KAMPALA, Feb 22 2010 (IPS) – A severe shortage of highly-trained medical personnel is one of the many challenges to providing health care at a local level across Africa. Task shifting permitting less-specialised people to carry out certain functions is one proposal to over come this, but it is meeting resistance.
Primary health care in Uganda is increasingly entrusted to community-based workers: is the strategy safe?…
Sanjay Suri
LONDON, Mar 28 2010 (IPS) – A high-level meeting in London of political and business leaders will consider this week ways of raising 100 billion dollars to fight climate change. And yet another one in Washington will search for ways of finding, and funding, more three-dollar stoves around the world.
The second one is more ambitious than it sounds; it aims to get more than half a billion clean stoves around the world. But working with the little and the tangible, it might just be more effective than the London meet. And, it brings simultaneous health benefits.
The Britain-based Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy is pushing strongly for cleaner stoves around the world. Fighting climate change and improving the health of the world s poorest people are often…
Wambi Michael
KAMPALA, Apr 28 2010 (IPS) – Uganda s trade minister is in agreement that his government s controversial Counterfeit Goods Bill should not restrict the manufacture or import of life-saving generic medicines.
The bill, drafted with funding from the European Union, suggests criminal penalties for counterfeiting.
Counterfeiting is defined expansively as the manufacturing, producing, packaging, re-packaging, labelling or making of any goods which are imitated so as to be substantially similar to the protected goods without the authority of the intellectual property (IP) right owner subsisting in the country or elsewhere.
With reference to the World Trade Organisation s 2001 Doha Declaration, Gagawala Wambuzi, Uganda s minister for trade who is spearh…
Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Jun 9 2010 (IPS) – Men, women, NGOs, governments, the Gates Foundation. Everyone agrees women are awesome. More importantly, protecting the health of the people that make up more than half of the human population and do far more than half of the work to sustain it should be everyone s priority.
That was the main message coming out of this year s Women Deliver conference here, which wrapped up Wednesday afternoon. The conference sought to generate commitment and investment toward reaching the U.N. s Millennium Development Goal number five to reduce the number of women dying in childbirth and achieve universal access to prenatal care and family planning services.
Those goals are supposed to be met by 2015, and though progress has been made,…
Hannah Rubenstein
NEW YORK, Jul 9 2010 (IPS) – I was baking a cake when my contractions were two minutes apart, Kristine says, her voice warm with memory, not in a hospital, holding onto a bedside somewhere screaming.
She speaks of her experience tenderly. I felt like giving birth was in my hands, having it at home, she says, not on a doctor s schedule, in somebody else s hands. By the time my daughter was born, I felt like my midwife was a part of my family.
Kristine is one of more than 300,000 women in the United States who choose to give birth with the help of a midwife each year, and one of approximately 40,000 women who give birth at home. Both of her daughters, now aged 22 months and 11 weeks, were attended at birth by a midwife in Kristine s home. If she has …
Keya Acharya
NEW DELHI, Aug 3 2010 (IPS) – Their ongoing negotiations remain shrouded in secrecy, but there are already reports that India and the European Union (EU) will have a free-trade agreement ready by the end of August, and that they will be putting signatures to it before the end of 2010.
Yet it is a potential development that is causing more nervous chatter than joyous jitters here in India, where drug manufacturers in particular have raised concerns over India s trade interests and intellectual property rights (IPR) issues.
India s 7.5-billion-dollar drug industry is among the world s top five bulk medicine producers. It is also among the world s 20 top pharmaceutical exporters, with its export business growing at 17.8 percent per year.
A large segm…
Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 2010 (IPS) – As regulators traced the U.S. salmonella outbreak spread by infected eggs back to the hen feed used at two Iowa farms Thursday, many groups are pointing the blame at the factory farm system from which the eggs and bacteria came.
So far, over 550 million shelled eggs have been recalled after an estimated 1,300 cases of salmonella poisoning across 10 states.
While salmonella may not be the most deadly or dangerous bacterium out there no deaths have so far been tied to the current outbreak its symptoms do include diarrhea, fever and vomiting.
And, as food safety groups are pointing out, the speed at which and distance across which salmonella from eggs has spread in this outbreak are symptoms of a food system overl…
Zofeen Ebrahim* – IPS/TerraViva
KARACHI, Pakistan, Sep 21 2010 (IPS) – For five years, Sana Yasir toiled through medical school and then was awarded at the end with a diploma and a bright future. After completing the required year-long clinical practice, however, Yasir got married and quit the workplace.
The fact that many women doctors opt not to practise medicine raises…
Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Oct 14 2010 (IPS) – All too aware of the Honduran public health system s shortcomings and the great vulnerability of the country s poorest people, women who have beaten breast cancer are stepping up to share their experiences and knowledge in an effort to save more lives.
We are all survivors of this disease, and we decided to organise in order to help other people who have limited resources. Imagine that someone who doesn t have 300 lempiras (about 16 dollars) cannot get a mammogram, and could die as a result, Ingrid Castellanos, president of the Honduran Foundation Against Breast Cancer, told IPS.
For three years, the Foundation has led educational campaigns, forums and walks to bring attention to the issue and raise public awareness abou…
Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 15 2010 (IPS) – Latin America and the Caribbean are taking firm steps against the use of tobacco with the adoption of no smoking laws, bans on advertising, and graphic pictorial warnings on cigarette packets.
But some countries in the region are lagging behind, despite well-organised anti-smoking movements.
While the entire region moves ahead on this, Argentina is way behind on tobacco control measures, Dr. Verónica Schoj, director of the Interamerican Heart Foundation-Argentina (IAHF Argentina), told IPS.
The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) was negotiated under the auspices of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and adopted in 2003. It entered into force in early 2005 and now has 171 parties.
In Latin…