Helen Clark

HANOI, Sep 29 2009 (IPS) – At a tra da (iced tea) stand in Hanoi s Truc Bach area, men in baggy white singlets sit on low plastic stools drinking strong green tea poured from a chipped porcelain tea pot.
A hissing squeal cuts over the revving of a motorbike one street down as one of the men pulls smoke through his thouc lao , a traditional bamboo water pipe. It is popular mainly with older men and farmers, not the city s trendy youth.

The stall owner sells bags of rough tobacco for 2,000 Vietnam dong or less than 10 U.S. cents.

In Vietnamese tobacco is called thouc la , which means medicinal leaves . Given a reported 40,000 die each year from lung cancer, it is not the most apposite name.

Huong who only gave one name has been smoking more t…

Charles Mpaka

LILONGWE, Oct 9 2009 (IPS) – It was, Malawian police say, a routine sweep for criminals at one of the country s busiest border posts. They were looking for criminals.

A Malawian sex worker who says she was forced by police to undergo an HIV test. Credit: Charles Mpaka

But when police arrested 14 prostitutes as part of their search, and then allegedly forcefully tested them for HIV and charged them for deliberately trading in sex while having a sexually…

Sabina Zaccaro

ROME, Nov 16 2009 (IPS) – World farmers are not part of the official delegations at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) food summit on food security that opened here Monday. But they came anyhow to express their views, since, they say, it is their communities that are most impacted by the food crisis.

Hortense Kinkodila of La Via Campesina in Congo Brazaville. Credit: Sabina Zaccaro/IPS

Small-scale producers from the Amazonian rainforest, from Africa, the Pacific islands and th…

Evelyn Matsamura Kiapi

ARUSHA, Dec 4 2009 (IPS) – Although he was born with the virus, it was only 15 years after his birth that Robert* and his family discovered he was HIV-positive.

School children face stigmatisation for being HIV-postive, making it hard for them to receive an education. Credit: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN

His mother, Flavia Kyomukama, was devastated by the discovery.

Kyo…

Ansel Herz

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 17 2010 (IPS) – Millions of dollars in aid are pouring into Haiti. Another head of state visits each day. The misery in Port-Au-Prince dominates the news nearly a week after the 7.0 earthquake struck the heart of this island country.

Children in Cité Soleil, Haiti, play with a kite made from a plastic bag among the shanty town s rubble. Credit: UN Photo/Logan Ab…

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 …