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…

Miriam Mannak

CAPE TOWN, Jul 31 2009 (IPS) – A global call to put people living with HIV on antiretroviral therapy (ART) at an earlier stage of their illness is intensifying, but most developing countries, especially in Africa, are struggling to meet the current recommendations.

Youth run testing ce…

Cam McGrath

CAIRO, Aug 23 2009 (IPS) – Muslims marked the start of the fasting month of Ramadan Saturday, but the global H1N1 pandemic has put a damper on religious festivities throughout the Middle East.
Everyone is worried about swine flu, says Anwar Mohamed, a Yemeni antique dealer. We have been told to avoid crowds, but everywhere there are crowds.

Arab governments have taken measures aimed at reducing the spread and impact of the H1N1 virus, which has infected over 5,000 people in the region, and killed at least 30. Authorities have implemented border surveillance, quarantine procedures and swine flu awareness campaigns. They have also sought to restrict activities that draw large crowds, including religious gatherings and pilgrimages.

As Islam s holies…

Kristin Palitza interviews HENRY MALUMA, Oxfam Zambia essential services coordinator

CAPE TOWN, Sep 30 2009 (IPS) – A United Nations mid-point review of Zambia s efforts towards reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), released in September, has revealed that HIV/AIDS might prevent the southern African country from meeting the targets.

HIV prevents many Zambian children from attending school. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

The HIV pandemic has had devastating effects on all aspects o…

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 13 2009 (IPS) – A growing new market for human organs has prompted the United Nations and the Council of Europe to call for an international convention to regulate the sale of body parts, mostly kidneys and livers, in transplant surgery worldwide.

Arthur Caplan, director of the Centre for Bioethics at the University o…

Dahr Jamail

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Nov 16 2009 (IPS) – According to a soldiers advocacy group at Fort Hood, the U.S. base where an army psychiatrist has been charged with killing 13 people and wounding 30 in a Nov. 5 rampage, the official suicide figures provided by the Army are definitely too low.
Chuck Luther served 12 years in the military and is a veteran of two deployments to Iraq, where he was a reconnaissance scout in the 1st Cavalry Division. The former sergeant was based at Fort Hood, where he lives today.

I see the ugly, Luther told IPS. I see soldiers beating their wives and trying to kill themselves all the time, and most folks don t want to look at this, including the military.

Luther, who in 2007 became the founder and director of the Soldier s Adv…

Valeria Fernández

PHOENIX, Arizona, Dec 4 2009 (IPS) – Arizona community activists and religious leaders are trying to mitigate fears over a new law that would require state employees to denounce undocumented immigrants.

Lydia Guzmán, president of the pro-immigrant coalition Somos America, speaks with the local Spanish TV …

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 17 2010 (IPS) – The sun had barely set and already, the residents of Rue Berne were making their beds. These bedrooms were makeshifts arranged neatly on one side of the street, away from shaky walls and fragile home frames that remain so dangerous.

A man sets up a shelter in Cité Soleil, Haiti. Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

The men erected barricades, leaving enough room for a vehicle to navigate the tiny canyon. Soon they shared whatever they had pasta, or rice with smoked herring. …

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…