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…

BRUSSELS, Jun 6 2009 (IPS) – In 1994, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) proposed a groundbreaking shift in the approach to reproductive health: women s reproductive capacity was to be transformed from an object of population control to a matter of women s empowerment to exercise personal autonomy.
The ICPD s Plan of Action set out several key action areas: education and literacy, reproductive health care and unmet need for contraception, maternal mortality reduction and HIV/AIDS.

But although reproductive health programmes enjoyed fresh attention and resources from donors and governments, the emergence of HIV/AIDS as a leading funding priority undermined progress.

The two became awkward bedfellows despite HIV/AIDS being a health issue…

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…