Diego Cevallos* – Tierramérica
MEXICO CITY, Jun 4 2008 (IPS) – Government funds to fight tobacco use in Latin America, which kills one million people each year, pale in comparison to the health costs of this epidemic and receive only a small portion of the tax revenues from the tobacco industry.
Children are often second-hand smokers. Credit: Photo Stock
Most countries in the region violate their own commitments to ban tobacco advertising and to prohibit smoking in public places, including hospitals and schools.
Eliminating ci…
Mel Frykberg
GAZA CITY, Jul 2 2008 (IPS) – Gaza is being forced to pump 77 tonnes of untreated or partially treated sewage out to sea daily due to the Israeli blockade of the coastal territory. The fear is that some of this is creeping back into drinking water.
The drought in the Palestinian territories has exacerbated Gaza s shortage of drinking water. Credit: Mel Frykberg
The health of Gaza s 1.5 million people is at risk, Mahmoud Daher, from the UN …
Interview with Luis Soto Ramírez, co-chair of AIDS 2008
MEXICO CITY, Aug 1 2008 (IPS) – Mexican virologist Dr. Luis Soto Ramírez, co-chair of the 17th International AIDS Conference, which opens Sunday in the Mexican capital, says that ramping up prevention efforts is the most urgent step to be taken in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Luis Soto Ramírez Credit: Daniela Estrada/IPS
While rushing from one commitment to another in the run-up to the event, also known as AIDS 2008, which will draw 25,000 participants from 188 countries, Soto Ramírez takes time to question the way the Uni…
Wambi Michael
KAMPALA, Sep 23 2008 (IPS) – Producing baskets and mats in central Uganda has traditionally been women s work. Women made these items for use in homes. The National Association of Women Organisations in Uganda (NAWOU) has changed this practice into a powerful force fighting poverty.
Improving lives: Artisans Rose Sanyu (left) and Milly Kinene. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS
The organisation has a big crafts collection centre in the east African country s capital of Ka…
Daniela Estrada
SANTIAGO, Nov 13 2008 (IPS) – Chilean Health Minister Álvaro Erazo reported Thursday that 512 people who tested positive for HIV were not notified by the public health system.
He acknowledged there were problems and announced several measures to confront the health emergency.
The measures will work as long as the necessary resources are available, Patricio Novoa, of Vivo Positivo (Living Positive), an umbrella group linking 30 non-governmental organisations, told IPS. What is needed here is training for many people, and the hiring of services.
On Thursday, Minister Erazo presented the national report on the state of the situation of confirmed HIV/AIDS cases 2004-2008 to the health committee of the lower house of Congress, which the committee…
BRUSSELS, Jan 8 2009 (IPS) – Extreme poverty will continue to blight sub-Saharan Africa for another 200 years unless action to overcome it is intensified, a new report has suggested.
Social Watch, a network of campaigning groups, has devised a measure known as the basic capabilities index to assess the level of hardship throughout the world.
Its latest report finds that 80 countries home to half the world s population fare badly when three criteria are examined: the number of children who die before their fifth birthday, the proportion of children who complete primary education, and the proportion of births that are attended by trained midwives or other medical professionals.
Only 16 of these countries have registered considerable improvement since 2000. Although th…
Dahr Jamail
BAGHDAD, Feb 21 2009 (IPS) – Seventy percent of Iraq s doctors are reported to have fled the war-torn country in the face of death threats and kidnappings. Those who remain live in fear, often in conditions close to house arrest.
Dr. Thana Hekmaytar Credit: Dahr Jamail
I was threatened I would be killed because I was working for the Iraqi government at the Medical City, Dr. Thana Hekmaytar told IPS. Baghdad Medical City is the largest medical complex in the country.
Dr. Hekmaytar, a head and neck surgeon, has now been practising at the Saint Raphael Hospital in Baghdad for …
Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Mar 30 2009 (IPS) – You could hear a pin drop and uncomfortable glances went round the room when the moderator of the debate invited contributions from the floor. A law student finally broke the silence, appealing for education to be a two-way street, so that homosexuals can help us to accept them.
Perhaps unintentionally, the law student, Bárbara García, really broke the ice. The men and women who had spoken up to defend their sexual orientation against prejudice and misunderstanding had shown those present a reality that perhaps many considered alien to their experience, had no knowledge of, or knew of only in a distorted way.
There are people who commit suicide because of their sexual orientation. We are not even going to talk about lesbi…
Louise Redvers
LUANDA, Apr 29 2009 (IPS) – Teresa Barros problems started last year with the death of her baby.
OMA advisor Odelina de Almeida speaks to survivors of domestic violence outside a support centre in Angola. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS
Our youngest daughter died, Barros (38) explained. My husband blames me, and now he drinks a lot and picks fights and makes confusion.
My …
Matthew Berger
NEW YORK, May 28 2009 (IPS) – Bruce Brown died of cancer at age 18. Some of Marilyn Kissinger s other friends lived into their early and late twenties, dying in the late 1960s. Most had died by the late 1980s.
Doreen Thomas says her friends and family lasted until their forties and sixties, but everybody s household was full of cancer. The people who didn t have internal cancer, we had outside cancer. I ve had 11 [tumors] removed.
Thomas had moved to Enniskillen, New Brunswick, in 1953. Two years later, the Canadian military started spraying Agent Orange and other chemicals at nearby Canadian Forces Base Gagetown, and kept doing so until at least 1984.
In 1964, four years after Kissinger s family moved to Oromocto, where the base is headquarter…