Envios-star

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…

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 …