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April 26, 2009)
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23 Apr 2009 20:08:46 GMT
Source: Reuters
They found a sharp
increase in the number of HIV infections in the 10 years between 1997 and 2007,
but said it was likely due to better surveillance. They found 4,593 people with
HIV infection in 2007.
"Among males
classified by HIV transmission category, 82.1 percent of newly diagnosed
infections were attributed to injection-drug use," the team from the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
"Among females
classified by HIV transmission category, 53.7 percent engaged in high-risk
heterosexual conduct."
The epidemic mirrors
changes in
"The recent increase
in reported HIV cases attributed to high-risk heterosexual contact and the
decline in cases attributed to injection-drug use might suggest a shift in
"Migrant women who
lack appropriate job skills or who seek to supplement the family income might
become sex workers, and migrant men living apart from their spouses might become
clients of sex workers," the commentary adds.
Only 102 HIV cases were
reported in
Globally, the AIDS virus
infects 33 million people. It has killed 25 million. There is no cure for the
virus and no vaccine, but drugs can keep patients healthy for years. (Reporting
by Maggie Fox)
20 Apr 2009 01:58:01 GMT
Source: Reuters
BEIJING
Some families don't even
know AIDS treatment programmes exist, it said.
"
As many as 10,000 Chinese
children may be HIV-positive, most because of botched blood transfusions or
transmission from their mothers. They are concentrated in central
In 2005, 9,000 cases of
children contracting HIV from their mothers were reported. Many children with
AIDS die before the age of five, often undiagnosed. Some live too far from
hospitals and others have been turned away from hospitals and schools that fear
contagion from AIDS patients.
The government provides
generic versions of four drugs for front-line treatment, but many patients have
developed resistance.
Asia Catalyst called for
the Chinese government to "fill in the gaps" by extending coverage for
additional medical costs, and providing cheaper second-line drugs. (Reporting by
Lucy Hornby; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Sat Apr 25, 2009 10:52am
EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The
World Bank is set to triple healthcare spending in developing countries to $3.1
billion this year amid signs governments are cutting funding in the midst of a
global economic crisis.
A new World Bank report
said it would increase its healthcare funding from $1 billion last year, with
evidence already that some governments are facing difficulties in affording
HIV/AIDS drug therapies.
Preliminary findings from
a March 2009 World Bank survey in 69 countries, which offer treatment to 3.4
million people on anti-retroviral treatment, shows that eight countries now face
shortages of anti-retroviral drugs or other disruptions to AIDS treatment.
Some 22 countries in
Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and Central Asia, and
HIV/AIDS prevention
programs are also in jeopardy, with some 34 countries, representing 75 percent
of people living with HIV, feeling an impact on prevention programs that target
high-risk groups, including sex workers and drug users.
The World Bank also said
it was doubling financing for health education this year to $4.09 billion.
The Bank's announcement
comes amid an outbreak of a deadly swine flu in
The World Bank this week
said it was boosting investment in countries' social protection programs to $12
billion for 2009-10, including for so-called targeted assistance that offers
poor families cash in return for sending kids to school and to mothers who take
their children for regular checkups.
(Reporting by Lesley
Wroughton; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
by Karin Zeitvogel Karin
Zeitvogel Fri Apr 24, 2:46 pm ET
WASHINGTON
(AFP) – The
"I am here today to
say malaria is a scourge we will end," Rice told a gathering of UN
officials, global faith leaders, a star musician and malaria experts at the
launch of a UN report and new faith-based campaign to wipe out the disease that
claims the lives of 3,000 African children a day.
"President Obama is
committed to making the
"If we could bottle
the energy and expertise in this room, we would surely have malaria on the
run," she said.
Although deaths from
malaria have been halted in places like North America and
The vast majority of
malaria victims are in
"The report shows
that major and measurable successes are being achieved in fighting a disease
that is one of the leading killers of children and a major cause of
poverty," Veneman said.
"This report reminds
us: malaria can become a disease of the past."
In a statement issued by
the White House, Obama hailed the "great strides" that have been made
in "addressing this preventable and treatable illness."
The road to wiping out
malaria deaths by the middle of next decade "begins with ending malaria as
a major public health threat in
And a key weapon in that
battle is the simple mosquito net, the conference was told.
"In 10 African
countries, an estimated 125,000 malaria deaths have been prevented from 2001 to
2007 through increased use of insecticide-treated nets," said Veneman.
That represents one-eighth
of the estimated one million deaths which the World Health Organization (WHO)
blamed on malaria in 2006.
The use of
insecticide-treated nets -- one of the most effective ways of preventing malaria
-- has increased at least threefold since 2000 in 19 of 22 countries in
sub-Saharan
Alongside the report, the
One World Against Malaria Campaign was launched Friday, aiming to tap into local
communities' trust of and easy access to faith leaders and institutions, which
are highly effective at educating people about malaria and providing treatment
and preventive tools, such as mosquito nets.
"Many rural areas
lack health clinics, but they almost always have a mosque or a church,"
said Rice, adding that nearly a third of some 150 non-profit organizations which
the United States has supported in the fight against malaria were faith-based
groups.
Faith-based organizations
are more effective in bringing about the social change that is necessary if the
fight against malaria is to succeed, said Ed Scott, founder and chairman of the
Center for Inter-Faith Action on Global Poverty (CIFA).
"Governments are
effective at organizing spraying campaigns and distributing nets, but getting
people to actually sleep under the nets, to welcome people into their homes to
do spraying, is not so easy," Scott told AFP.
"The people who are
best equipped to encourage social change are the faith-based institutions,"
he said.
In
At the conference, jazz
great Quincy Jones was presented with an award recognizing his lifelong
dedication to humanitarian work.
"He was the one who
inspired me to get involved in malaria," Ray Chambers, special envoy for
malaria to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, told AFP.
"As I learned about
malaria through
Accepting the award as the
fund-raising song he produced -- "We are the World" -- played over
loudspeakers, Jones said simply: "It's a remarkable thing to be on the road
to defeating malaria."
Thu Apr 23, 2:36 AM
Her
marriage to a violent and abusive addict, during which she had to work to feed
their four children, ended when he died of AIDS -- but not before he infected
her with the HIV virus.
"Such a huge
punishment without doing anything wrong crushed me," said 28-year-old Naz
as she sat in a
She was 16 years old when
her labourer father married her off to Ghulam Punjtan, then an apparently
respectable driver for the Pakistani government.
"A few months after
the marriage I discovered Ghulam was a heroin user. I tried to help him kick the
habit but all I got were beatings and abuse," she said.
Opium poppy is grown on
the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, a region infamous as a hideout for Taliban and
Al-Qaeda extremists and branded the most dangerous place in the world for
Americans by US President Barack Obama.
As such, the largely
lawless region is the key transit point for heroin, morphine and hashish heading
west to
As it passes through what
has become the central theatre of the "war on terror," cheap supplies
are left behind for the locals, with one gram costing as little as 80 rupees
(one dollar) in
Here anyone can afford a
hit. And many, like Rubina Naz's husband, do.
Her life lurched from bad
to worse as her husband's addiction spun out of control. When he lost his job,
she took factory work to ensure the family had an income.
"My husband fell
seriously ill three years ago. His father took him to a hospital where tests
confirmed him HIV positive," she said.
But her in-laws didn't
tell Rubina about the disease, and she continued to have sex with her husband.
Weeks after he died, she fell ill and was diagnosed HIV positive.
Because of the enormous
quantities of drugs that pass through the country, abuse and addiction are on
the rise, without the health services and anti-drugs squads needed to adequately
combat the scourge.
Border control duties are
shared with paramilitary troops already struggling with a deadly
counter-insurgency campaign in the tribal belt.
"Even though the
challenges facing a transit country like
The majority of drug users
in
A joint study released
last year by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the Paris Pact Initiative, an
international partnership to counter trafficking and consumption of Afghan
opiates, found that trafficking of Afghan opiates through
Seizures are also on the
rise, it said -- but both figures just reflect an increase in the cultivate of
poppy in
"Trafficking of
opiates into and through
In 2005,
UN experts have said that
the easy availability of narcotics is compounded by general ignorance among
Pakistanis about the consequences of taking them.
A report earlier this
decade found that more than 80 percent of Pakistanis did not believe narcotics
to be harmful, and that many addicts were introduced to drugs by friends and
relatives.
One of those who learnt
the hard way was 25-year-old Shabana.
Introduced to heroin by
classmates, she thought it was fantastic, she said.
It quickly took over her
life as she graduated from smoking to sniffing and, finally, injecting. She lost
weight, dropped out of college, and her family abandoned her.
"I began to take
drugs with my friends for fun, but as time passed it became a matter of life and
death," she said, refusing to give her full name.
A photograph of her a few
years ago shows a tall girl with fair skin and striking features -- barely
recognisable as the girl now lying on a bed in a
"I started smoking
heroin-filled cigarettes and found myself in heaven," she said.
Only an older brother
saved her from the hell that addiction can leads to.
"My brother brought
me here for rehabilitation. For me he is more than my father. I will not take
drugs again, I will not let him down," she said.
Mon Apr 20, 8:04 am ET
DAKAR
The chairman of the appeal
court Bara Niang annulled "the official statement in the case and the
subsequent procedure" and ordered the arrest warrants against the men
lifted.
The men, who were
sentenced by a lower court to eight years in prison for homosexual conduct, were
due to be released immediately, their lawyers said.
Part of a group involved
in HIV/AIDS education, they were convicted of "indecent acts against
nature" and membership of a criminal organisation after their arrests in
December at a private apartment in a
Defence lawyers argued at
the beginning of the appeal last week that the police report on which the
accusations against the men was based relied mainly on anonymous tip-offs. In
addition they said the men were not caught in the act as the prosecution had
suggested during the trial.
The prosecution did not
contest the defence claims.
Homosexuality is illegal
in
The additional three years
in prison was due to the judge in the initial trial ruling that the association
most of the men worked for was actually a cover for recruiting gay men,
according to media reports.
The eight-year sentence
was the highest ever to be handed down in
The defence had protested
the men's detention in a notoriously cramped jail in
By SHAYA TAYEFE MOHAJER,
Associated Press Writer Shaya Tayefe Mohajer, Associated Press Writer Tue Apr 21,
11:25 pm ET
LOS
ANGELES – They have seen each other socially, with their husbands in
Washington or at the United Nations, but the 15 African first ladies met this
time to speak candidly about problems facing women and children on their home
continent.
Some called for improved
nutrition for children and pregnant mothers, clean water, sanitation
infrastructure and inexpensive tools such as insecticide-treated bed nets to
help combat malaria. The first ladies at the gathering Tuesday all called for
better education for girls.
"Developing
partnerships with the education sector will give us significant mileage in
preventing maternal and child mortality in the long term," Kenyan first
lady Ida Odinga said.
The World Health
Organization estimates 121 of every 1,000 children who survive birth in
HIV/AIDS remains one of
the toughest problem faced by
The meeting was
co-sponsored by US Doctors For Africa and African Synergy, a charitable group
formed by 22 first ladies of
"First ladies have a
unique role. They exist outside the political realm to some degree but have a
very powerful role in their communities" as role models to everyday
Africans, said Cora Neumann, an organizer for
"There's never been a
summit focused exclusive to them," Neumann said.
Some of the first ladies
already are health advocates in their countries. First lady Nyama Koroma of
Plans for the event
included a fundraiser with a performance by Natalie Cole and a luncheon hosted
by
Experts from the World
Health Organization, Gates Foundation, U.S. Agency for International
Development, World Bank and RAND were among those who participated in
discussions alongside the first ladies.
23 Apr 2009 16:17:18 GMT
Source: IRIN
Reuters and AlertNet are
not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet
sites. The views expressed are the author's alone.
MAPUTO, 23 April 2009 -
Isabel Maria Francisco, 41, gets up at 4:30 in the morning, eats a light
breakfast and takes a minibus taxi to Chamanculo Hospital on the outskirts of
Mozambique's capital, Maputo, to start work as a patient-expert at 6:00 a.m.
Despite her shyness when
talking to IRIN/PlusNews, a transformation takes place as she tells hundreds of
patients in seminars at the hospital and in communities about the importance of
adhering to their tuberculosis (TB) and HIV drug regimens, and motivates them
never to miss a dose of their medicine. She managed to cure her TB infection
after eight months of treatment in 2004, and started taking antiretroviral (ARV)
medication in 2008.
Like Francisco, other
activists supported by provincial and district health facilities visit remote
areas looking for people with symptoms of TB - a cough that has persisted for
more than three weeks, phlegm, breathlessness and chest pains - and refer them
to the closest health centre, or collect samples and take them to testing
centres by bicycle.
"It's also common to
see TB patients sitting in the shade of a tree in rural districts, taking their
medication together under the watch of a volunteer," said Paula Samo Gudo,
head of the National Tuberculosis Control Programme.
In search of the perfect
treatment
With the support of health
activists and other groups, such as traditional doctors and faith-based
organizations, who work directly in the community, the Health Ministry has
recorded an improvement in detecting TB: 35,672 new cases were registered in
2006, but this rose to 38,044 in 2007.
There is growing concern
over keeping people on treatment, and Gudo said the Ministry of Health would
conduct a survey to determine the scale of treatment defaulting.
A major reason for
treatment interruption is the movement of Mozambican workers to mines in
neighbouring
Interrupting treatment for
TB or HIV can lead to the development of strains of TB that are resistant to
first-line drugs and are much more difficult to diagnose and treat, which are
becoming increasingly common among migrant mine workers and their families.
Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB),
the most highly transmissible form of TB, represents an estimated 3.4 percent of
all new cases of the disease in
The country does not yet
have the capacity to diagnose extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), so when a
patient is suspected of having XDR-TB, samples are sent to be tested in
Médecins Sans Frontières-Switzerland,
an international medical aid organization, provides technical support to the
Ministry of Health to treat TB in
"These are actually
the hardest patients to treat," he commented. "We have to be very
careful, as, since they have failed to react well to initial treatment and many
of them have AIDS, a simple slip-up could be fatal."
Official Health Ministry
figures indicate that some 60 percent of TB patients are co-infected with HIV,
and all the units providing TB treatment now also offer HIV counselling and
testing.