Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Feb 22 2010 (IPS) – The mighty mountains of hazardous electronic waste are growing by about 40 million tonnes a year globally. In China, India and South Africa, those mountains are expected to grow 200 to 500 percent in the next decade, a new report warns.
Informal e-waste recycling in China. Credit: StEP-EMPA
And that s just from domestic sales of TVs, computers and cell phones. The figure doesn t include millions of tonnes of e-waste that is exported, mostly illegally, into these countries.
Sales of electronic consumer…
Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 31 2010 (IPS) – Experts from around the world are trying to attract attention to deadly but little-known illnesses, such as Chagas disease, visceral leishmaniasis and sleeping sickness, that have been neglected by the pharmaceutical industry.
So-called neglected tropical diseases, which also include malaria, dengue fever and schistosomiasis, in conjunction with tuberculosis are responsible for 11.4 percent of the global burden of illness, but only 1.3 percent of the 1,556 new drugs registered between 1975 and 2004 were specifically developed for these diseases.
Pharmaceutical laboratories give these diseases zero priority, Tania Araújo-Jorge, head of the state Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ), told IPS.
The Brazilian Fo…
Kit Gillet
BEIJING, Apr 29 2010 (IPS) – China s lifting of its longstanding ban on foreign visitors with HIV removes a restriction that many Chinese doctors and activists find discriminatory, but erasing the stigma attached with the virus remains one of the biggest challenges ahead in facing the disease.
The lifting of the ban was announced on Apr. 27, one month after the country refused entry to Australian author Robert Dessaix, who had included his HIV- positive status on a visa application to China.
A statement released by the Chinese State Council on Tuesday said that, after careful research, government officials had concluded that the ban had an extremely limited effect on preventing and controlling the pandemic within the country. Officials also said that the ba…
BANGKOK, Jun 9 2010 (IPS) – She spends so much time immersed in water that she may soon turn into a mermaid. But Jariya Sakayaroj looks like she does not mind even if she ends up developing scales.
Microbiologist Jariya Sakayaroj explores the waters for fungi that may contain bioactive compounds that could be used for medical treatm…
Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 9 2010 (IPS) – The Statute of Racial Equality, soon to be signed into law in Brazil, is at the centre of a controversy between those who consider it a historical achievement, like the abolition of slavery in 1888, and those who see it as failing to satisfy the demands of the black movement.
The ceremony at which Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will sign the statute into law, scheduled for Jul. 20, will not be the brilliant occasion hoped for by the government s Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR).
After nearly two decades of debate, the statute approved by Congress on Jun. 16 has not left everyone happy.
It is a watered-down text that does not include some of the major demands …
Susan Anyangu-Amu
NAIROBI, Aug 3 2010 (IPS) – An arrow points the way from a busy street along a rough pathway; visitors clutch their bags more closely. The door is open: sachets are displayed on the table with labels indicating treatment for ulcers, diabetes, hypertension, fibroids. But not the contraceptive pill IPS is looking for.
Thirty-five-year-old Sophie she didn t want her surname used came here for six months for a herbal contraceptive.
She says she gained a lot of weight and suffered severe bleeding in connection with the injectable contraceptive she was getting at a government health facility, so she turned to this alternative, oblivious to official warnings that it has been linked to serious health problems.
I stopped using conventional family pla…
Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 27 2010 (IPS) – Experts from 13 Latin American countries called for a shift in counter-drug policies from a punitive to a public health-based approach for users, in order to reduce drug-related violence, on the argument that the current war on drugs has been lost in the region.
The Aug. 26-27 Second Latin American Conference on Drug Policy was organised in Rio de Janeiro by Intercambios Civil Association for the Study of and Assistance for Drug-Related Problems, of Argentina, and Psicotropicus of Brazil, two non-governmental organisations that advocate a new approach to global anti-drug policy.
The conference, which brought together public officials, academics and activists from around the region to debate drug policy, discussed …
Bonnie Allen and Clara K. Mallah*
MONROVIA, Sep 22 2010 (IPS) – Mercy Freeman sits on a small hospital cot in one of Liberia s emergency hospitals, looking down at her frail son, whose dark eye sockets have sunk into his bony face.
Nearly forty percent of Liberian children under five are malnourished. Credit: Bonnie Allen/IPS
He just started getting thin and thin[ner]. I do not know what is happening, that is why I brought him to the hospital, the 18-year-old single mother says, …
NEW YORK, Oct 15 2010 (IPS) – A U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican descent with mental disabilities is suing the U.S. government for wrongfully deporting him to Mexico and forcing him to endure over four months of living on the streets and in the shelters and prisons of Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala.
Advocates say that the case, while extreme, is just one of many produced by the country s dysfunctional immigration system.
The suits were filed last week on behalf of U.S. citizen Mark Lyttle by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Georgia and the ACLU of North Carolina, in federal courts in those states.
Azadeh Shahshahani, director of the National Security/Immigrants Rights Project of the ACLU of Georgia, told IPS, Mark s case is a tragedy tha…
Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Nov 15 2010 (IPS) – People are going to take the body to MINUSTAH to show them what they did, Jean-Luc Surfin told IPS by phone as riots erupted against Haiti s U.N. peacekeeping force on Monday in the northern city of Cap-Haitien.
A demonstrator holds up an anti-U.N. poster during an October protest outside a MINUSTAH base in Port-au-Prince. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS
Surfin, a…