Cam McGrath* – IPS/IFEJ

CAIRO, Sep 6 2010 (IPS) – The midday sun punishes a group of veiled women as they wait in line to fill their buckets and jerrycans. They have travelled on foot to a rusty tap on the outskirts of Cairo that gushes irrigation water never intended for human consumption.

Carrying drinking water in a low-income Cairo district. Credit: Victoria Hazou

We ll boil it when we get home, says one woman, positioning a blue jerrycan on her head.

Water shortages, aggravated by intense summer heat…

Matthew O. Berger and Peter Boaz

WASHINGTON, Sep 28 2010 (IPS) – Although the world will miss the 2010 deadline for universal access to HIV treatment, some countries, notably in sub- Saharan Africa, have made real strides forward, three United Nations agencies reported Tuesday.
The goal was set in 2006, but, as the joint report lays out, only some countries will achieve universal access, defined as coverage of at least 80 percent of the population in need, by the end of this year.

As with many health goals, progress is marked by unevenness both between regions and between aspects of the treatment needed.

While prevention efforts to reach the most at-risk populations globally – sex workers, drug users and men who have sex with men – are still limited, for i…

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 21 2010 (IPS) – Northern Thailand s Chiang Rai province has many charms to draw foreign visitors, from hilltribe communities dressed in colourful ethnic clothes, trips to gentle hills close to the Burmese and Lao borders, excursions to once infamous opium trails and a journey along the Mekong River.
But foreign guests from neighbouring countries like Vietnam to other nations like China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Papua New Guinea are also being drawn to the province by a very different attraction its main provincial hospital.

These visitors, health workers for the most part, spend time at the Chiang Rai Prachanukroh Hospital to learn how Thai health workers have succeeded in reducing the spread of HIV among babies.

We sh…

Cam McGrath

CAIRO, Nov 22 2010 (IPS) – Civil society has warned of adverse social and health consequences after the Egyptian government ordered the removal of content related to male and female anatomy, reproductive health and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) from the school curriculum.

Sex education is expelled from Egyptian schools. Credit: Victoria Hazou

We know most of this material wasn t being taught, but removing it from the curriculum is a big step backwards, says Noha Roushdy, researcher at the Egyptian Initiative…

Miriam Gathigah

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 4 2011 (IPS) – Medical experts have warned that malaria and HIV have monopolised interventions geared towards curbing child mortality in Kenya, thus ignoring the equally deadly killer, diarrhoea. This disease has silently claimed the lives of hundreds of children every year.
Cecilia Njambi, a mother of two, lost her first-born son to diarrhoea. He hadn t slept well the previous night and had complained that his tummy hurt. His stool was loose but we weren t alarmed as no one takes diarrhoea seriously anyway. We just assumed that he must have eaten something that didn t go down well with him.

We gave him a solution of water and salt, as is common practice, and in the morning I left for work. That s the last I saw of my five-year- o…

Julio Godoy

BONN, Feb 23 2011 (IPS) – Imagine a green wall 15 kilometres wide, and up to 8,000 kilometres long a living green wall of trees and bushes, full of birds and other animals. Imagine it just south of the Sahara, from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa in the east, all the way across the continent to Dakar, Senegal, in the west.
The building of this pan-African Great Green African Wall (GGW) was just approved by an international summit taking place this week in the former German capital Bonn, a side event of the joint conference of the committees on Science and Technology and for the Review of the Implementation of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

The GGW, as conceived by the 11 countries located along the southern border of the Sahara, and …

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Mar 17 2011 (IPS) – For the past three days Hiroko Oogusa, 62 following orders from the local authorities has remained in her tightly shuttered home located 40 kilometres from the badly damaged Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima.

Four reactors of Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Credit: Japan Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport

The local town council officials who drove past my hou…

Dahr Jamail

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, Apr 15 2011 (IPS) – As the one-year anniversary of the record-breaking BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico approaches, mental health experts and social scientists warn of decades of impact on Gulf residents.

A fisherman and other Gulf Coast residents at a community meeting in New Orleans. Credit: Erika Blumenfeld/IPS

On Apr. 20, 2010, the oil rig exploded, triggering a months-long disaster that would end only after…

Emmanuel Chaco

KINSHASA, May 18 2011 (IPS) – More than 3,000 cases of measles have been recorded in the past three months in two districts of Maniema Province, in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Provincial statistics seen by IPS for the districts of Kibombo and Kindu, show that since mid-April, a measles epidemic has caused more than 15 deaths at health facilities, and three or four times as many have died at home, in cases where families did not take stricken children to medical centres.

The villages further upstream along the Congo River are the worst affected by measles, says Dr Théo Katako, interim head of the Provincial Inspectorate of the Ministry of Public Health. Meanwhile, the province was only able to organise a vaccination campaign a…