Envios-star

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…

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 …