dramatic comeback, showing up in a drug resistant avatar…
Ending the Unthinkable Injustice of Human Chaining
A man’s legs chained in a Christian rehabilitation center in Ibadan City, Oyo State, Nigeria, Ibadan City, Oyo State, Nigeria, September 2019. Women and men are chained and tied for perceived or actual mental health condition or intellectual disability. © 2019 Robin Hammond for Human Rights Watch.
NEW YORK, Apr 7 2020 (IPS) – When Akanni’s mother died in early 2018, she stopped eating for three weeks. Her mood became unpredictable; she was often shouting or sulking angrily. Medicine from a local pharmacist didn’t help. At a loss for what to do to handle the trauma, Akanni’s father took her to a church in Abeokuta, Ogun state, in Nigeria. And then he left her the…