Integrated Regional Information Networks - November 5, 2009
KABUL, 5 November 2009 (IRIN) - Over 50 people have been diagnosed as HIV-positive in Afghanistan over the past nine months, bringing the number of registered cases to 556, according to the National HIV/AIDS Control Programme. Most of them have got the virus through intravenous drug use, Malika Popal, the Programme s
Integrated Regional Information Networks - November 5, 2009
NOUAKCHOTT, 5 November 2009 (IRIN) - People living with HIV in Mauritania are voicing their concerns about the suspension of HIV/AIDS funding by the World Bank and the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. They feel powerless in the face of the decisions, of which they are suffering the consequences.
Integrated Regional Information Networks - November 5, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 5 November 2009 (PlusNews) - Wavering international support for HIV/AIDS efforts is resulting in funding shortfalls that could wipe out a decade of progress in rolling out AIDS treatment, the international medical and humanitarian organization, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), has warned. In a report calle
Integrated Regional Information Networks - November 5, 2009
SELEBI-PHIKWE, 5 November 2009 (PlusNews) - On a recent Wednesday evening, Gillian Otsile, a volunteer at a local NGO, Men Sex and AIDS, approached a group of young men drinking cartons of traditional sorghum beer at a tavern in Selebi-Phikwe, a mining town in northeastern Botswana . In a country where nearly one
Integrated Regional Information Networks - November 4, 2009
MBABANE, 4 November 2009 (PlusNews) - Swaziland not only has the world s highest HIV prevalence rate, it now also has the highest tuberculosis (TB) rate, but health officials warn that not enough is being done to integrate TB and HIV services. Last week the Ministry of Health and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the int
Integrated Regional Information Networks - November 3, 2009
GABORONE, 3 November 2009 (PlusNews) - Raging hormones, peer pressure and coming to terms with a changing body image - growing up is difficult enough without the added burden of living with HIV, and keeping it hidden from friends and classmates. Being a teenager is very hard; you have to keep up with the changing life,
Integrated Regional Information Networks - November 3, 2009
NAIROBI, 3 November 2009 (PlusNews) - Three years after being diagnosed with HIV, Alice Mworia, 28, went for a routine medical check-up during which she told the nurse she had noticed an unusual vaginal discharge; a test revealed she had pre-cancerous lesions on her cervix that could develop into cancer if untreated.
Integrated Regional Information Networks - November 2, 2009
MASERU, 2 November 2009 (PlusNews) - Having more than one sexual relationship at the same time is driving the spread of HIV in small landlocked Lesotho . The health sector has long suspected this, but a new report by the National AIDS Commission (NAC), in partnership with UNAIDS and the Minis
Integrated Regional Information Networks - November 2, 2009
NAIROBI, 2 November 2009 (PlusNews) - A 22-year-old ban on people infected with HIV entering the US was officially lifted on 2 November, with the new rules taking effect in 60 days. AIDS activists have hailed the move as a major coup in the fight against stigma. This comes as very good news for us, Michael Angaga, regi
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 30, 2009
NAIROBI, 30 October 2009 (PlusNews) - The use of mid-level health workers rather than doctors to prescribe antiretroviral treatment (ART), a strategy called task-shifting, has enabled Mozambique to triple the number of facilities providing medication within six months, according to a new study. The report, publishe
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 30, 2009
WINDHOEK, 30 October 2009 (PlusNews) - In Onamutenya village, northern Namibia , the Shigwedha household leaves their homestead at the crack of dawn to make the monthly four-hour walk to fetch antiretroviral (ARV) medication from the local clinic. Wilbard Shigwedha, 9, who is HIV-positive and an old hand at this early-
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 29, 2009
NAIROBI, 29 October 2009 (PlusNews) - Malawi s successful use of a well-known tuberculosis (TB) treatment system to scale up antiretroviral treatment (ART) for HIV could improve chronic disease management in other African nations, experts say. Directly observed treatment short course (DOTS), has been used to successful
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 27, 2009
NAIROBI, 27 October 2009 (PlusNews) - Replacing manual data with electronic health records would significantly improve the quality of care and enable African HIV treatment programmes to be scaled up more efficiently, say the authors of a new article on the subject. Talkin About a Revolution , published in the latest ed
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 27, 2009
DAR ES SALAAM, 27 October 2009 (PlusNews) - HIV-positive Tanzanians are not taking advantage of the availability of life-prolonging anti-retroviral medication in hospitals around the country, says a senior government official. We have an adequate supply of ARVs in our hospitals and other outlets, but there are few peop
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 26, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 26 October 2009 (PlusNews) - The billions of donor dollars spent on combating HIV/AIDS in the last decade, often at the expense of other fatal diseases, have done little to strengthen weak national health systems, some global health experts argue. On the contrary, say others, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has spa
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 23, 2009
ADDIS ABABA, 23 October 2009 (PlusNews) - With non-skilled jobs in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, paying as little as US$16 per month, the financial incentives to engage in commercial sex work are overwhelming - earning 30 times a domestic worker s salary. Many of the women entering into sex work in Addis are rura
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 22, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 22 October 2009 (PlusNews) - The recent news that for the first time an HIV vaccine had shown some protective effect generated widespread excitement, until it emerged that the results were based on the most promising of three different analyses of the trial findings. The trial team in Bangkok, Thailand s
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 22, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 22 October 2009 (PlusNews) - The availability of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment and legislation prohibiting discrimination have helped turn HIV/AIDS into just another chronic disease, but an HIV-positive status can still be an obstacle to getting a loan or buying insurance. Most life insurance companies i
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 21, 2009
MBABANE, 21 October 2009 (PlusNews) - A search for ways to curb the spread of HIV in Swaziland has led to a public debate on legalizing sex work, which would have been unheard of 10 years ago in this poor, food-insecure country. The woman at the centre of the debate is Senator Thuli Mswane, who is also director of Hosp
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 20, 2009
DURBAN, 20 October 2009 (PlusNews) - Just over three years ago, a group of HIV-infected inmates at Westville Correctional Centre, near the South African port city of Durban, won a High Court battle that forced the government to provide them with life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. Judge Thumba Pillay ordere
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 19, 2009
NAIROBI, 19 October 2009 (PlusNews) - Julia Nyaberi s* clinic in Majengo, a slum in Kenya s capital, Nairobi, caters to one type of client only - pregnant women seeking abortions. Young women writhe in pain on the floor of the poorly lit house; the neighbours all know what happens here and have become immune to the moa
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 16, 2009
NAIROBI, 16 October 2009 (PlusNews) - A draft bill before the Ugandan parliament that seeks to impose stricter sanctions on homosexuality would drive men who have sex with men further underground, making it even more difficult for them to access HIV services, according to AIDS activists. According to Uganda s New Visio
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 15, 2009
NAIROBI, 15 October 2009 (PlusNews) - As traditional sources of financial aid dry up, new and innovative approaches to fundraising may be the best hope of generating money for HIV/AIDS efforts. Fundraiser UNITAID has collected an estimated US$1.2 billion since 2006 for the treatment of HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, ma
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 14, 2009
LUSAKA, 14 October 2009 (PlusNews) - The human rights record of the Zambian military is being tested in court by two former air force officers who allege they were fired for being HIV positive. Stanley Kingaipe and Charles Chookole claim they were tested and treated for HIV without their knowledge, and then discharged
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 14, 2009
GULU, 14 October 2009 (PlusNews) - The imminent closure of internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in northern Uganda is causing concern among HIV-positive residents, who fear they may not have access to vital health services when they return to their villages. The decommissioning of the IDP camps started in the regio
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 14, 2009
BAMAKO, 14 October 2009 (IRIN) - Parents are supposed to outlive their children, or so thought the grandmothers sitting in the children s playroom at Gabriel Touré hospital in Bamako, capital of Mali . They had all lost their children to AIDS-related illnesses, and met each other when they brought their HIV-positive gr
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 13, 2009
HARARE, 13 October 2009 (PlusNews) - Janet Mpilime, 32, captain of the ARV Swallows, an all-woman football team based in the informal settlement of Epworth, 10km east of the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, has just led her team to a 2-1 victory over Sporting ART. Wearing a football kit similar to that of Spain s number-one
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 12, 2009
NAIROBI, 12 October 2009 (PlusNews) - Kenya is facing a nationwide shortage of anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs as a court case continues to hold up the purchase of the life-prolonging medication. The High Court in the capital, Nairobi, barred the Ministry of Health from procuring ARVs after a consortium of drug suppliers c
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 9, 2009
UMSINGA, 9 October 2009 (PlusNews) - Three years ago, the Church of Scotland Hospital at Tugela Ferry, in the rural Umsinga area of South Africa s KwaZulu-Natal Province, was the focus of international media attention as the epicentre of a deadly outbreak of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB). It was report
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 8, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 8 October 2009 (PlusNews) - In the context of sub-Saharan Africa s HIV/AIDS epidemic, women have often been characterized as the victims and men as the perpetrators incapable of sticking to one partner or taking responsibility for their sexual health. But what if men were victims of the social norms that
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 8, 2009
NAIROBI, 8 October 2009 (PlusNews) - A row between NGOs involved in the fight against HIV in Kenya could result in the country losing out on money from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. A group of NGOs under the umbrella group, the Kenya Consortium to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, is accu
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 8, 2009
SAURI, 8 October 2009 (PlusNews) - Five years ago, pregnant women in the village of Sauri, in western Kenya s Nyanza Province, had access to just one rundown and poorly staffed sub-district hospital. Few chose to use it, instead giving birth at home, risking complications during delivery and, for those living with HIV,
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 8, 2009
MASERU, 8 October 2009 (IRIN) - The volunteer children s counsellor hangs up, visibly distraught: the latest call to Lesotho s toll-free child helpline was from a nurse in a remote village in the northern district of Butha–Buthe, where she had just helped an abandoned, mentally handicapped 16-year-old girl give birth.
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 6, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 6 October 2009 (PlusNews) - The rate of HIV infection among pregnant women in South Africa has remained stubbornly high at around 29 percent for the third year running, according to government figures released on 5 October. The 2008 National Antenatal HIV and Syphilis Prevalence Survey - based on blood sa
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 5, 2009
MBABANE, 5 October 2009 (PlusNews) - Swaziland s Ministry of Health and Human Services aims to provide circumcision to 80 percent of men aged 15 to 24 in the next five years, in response to the surging number of men requesting the procedure to reduce their risk of HIV. Circumcision was widely practiced during the 19th
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 2, 2009
ADDIS ABABA, 2 October 2009 (PlusNews) - The life of a domestic worker in Ethiopia is rarely an easy one. Often escaping a deeply impoverished existence in the rural areas, these women find themselves in employment hundreds of miles away from their hometowns as maids - or serategnas in the national language, Amharic.
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 1, 2009
MBABANE, 1 October 2009 (IRIN) - Simmering animosity and tension between non-governmental organizations and the conservative authorities of donor-dependent Swaziland are threatening to boil over, bringing legislation that could restrict the activities of civil society. It has been building for some years. The deeper Sw
Integrated Regional Information Networks - October 1, 2009
NAIROBI, 1 October 2009 (PlusNews) - More than half of HIV-positive pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries continue to go without life-saving anti-retroviral medication that could prevent transmission of the virus to their unborn children, according to a new report, Towards Universal Access. Although there
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 30, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 30 September 2009 (PlusNews) - More than four million people globally are now on antiretroviral (ARV) treatment - a 10-fold jump in five years - but this is still less than half the people living with HIV who need it. A new report, Towards Universal Access, was released on 30 September by the
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 30, 2009
LUSAKA, 30 September 2009 (PlusNews) - How do you tell your boyfriend that you re a 20-year-old virgin living with HIV? Zambian Chanda Nsofwa was born infected and is now at an age where she has to deal with this and other ticklish questions about sex and HIV. We know that some of these children are already having sex
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 30, 2009
NAIROBI, 30 September 2009 (PlusNews) - The Kenyan government has acquired a new condom testing machine that it says will guarantee all condoms entering the country are of high quality; the move is intended to restore public confidence following the recent banning of a brand of imported condoms deemed defective by the
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 30, 2009
NAIROBI, 30 September 2009 (IRIN) - Africa s orphans will experience a richer, more wholesome childhood if they are raised within a family rather than in a childcare institution, according to speakers at a conference on family-based care for children in Nairobi. We need to heed the cry of a child s heart for an adult w
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 29, 2009
HARARE, 29 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Zimbabwe s adult HIV prevalence rate is continuing its downward trend, showing a drop from 14.1 percent in 2008 to 13.7 percent in 2009, according to new estimates released by the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare. The 2009 Antenatal Clinic (ANC) Surveillance Survey, based on b
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 29, 2009
KAMPALA, 29 September 2009 (PlusNews) - The Ugandan parliament s house committee on HIV/AIDS and related matters has appealed to the government to increase its funding for HIV, especially as infection rates remain high and the country continues to experience frequent shortages of anti-retroviral medicines. As a committ
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 28, 2009
MATHEBE, 28 September 2009 (IRIN) - Despite her twisted spine and cataracts, Maphoka Tsolo, 91, still managed to lead the way down the steep narrow path behind her stone house in Mathebe, a small village in Mafeteng district, eastern Lesotho , determined to show why her orphaned great-grandchildren deserved the money f
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 25, 2009
KAMPALA, 25 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Ugandan health workers ill-treatment of HIV-positive people could adversely affect the access of these patients to treatment, a new study by local NGO Uganda Network for Law Ethics and HIV/AIDS (UGANET) has revealed. The baseline survey, HIV/AIDS and Human Rights Violations in Ug
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 24, 2009
NAIROBI, 24 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Kenya s older citizens are not safe from the HIV/AIDS epidemic, according to the final report of the 2007 Kenya AIDS Indicator Survey. The survey, released on 24 September, also showed that the country s epidemic varies greatly from region to region, while HIV testing remains low
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 24, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 24 September 2009 (PlusNews) - A six-year clinical trial in Thailand has yielded the first ever evidence that an AIDS vaccine can provide some protection against HIV infection. The trial team in Bangkok, Thailand s capital announced on 24 September that rates of HIV infection were 31 percent lower in tria
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 23, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 23 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Multiple partnerships may not be as common in South Africa as previously thought, according to a study presented at the recent AIDS Research Symposium at the University the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. Saul Johnson, managing director of Health & Development Africa (HD
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 22, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 22 September 2009 (PlusNews) - South Africa s antiretroviral (ARV) treatment programme has been pushed into crisis by poor budgeting decisions, financial mismanagement and a lack of monitoring and evaluation of HIV programmes. Rapid expansion of the ARV programme in 2008 slowed significantly in 2009, said
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 18, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 18 September 2009 (PlusNews) - The number of HIV-infected children in southern Africa who survive into adolescence without treatment is greater than previously thought, and will keep increasing for years to come. These are the findings of a study estimating the scale and likely course of the HIV epidemic
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 18, 2009
NAIROBI, 18 September 2009 (PlusNews) - AIDS activists around the world have welcomed a new UN General Assembly resolution to create a single agency to promote the rights and wellbeing of women, which they say is good news for women, who are bearing the brunt of the global AIDS pandemic. This is a historic opportunity
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 18, 2009
BUSIA, Alloys Emokori, 55, is a recovering alcoholic in the western Kenyan town of Busia, near the Kenya- Uganda border. Diagnosed with HIV in 2004, Emokori has lost five wives. He told IRIN/PlusNews about his battle to overcome alcoholism. My life revolved around alcohol and women. Due to alcohol, I lost four women wh
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 17, 2009
NAIROBI, 17 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Carrying placards that read, Huwezi Die Uki Abstain , Swahili slang for You won t die if you abstain [from sex] , more than 3,000 young people recently marched through Nairobi in an effort to re-energize the campaign to keep teens from having sex too early. But beyond the placard
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 17, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 17 September 2009 (PlusNews) - A multi-country campaign in Africa is using cell phone technology to expose stock-outs of essential medicines at public health facilities and put pressure on governments to address the issue. Stop the Stock-outs was launched earlier this year in Kenya ,
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 16, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 16 September 2009 (PlusNews) - South Africa is not on track to meet its target of reaching 80 percent of people in need of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment by 2011, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi told reporters on 15 September. A five-year National Strategic Plan (NSP), adopted in 2007, set ambitious targ
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 15, 2009
KAMPALA, 15 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Condoms have been part of Uganda s HIV prevention strategy since the 1980s, but a new study shows that only a quarter of sexually active Ugandans consistently use them. According to a baseline survey on HIV/AIDS carried out by the Uganda Network for Law Ethics and HIV/AIDS (UGANE
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 15, 2009
MBABANE, 15 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Average life expectancy in Swaziland has plummeted from around 60 years in the 1990s to just over 30 years today. Few would deny that HIV/AIDS is largely to blame, but the reasons why the epidemic has devastated this tiny, southern African country more than any other are less cle
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 14, 2009
HARARE, 14 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Zimbabwe s National AIDS Council (NAC) has purchased US$890,000 worth of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs following allegations that it was abusing funds generated by a three-percent tax on income known as the AIDS levy. The government body charged with coordinating anti-AIDS efforts ha
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 14, 2009
BUSIA, 14 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Discussing the prospect of death is taboo in many African cultures, but a new Ugandan programme is encouraging people living with HIV to secure their families futures by leaving wills. Orphans are often left behind, groping in the dark without knowing what they are entitled to, sa
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 11, 2009
ADDIS ABABA, 11 September 2009 (PlusNews) - The Ethiopian government is using modern technology and the country s New Year celebrations as an opportunity to encourage citizens and their families to get tested for HIV. New Year, new life! Test for HIV, test with your partner, get your children tested and brighten the fu
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 11, 2009
PRAIA, 11 September 2009 (PlusNews) - People living with HIV in Cape Verde are worried that the HIV/AIDS programme may be disrupted by a change in funders. The World Bank pulled out in June after supporting the programme for seven years, and a US$5.3 million grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Ma
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 10, 2009
KAMPALA, 10 September 2009 (PlusNews) - A large supply of paediatric antiretroviral medication donated by the Clinton Foundation could expire in Ugandan medical stores because of low demand, a senior health official says. There are few children who are receiving the drugs; they are going to expire by March [2010], sai
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 10, 2009
MAPUTO, 10 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Victor, 25, a self-employed mechanic, opens the hood of one of several cars crammed into his back yard in Maputo, the Mozambican capital. He has a reputation for being a good mechanic, but few people in the neighbourhood realize his inspiration comes from taking drugs. I can t wor
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 10, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 10 September 2009 (PlusNews) - If you haven t seen a female condom lately, you re not alone. More than 15 years after the only female-controlled method to prevent HIV was introduced, it is still largely marginalized and inaccessible. IRIN/PlusNews has compiled a list illustrating female condom distributio
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 10, 2009
NAIROBI, 10 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Kenyan AIDS authorities are struggling to restore public confidence in condoms after an alarming news report recently showed locally stocked brands to be defective. KTN, a local TV station, showed the condoms, purchased from vendors in the capital, Nairobi, being tested by the Ke
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 9, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 9 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Many countries struggle to pay for antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for all those who need them, but a new study has found that some nations are paying up to three times more for the life-prolonging medicines than others with similar HIV prevalence and income levels. In 2007
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 8, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 8 September 2009 (PlusNews) - The South African National AIDS Council (SANAC), long inactive, is showing signs of life. The revived secretariat moved out of the Department of Health and acquired a new CEO on 1 September, and recently flexed some of its new-found muscle when it recommended that government
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 8, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 8 September 2009 (PlusNews) - In South Africa a generation of children who were born HIV-positive is reaching young adulthood, but they are not getting the type of message or psychosocial support they need from the public sector. These kids are getting older on treatment and surviving on treatment; they r
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 7, 2009
OUAGADOUGOU, 7 September 2009 (IRIN) - Torrential storms that have led to at least seven reported deaths have also shut down Burkina Faso s main hospital, interrupting dialysis treatments, preventing HIV diagnoses and overloading health centres ill-equipped to take on surgical cases. The Health Minister Seydou Bouda to
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 7, 2009
BUSIA, 7 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Christopher Orodi admits he has a pretty serious drinking problem; the weekly support group he attends not only helps keep him off the bottle, it keeps him on his life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) medication. I realised that if I did not stop drinking, I was going to die from HIV
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 7, 2009
MAKUENI, 7 September 2009 (PlusNews) - More than 200,000 Kenyans now have access to free antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, but in a country that experiences frequent food shortages, drugs are rarely enough to keep HIV-positive patients healthy. IRIN/PlusNews visited the homestead of Mbula Waema, an HIV-positive widow living
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 4, 2009
BOSSO, 4 September 2009 (IRIN) - Sex workers crossing into Niger s east, as well as busy border traffic of livestock breeders, businessmen and migrants, boost the risk of HIV infections in Diffa region, according to the government. But despite the region having the country s highest recorded HIV prevalence rate, there
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 4, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 4 September 2009 (PlusNews) - An attempt to help educators around the world develop sex-education programmes as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among young people has become bogged down in controversy. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultura
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 4, 2009
NAIROBI, 4 September 2009 (PlusNews) - The search for an AIDS vaccine has taken a step forward with the discovery of two powerful new antibodies that can cripple the HI virus. Researchers led by the International AIDS Vaccine Institute (IAVI) said the two new antibodies revealed what might be an Achilles heel of the vi
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 3, 2009
NAIROBI, 3 September 2009 (PlusNews) - Shortages of medical staff in Uganda mean clinical officers, nurses and midwives are prescribing life-prolonging antiretroviral therapy (ART) without proper training, a new study reveals. The study, conducted by the Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) of Uganda s Makerere Universi
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 3, 2009
NAIROBI, 3 September 2009 (PlusNews) - AIDS activists have praised a decision by the Indian patent office to reject patent applications for two life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, allowing Indian manufacturers to keep on making and exporting generic versions. This is fantastic news that will save countless live
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 2, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 2 September 2009 (PlusNews) - The people of sub-Saharan Africa, already bearing the brunt of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, are also likely to be worst hit by the effects of climate change, but until now AIDS and climate change experts and activists have largely remained in separate camps. Now, change migh
Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 1, 2009
LUSAKA, 1 September 2009 (PlusNews) - The HIV/AIDS epidemic may have contributed to the high incidence of cervical cancer in Zambia , where the number of cases is the second highest in sub-Saharan Africa, and HIV prevalence is one of the highest in the world. Women infected with HIV are thought to be three to five time
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 31, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 31 August 2009 (PlusNews) - A new book has broken the silence over what really goes during traditional male circumcisions in South Africa , and the author, a former initiate, says that if is to be made safer and punted to prevent HIV, circumcision as many know it will have to change. Thando Mgqolozana
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 31, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 31 August 2009 (PlusNews) - The debate about the safest and healthiest infant feeding choice for HIV-positive mothers in the developing world should be over, according to one of South Africa s leading HIV/AIDS researchers. The time has come to confront the obvious dangers of infant malnutrition and mortal
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 31, 2009
NAIROBI, 31 August 2009 (PlusNews) - People living with HIV in Kenya do not have adequate access to family planning services, even though most HIV-infected women do not want children in the immediate future. A recent study by the reproductive health NGO, Family Health International (FHI), in the Nakuru district of Rift
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 28, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 28 August 2009 (PlusNews) - South Africa s Free State Province is again experiencing a crisis in the delivery of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, with understaffed clinics, erratic drug supplies and long waiting lists preventing many dangerously ill patients from accessing the life-prolonging drugs, accord
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 28, 2009
HYDERABAD, 28 August 2009 (PlusNews) - Cricket is more than just a game in Pakistan ; it s an obsession. So when a team of HIV-positive players stepped onto the wicket recently for their first match, the stakes were even higher. For me, cricket has always been a passion and today, after winning this match, I feel good.
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 28, 2009
NAIROBI, 28 August 2009 (PlusNews) - A more effective antiretroviral (ARV) regimen for pregnant HIV-positive Kenyan women lies at the heart of new national guidelines for the prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission {PMTCT). Now, a combination of three ARVs - zidovudine ( AZT ),
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 27, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 27 August 2009 (PlusNews) - One in six HIV-positive people in the world live in South Africa , which is also experiencing a parallel tuberculosis (TB) epidemic, but years of weak leadership, poor policy implementation and inadequate resources have undermined efforts to control the twin health emergencies.
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 27, 2009
KIGALI, 27 August 2009 (PlusNews) - A new centre providing care and support to children living with HIV in Rwanda is the first step in rolling out child-centred HIV services across the country, according to government officials. On 21 August the Integrated Paediatric Centre at Kibagabaga Hospital, in the capital, Kigal
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 26, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 26 August 2009 (PlusNews) - Each year in South Africa , an estimated 76,600 women, newborns and children die from preventable and treatable causes, putting the country among only a dozen in the world that have backtracked on the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing child mortality by 2015. Al
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 26, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 26 August 2009 (PlusNews) - The days of South African men waiting at the kerbside while girlfriends and wives queue at the clinic for antenatal visits are gone; a new programme aims to create a new idea of what makes a man, and turn the tables on the old one. Starting on 29 August the Brothers for Life c
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 26, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 26 August 2009 (PlusNews) - A health system ill-equipped to cope with one of the most severe HIV epidemics in the world together with crushing burdens of non-communicable disease, maternal and child mortality and soaring rates of death from violence and injury. This is the picture that emerges from Health
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 21, 2009
NAIROBI, 21 August 2009 (PlusNews) - New research showing that the tuberculosis vaccine Bacille Calmette Guerin (BCG) can be deadly to HIV-positive infants means Kenya s health ministry will have to redouble its efforts to test pregnant mothers and their infants for HIV, senior health officials say. The South African s
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 20, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 20 August 2009 (PlusNews) - The South African National AIDS Council (SANAC), long perceived by activists as largely dormant, awakened to make groundbreaking recommendations to government earlier this month. Dr Nono Simelela, who takes over as the new CEO on 1 September, spoke to IRIN/PlusNews about where
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 19, 2009
NIAMEY, 19 August 2009 (IRIN) - Despite a two-year-old law in Niger penalizing discrimination against people infected with HIV, seropositive women say they still receive substandard health care, are denied employment and risk losing their children because of their status. When a woman is divorced as a result of her HIV
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 19, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 19 August 2009 (PlusNews) - Dear Abby, Dear Dolly, Ask Amy - advice columns are always popular in the print media, and South Africa is no exception. The Agony Aunts daily solve problems about love, lust, romance and other relationships, but one thing is consistently left off the page - HIV. Flip throu
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 19, 2009
NAIROBI, 19 August 2009 (PlusNews) - The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is one of Uganda s key health partners; over the past six years it has disbursed more than US$164 million in programme grants. But the fund s relationship with the government has not always run smoothly; in 2005, the discovery
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 19, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 19 August 2009 (IRIN) - The return of cholera to Zimbabwe is not a matter of if, but when, said Rian van de Braak, head of mission of the medical NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). In an interview published on its website on 19 August, Van de Braak commented, The threat is definitely not over. Everyone e
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 19, 2009
BULAWAYO, 19 August 2009 (IRIN) - On the last Sunday of every month, Zwodwa Mpika, 52, puts on her blue dress and matching brimless cap, the uniform of the burial society she belongs to, and sets off for the meeting. She has rarely missed a gathering since her husband died in 2006, and her regular attendance has earned
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 18, 2009
OUAGADOUGOU, 18 August 2009 (IRIN) - Health authorities estimate that just 10 percent of HIV-infected children in Burkina Faso are taking life-saving drugs while thousands of at-risk children are undiagnosed because their families refuse to have them tested. The Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS estimated that as of 2006
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 18, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 18 August 2009 (PlusNews) - With South Africa s sixth H1N1 death confirmed on Monday, the government has issued a warning to people living with HIV, as well as other chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes, to seek medical treatment early if they have even mild symptoms of the new influenza, al
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 18, 2009
AMURIA, 18 August 2009 (PlusNews) - HIV-positive patients in drought-hit eastern Uganda are abandoning their anti-retroviral regimens in droves, and leaders fear that unless more food becomes available, they will soon be dealing with drug resistance and death. In our assessment in Teso [a sub-region in eastern Uganda],
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 17, 2009
ADDIS ABABA, 17 August 2009 (PlusNews) - When the father of Fasika Lemma s daughter died seven years ago, she decided to get tested for HIV; the results revealed she was indeed HIV-positive, but worse was to come. A year after, I learned it could be transmitted to my daughter through breastfeeding, Fasika told IRIN/Plu
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 14, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 14 August 2009 (PlusNews) - William Maiko, 18, waiting at the Bophelo Pele Male Circumcision Centre in the township of Orange Farm, about 45km south of Johannesburg, South Africa , is amazingly composed for someone about to have his foreskin surgically removed. I ve heard we must come and circumcise so th
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 14, 2009
KIGALI, 14 August 2009 (PlusNews) - The tiny nation of Rwanda has emerged as the unlikely star of central Africa in making progress towards achieving universal access to HIV treatment, prevention and care. More than 70 percent of its people who need life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) drugs have access to them, preven
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 13, 2009
CHITOBE, 13 August 2009 (PlusNews) - Many people living with HIV in Mozambique s Manica Province, near the Zimbabwe border, suffer more as a result of stigma than from a lack of medication, hunger or poverty. I lost my home. My family isolated me and even went so far as to separate the utensils I used; they were afraid
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 13, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 13 August 2009 (PlusNews) - Long treks, hard living and poor pay - the life of a migrant farm worker is not easy, and can even be downright risky. But a new programme aims to reduce that risk, at least when it comes to HIV. The International Organisation for Migration and USAID on Thursday launched Ripfum
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 12, 2009
NAIROBI, 12 August 2009 (PlusNews) - Hundreds of lay health care workers are deployed in Kenyan communities to fill the gap caused by severe staff shortages in the health sector - but could they be doing more harm than good? Some lay health workers even dispense antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, but health experts have warne
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 12, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 12 August 2009 (IRIN) - Zimbabwe and international donors have had a long but uneasy relationship in the fight against HIV/AIDS - especially when it came to the money. Despite having one of the world s highest HIV prevalence rates, Zimbabwean proposals to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Ma
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 12, 2009
BALI, 12 August 2009 (PlusNews) - An estimated 50 million women in Asia are at risk of contracting HIV from male partners who engage in risky sexual behaviours, says a new UNAIDS report released at the 9th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP) in Bali, Indonesia
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 12, 2009
BAMYAN, 12 August 2009 (IRIN) - When the first and only midwifery school was opened in 2004 in Bamyan city, central Afghanistan , not a single application was received for the 18-month course. Today, the school has to turn down dozens of applications from women all over the province because it cannot accommodate more t
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 11, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 11 August 2009 (PlusNews) - HIV is the main cause of death among pregnant women in Johannesburg, South Africa s most populous city, according to a five-year study of maternal mortality at one of the city s largest public hospitals. The study, published in the August 2009 issue of Obstetrics and Gynaecolog
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 10, 2009
KAMPALA, 10 August 2009 (PlusNews) - HIV activists are demanding that Uganda s Ministry of Health refund an estimated US$15 million earmarked for purchasing antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, which was instead used to buy shares in a local drug factory and pay health workers. For the ministry to divert funds from buying drugs
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 7, 2009
MASENO, 7 August 2009 (PlusNews) - Jennifer Omasa had lost three children when using traditional birth attendants, so when she fell pregnant a fourth time, she opted to visit her local antenatal clinic in the town of Maseno, western Kenya , and now has an eight-month-old baby girl named Zawadi, Swahili for gift. He
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 7, 2009
NAIROBI, 7 August 2009 (PlusNews) - The Clinton Foundation has announced agreements with two drug companies to bring the cost of second-line antiretrovirals (ARVs) to under US$500 per person annually and reduce the cost of a key tuberculosis (TB) drug to $1 per dose. Today s announcement will help ensure we can sustain
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 7, 2009
ADDIS ABABA, 7 August 2009 (PlusNews) - Simay Muluneh, 32, who lives in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia , will always wonder what might have been. Her husband died of AIDS-related complications 10 years ago, but a year after his death discovered that she, too, was HIV-positive after applying for a visa to work in
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 7, 2009
NAIROBI, 7 August 2009 (IRIN) - A Kenyan horticultural scientist hopes that a group of leafy green plants, previously dismissed by some as weeds, may have a significant impact on reducing malnutrition and poverty levels in Kenya. Mary Abukutsa-Onyango has identified six local greens - described as African indigenous ve
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 5, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 5 August 2009 (PlusNews) - More South Africans could access HIV treatment earlier if government approves recommendations by the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC), a move that could finally align national policy with international best practice. Rebecca Hodes, director of policy, communications a
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 5, 2009
MAPUTO, 5 August 2009 (PlusNews) - Thousands of people took to the streets of Maputo, capital of Mozambique , and the country s second city, Beira this week, to protest the government s closure of day care hospitals for HIV-positive patients. In Maputo, activists handed Health Minister Paulo Ivo Garrido a memorandum sl
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 3, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 3 August 2009 (PlusNews) - Nowhere is the goal of universal access to prevention, treatment and care more daunting than in South Africa , where an estimated 5.5 million people are living with HIV - the largest burden in the world. While South Africa now has the largest treatment programme in the world, wi
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 3, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 3 August 2009 (PlusNews) - While a number of countries in southern Africa have made great strides in improving access to antiretroviral (ARV) treatment for HIV-infected adults, progress in rolling out treatment for HIV-positive infants and children has lagged behind. Namibia is a notable exception.
Integrated Regional Information Networks - August 3, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 3 August 2009 (PlusNews) - A Johannesburg high school recently did something that for years has only been whispered behind closed doors in education circles - voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) for HIV was offered to students. Last week, members of the senior class at St Mary s, a private high school
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 31, 2009
KAMPALA, 31 July 2009 (PlusNews) - The government is investigating whether a nationwide shortage of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs led to the reported deaths of HIV-positive people in northern Uganda this month. Health workers in Apac district reported that at least 17 people known to have been HIV-positive died over the p
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 31, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, Jessica Standish-White is a senior student at St Mary s, a prestigious girls school in one of Johannesburg s more affluent suburbs, where she organized an HIV testing drive. Standish-White, who is going to the University of Cape Town next year, told IRIN/PlusNews that some of her peers still think HIV can
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 31, 2009
MBABANE, 31 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Swaziland s correctional services are using the confinement of prisoners as an opportunity to reach this high-risk group with HIV testing and treatment. Our goal is to test every prisoner in the system, said Ann Motsa, who is running the first HIV testing and counselling centre to be
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 30, 2009
NAIROBI, 30 July 2009 (PlusNews) - At the community centre in Mukuru, a slum in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, teenagers spend hours engrossed in a video game, but they are not battling other-worldly forces with super-human weapons; instead, they are finding their way through a familiar-looking city, trying to negotiate
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 30, 2009
NAIROBI, 30 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Several African governments have launched a drive to strengthen the continent s laboratories to a standard that will enable them to gain accreditation from the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO). Labs are vital to patient care - they are used for monitoring, diagnosis, tre
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 29, 2009
MAPUTO, 29 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Less than 7 percent of HIV-positive children in Mozambique are receiving antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, according to a new study. A 2009 HIV/AIDS Demographic Impact Study by the National Statistics Institute (with the Portuguese acronym INE), found that about 150,000 children between
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 29, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 29 July 2009 (PlusNews) - A government initiative to boost local HIV/AIDS research was launched in South Africa on Tuesday amid concerns about dwindling international funding for health research. The South African HIV/AIDS Research (and Innovation) Platform (SHARP), with backing from the Department of Sci
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 29, 2009
HARARE, 29 July 2009 (IRIN) - President Robert Mugabe has raised the spectre of banning the operations of non-governmental organizations in Zimbabwe , a threat he implemented in 2008 after the worst maize harvest on record. We have now a phenomenon of NGOs, or shall I call them phenomena, for they really are a type of
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 28, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 28 July 2009 (PlusNews) - The goal of achieving universal access to treatment by 2010 has preoccupied the global AIDS community in recent years, but a new report warns that not preparing for the changing treatment needs of people living with HIV will doom the sustainability of treatment programmes in deve
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 28, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 28 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Antiretroviral (ARV) treatment can be delivered safely and effectively in remote or resource-limited settings where regular laboratory monitoring cannot be carried out, according to findings from a study presented at the 5th International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Path
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 24, 2009
BLANTYRE, 24 July 2009 (PlusNews) - A year after the female condom was re-launched in Malawi amid high hopes it would empower women to have more control in their sexual relationships and better protection against sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and unwanted pregnancies, usage has remained relatively low. The
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 24, 2009
HARARE, 24 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Providing male circumcision as an HIV prevention measure in Zimbabwe s state hospitals is off to a very slow start, and experts cite the country s crippled health sector as the main reason for the delay. Although about 140 circumcisions were successfully performed at four hospitals as
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 23, 2009
CAPE TOWN, 23 July 2009 (IRIN) - Graca Machel, founder and president of the Foundation for Community Development and an outspoken HIV/AIDS activist, closed the 5th International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Cape Town, South Africa , on Wednesday with a rousing call to p
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 22, 2009
CAPE TOWN, 22 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Alcohol and drug addiction are major drivers of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in many parts of the world, but for political and ideological reasons, scientists and clinicians have tended to shy away from this area of HIV research, while governments and donors have been reluctant to fund pro
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 22, 2009
NAIROBI, 22 July 2009 (PlusNews) - When Doreen Aluoch*, 32, got a job as a chef at a leading hotel in Kenya four years ago, she was told she had to have a medical examination before she could be employed, but she did not know that the routine checkup would include an HIV test. I was taken to the clinic and my stool, ur
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 22, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 22 July 2009 (PlusNews) - South Africa s tuberculosis (TB) programme is improving: fewer people are defaulting on treatment, and the cure rate has increased, says a joint review by government and the World Health Organization (WHO). A review of the TB control programme found that more than 90 percent of p
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 21, 2009
CAPE TOWN, 21 July 2009 (PlusNews) - While the worldwide AIDS community bemoans the global economic crisis and its impact on funding streams for the HIV/AIDS response, several speakers at the 5th International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention, taking place in Cape Town,
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 21, 2009
CAPE TOWN, 21 July 2009 (PlusNews) - The idea of using antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) not only to treat HIV infection but also to prevent new infections, and eventually to eradicate the virus almost entirely, is being hotly debated at the 5th International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and P
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 20, 2009
CAPE TOWN, 20 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Just three weeks into his new appointment, United States Global AIDS Coordinator Dr Eric Goosby outlined on Monday some of the changes that President Barack Obama s administration will make to the country s global AIDS policy at the 5th International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 20, 2009
CAPE TOWN, 20 July 2009 (PlusNews) - The 5th International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention opened on Sunday in Cape Town, South Africa , amidst reports that funding gaps and poor management are threatening supplies of life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) drugs in at least six
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 17, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 17 July 2009 (PlusNews) - New research suggests that circumcising HIV-positive men does not reduce the risk of their female partners becoming HIV-infected. The findings, reported on 17 July in the British medical journal, The Lancet, emerged from a clinical trial in Rakai District, southern
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 16, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 16 July 2009 (PlusNews) - New research has again confirmed the importance of viral load testing, which measures the amount of HI virus in the blood, to determine whether someone on antiretroviral (ARV) treatment is experiencing treatment failure and needs to be switched to a second-line drug regimen. Regu
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 16, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 16 July 2009 (IRIN) - Southern Africa s sex workers, denied access to HIV prevention and treatment services, are paying a high price to make a living when even government-issued condoms are not always free, according to a new report. Published by the Open Society Institute (OSI) report, Rights not Rescue,
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 16, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 16 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has announced plans to invest up to US$97 million over 10 years in improving antiretroviral (ARV) treatment for children and adults in sub-Saharan Africa. The world s second largest drug manufacturer has pledged $16 million in seed fun
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 15, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 15 July 2009 (PlusNews) - The stats are in - 2008 was a bumper year for HIV/AIDS funding, according to a new report by UNAIDS and the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit organization that focuses on health. It is the kind of monitoring that may prove important as the global economic slowdown continues.
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 14, 2009
Violence against women is one of the most pervasive forms of discrimination in South Africa and there is mounting concern that some assaults might be driven by prejudice against their sexual orientation. Research into gender-based violence is still largely limited to heterosexual couples, according to Funeka Soldaat, a
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 14, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 14 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Women who sleep with women (WSW) are not at risk of HIV transmission - or are they? AIDS advocates warn that it is time for a wake-up call about who is and is not at risk. HIV prevention among WSW and lesbian women remains off the prevention agenda, said Beverley Palesa Ditsie, a
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 14, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, Figuring out safe sex is hard enough, but if you are a woman who has sex with other women, no one is saying much about the methods available for preventing sexually transmitted infections. South African film director Beverley Palesa Ditsie spoke to IRIN/PlusNews about why she started using protection with
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 14, 2009
NAIROBI, 14 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Injections and needles are still not being used properly in African health facilities, putting millions of patients at risk of infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C, health experts warned at the Africa Health Conference in Kenya s capital, Nairobi. Injections are being misus
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 13, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 13 July 2009 (IRIN) - South Africa has recorded 75 laboratory confirmed H1N1 influenza cases - more commonly known as swine flu - but the executive director of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), Prof Barry Schoub, conceded at a Johannesburg media briefing on 13 July that there are p
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 13, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 13 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Sexual abuse is widespread in South Africa s prisons, but the provision of health services to this vulnerable population remains problematic. A rights group, Just Detention International (JDI), alleges that overcrowding, staff shortages and a culture of violence in correctional f
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 10, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 10 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Girls who have been orphaned may be twice as likely to experience sexual abuse, according to research from child-friendly clinics in Zimbabwe s capital, Harare. Dr Eunice Lyn Garura, director of the Family Support Trust, an NGO operating clinics for survivors of sexual abuse, sai
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 9, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 9 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Risky sexual behaviour has a language of its own on the University of Zimbabwe s (UZ) campus in the capital, Harare. When female students arrive, they join an informal sorority known as the university spinster association , or USA, while their male counterparts are inducted into t
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 9, 2009
NAIROBI, 9 July 2009 (PlusNews) - As Kenya prepares its third National AIDS Strategic Plan, several high-risk groups are calling on the government to give them more say in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Commercial sex workers, injecting drug users (IDUs) and men who have sex with men (MSM) were mentioned as vulnerable
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 9, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 9 July 2009 (PlusNews) - In the first case of its kind in Botswana , a woman has successfully sued another woman for publicly revealing her HIV status. The High Court in Lobatse, a city in the southeast, has ruled that Sadi Nokane pay Obakeng Madubela US$1,000 in damages for violating Madubela s right to
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 9, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 9 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Poor ventilation, overcrowding and HIV co-infection make prison an ideal breeding-ground for tuberculosis (TB), but a new study will be among the first in South Africa to quantify TB among inmates and personnel. The study, Herisa Rifuba or Stop TB in Setswana, will include about
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 8, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 8 July 2009 (PlusNews) - A new maternal mortality study names HIV and AIDS as the cause of one in four maternal deaths in Zimbabwe . The first comprehensive assessment of deaths resulting from pregnancy or childbirth revealed that 725 Zimbabwean women out of every 100,000 who deliver, die due to complicat
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 8, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 8 July 2009 (PlusNews) - A UN assessment has revealed that flooding in northern Namibia during March severely disrupted HIV and AIDS treatment, care and prevention services. The floods, caused by heavy rains, affected more than 350,000 people in six regions with some of the highest HIV-prevalence rates in
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 7, 2009
BULAWAYO, 7 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Municipal health officials in Zimbabwe s second city, Bulawayo, are struggling to cope with growing waiting lists of people in need of HIV treatment and too few doctors to prescribe the drugs. We have between 300 and 400 people on the waiting list for antiretroviral (ARV) drugs and we
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 7, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 7 July 2009 (PlusNews) - The quality of health care, including access to HIV prevention and testing services, depends to a large extent on which of South Africa s 52 districts you happen to live in. A man living in Cape Town received an average of 55 free condoms in 2007/08, while a man living in Kgalagad
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 6, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 6 July 2009 (PlusNews) - The burned-out health worker with the bad attitude has long been regarded as the patient s worst nightmare, and linked to everything from high teen pregnancy rates to poor patient tracking in South Africa . The Aurum Institute, a medical non-profit organization based in Johannesbu
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 6, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 6 July 2009 (PlusNews) - When it comes to incorporating gender-related policies and interventions into their HIV/AIDS programmes, three of the largest global AIDS donors talk the talk, but have largely failed to walk the walk. These are the findings of a new study, Moving Beyond Gender as Usual, by the Wa
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 6, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 6 July 2009 (PlusNews) - AIDS activists have reported that public health facilities in South Africa s Free State Province are experiencing serious shortages of condoms, with some clinics reporting complete stockouts. Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an AIDS lobby group, contacted 41 out of 351 clinics in
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 3, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 3 July 2009 (PlusNews) - In a landmark case in Namibia , 22 hotel workers are taking their employer and a doctor to court for allegedly testing them for HIV without their informed consent. In February 2000, the owner of Oshakati Country Lodge in northern Namibia hired a doctor to conduct HIV tests on all
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 2, 2009
HARARE, 2 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Government officials in Zimbabwe are unhappy about a decision by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to ditch the National AIDS Council (NAC) as the principal recipient of its existing and future grants and to instead channel funds through the United Nations Developm
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 2, 2009
KIGALI, 2 July 2009 (PlusNews) - A new HIV prevention campaign in Rwanda - Sinigurisha (I am not for sale) - warns against cross-generational sex involving both older men and older women. Sexual relationships between girls and older men [sugar daddies], and boys and older women [sugar mummies] - often in exchange for g
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 1, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 1 July 2009 (PlusNews) - HIV-positive babies who receive the global standard tuberculosis (TB) vaccine are at hightened risk of contracting this infectious disease, says a new study in Bulletin, a journal published by the World Health Organisation (WHO). HIV-positive babies who received the Bacillus Calme
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 1, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 1 July 2009 (PlusNews) - An inability to access adequate funding is crippling efforts by community-based organisations (CBOs) to help some of Malawi s most vulnerable children. Monkey Bay, 125km east of the capital, Lilongwe, has some of the highest poverty and HIV-prevalence rates in the country, accordi
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 1, 2009
KISUMU, 1 July 2009 (PlusNews) - Demand for medical male circumcision has been rising in Kenya s south-western Nyanza Province since it became available as part of a package of HIV prevention services in November 2008. Although local communities do not traditionally practice male circumcision, intensive sensitization p
Integrated Regional Information Networks - July 1, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 1 July 2009 (PlusNews) - The HIV/AIDS pandemic has dealt a body blow to the delivery of health care services in countries hard hit by the disease, new research has found. The National Bureau of Economic Research at Princeton University in the United States compared data from national Demographic and Healt
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 30, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 30 June 2009 (PlusNews) - The United States President s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has taken a damagingly narrow approach to HIV prevention in Zambia , ignoring realities on the ground and neglecting the most at-risk populations, says a new report. Researchers from the Sexuality Informati
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 29, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 29 June 2009 (PlusNews) - A pilot programme in Lesotho has demonstrated that primary health care clinics run by nurses can successfully deliver HIV and TB care and treatment services to patients in remote rural areas. The Selibeng Sa Tsepo (Wellspring of Hope) HIV/AIDS programme was launched in January 20
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 28, 2009
KARACHI, 28 June 2009 (IRIN) - A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed between Pakistan s National Tuberculosis Control Program (NTP) and the Karachi-based Ojha Institute of Chest Diseases (OICD) to provide better services to multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) patients. The MoU was signed on 27 June
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 26, 2009
GULU, 26 June 2009 (PlusNews) - The rising cost of food in northern Uganda is forcing HIV-positive new mothers to turn to risky alternatives to formula milk or exclusive breastfeeding, as recommended by health professionals. Despite the insecurity caused by a two-decade-long war in the north, prevention of mother-to-ch
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 26, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 26 June 2009 (PlusNews) - It has become a given – test more people for HIV and you ll get more people on treatment earlier, plus cut down on risky sex. But recent research on the behaviour of people who test HIV negative, has led some doctors to question the testing gospel. Speaking at the monthly meeting
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 25, 2009
NAIROBI, 25 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Kenya s university students - the brightest of their generation - do not consistently use condoms, a new study conducted in Maseno University, in western Kenya, has found. The knowledge, attitudes and sexual practices study, published in the latest edition of the East African Medical
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 25, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 25 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Two HIV-positive Namibian women who allege they were sterilised against their will in public hospitals are seeking redress through the courts, the first of more than 20 known cases, according to the International Community for Women Living with HIV/AIDS (ICW). The ICW raised the
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 25, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 25 June 2009 (PlusNews) - When doctors at Katatura State Hospital in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, booked Shantel Ferreira* for a follow-up operations after she gave birth to her first child, she thought nothing of it - until she started asking questions about the acronym BTL which appeared on her form.
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 24, 2009
NAIROBI, 24 June 2009 (PlusNews) - The US President s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) could do more to prevent HIV transmission among injection drug users (IDUs) in Africa, said a recent article in British Medical Journal, The Lancet. The programme has supported some projects in sub-Saharan Africa that provide
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 24, 2009
ESPUNGABERA, 24 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Eurico Jero, 31, opens his satchel and takes out condoms to distribute to the crowd at a rally in Espungabera, a city of some 27,000 in Mozambique s central region, and the capital of Mossurize district. When crowds gather, people, especially young people, meet up with each other
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 24, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 24 June 2009 (PlusNews) - A large number of South African women are being infected with HIV during pregnancy but not diagnosed, according to a new study published in the latest issue of AIDS, the official journal of the International AIDS Society. The findings of a South African study published in the 19
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 24, 2009
NAIROBI, 24 June 2009 (PlusNews) - About 40 percent of HIV-positive Ugandan patients are already ill or displaying symptoms of AIDS when they are diagnosed, a new study in the latest issue of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes has found. The study, conducted by western Uganda s Mbarara University Teach
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 23, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 23 June 2009 (PlusNews) - It has been two years since the World Health Organization recommended male circumcision (MC) as an HIV prevention measure, and countries in Southern Africa - the region hardest-hit by AIDS - have been slowly gearing up to provide widespread access to the procedure. IRIN/PlusN
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 23, 2009
NAIROBI, 23 June 2009 (PlusNews) - James Samo* is finding it harder and harder to deflect the persistent questioning of his six-year-old niece, Mary, he looks after, as to why she needs to take her antiretroviral medicine every day when she is not sick. How do I start explaining it to her? Even if I gathered the courag
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 22, 2009
KAMPALA, 22 June 2009 (PlusNews) - New HIV prevention campaigns in Uganda are beginning to reflect the complexity of sexual relations, but experts warn they constitute only a small first step. Go Red for Fidelity is one approach; it seeks to encourage faithfulness within marriage or long-term relationships, where over
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 21, 2009
DUBAI, 21 June 2009 (IRIN) - The prevalence of HIV among intravenous drug users (IDUs) in Egypt is relatively low, but needle sharing is rife among this group, putting them at risk of contracting the virus, experts say. Sharing needles and syringes is very high in Egypt. This is very alarming because although only 1 pe
Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 19, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 19 June 2009 (PlusNews) - A one-billion rand (US$123 million) shortfall in South Africa s public sector antiretroviral (ARV) programme could jeopardise treatment programmes as soon as September, a health expert has warned. Mark Heywood, deputy chairman of the South Africa National AIDS Council (SANAC), co
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 18, 2009
JOHANNESBURG , 18 June 2009 (IRIN) - More than 25 percent of South African men have raped; of those, nearly half said they had raped more than one person, says a new report by the Medical Research Council (MRC). The study was conducted in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, using a Statistics South Africa mod
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 18, 2009
PEMBA, 18 June 2009 (PlusNews) - It is prayer time at the Nur madrassa (Islamic religious school) in Pemba, capital of Cabo Delgado Province, on the northern coast of Mozambique . At this school, education does not stop at religious studies; on Saturdays, the malimo (teacher), Mitilage Rashid, talks to the 120 students
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 18, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 18 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Botswana s plan to circumcise about half a million men by 2015 could prevent nearly 70,000 new HIV cases by 2025, according to a recent report in the Journal of the International AIDS Society. The study found that scaling-up safe male circumcision has the potential to reduce the
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 18, 2009
NAIROBI, 18 June 2009 (PlusNews) - An initiative that uses music and dance to convey HIV prevention messages to young people, dance4life, has won an award for Excellence in HIV/AIDS Communication in Africa from the African Network for Strategic Communication in Health and Development (AfriComNet) Adults are still guess
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 17, 2009
NAIROBI, 17 June 2009 (PlusNews) - International donors must continue meeting their commitments to HIV/AIDS, even in the face of the economic downturn, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged. Now is not the time to falter, he told the UN General Assembly Review on HIV/AIDS in New York on 16 June. The economic crisi
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 17, 2009
YAMBIO, 17 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Healthcare workers in Yambio, capital of Sudan s Western Equatoria State, have warned that the number of HIV-positive people receiving treatment has risen, and they cannot keep up with the demand for medication. About 700 HIV-positive people are being treated by a local faith-based gro
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 17, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 17 June 2009 (PlusNews) - For the first time in nearly half a century, the world may be on the verge of adding a new drug to its arsenal against tuberculosis (TB) - one that would not only drastically improve the treatment of TB and its multidrug-resistant strains, but also shorten it. Adding a new drug,
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 17, 2009
BEIRA, 17 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Nearly 20 percent of Mozambique s civil servants are HIV positive, but given that several government ministries lack reliable data, this number could even be higher, a study has warned. According to a Demographic Impact Study by the government, around 19.2 percent of 167,420 public empl
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 15, 2009
KISUMU, 15 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Lillian Awiti*, 19, from Kisumu, on Lake Victoria in western Kenya , began her pregnancy optimistically, but soon stopped going for antenatal check-ups after a nurse at her local clinic insulted her. She asked where the father of my child is and I told her I do not know; instead of hel
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 15, 2009
MBABANE, 15 June 2009 (PlusNews) - A new campaign in the tiny kingdom of Swaziland is looking to get couples to get tested for HIV together. They are calling it the Love Test - an act by two intimate partners showing their devotion to each other. If the new initiative by Population Services International (PSI), a socia
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 10, 2009
CHIMOIO, 10 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Carlito, just nine years old, is sitting at the edge of a sandy field in Chimoio, in the central province of Manica, Mozambique , where he and his friends play soccer, putting the finishing touches to an unusual ball to play the beautiful game. The children bunch together several
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 10, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 10 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Findings from a clinical trial in Haiti bring the first conclusive evidence that HIV-positive people in developing countries have a significantly better chance of survival if they start antiretroviral (ARV) treatment earlier. Last week, an independent data and safety monitoring b
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 10, 2009
NAIROBI, 10 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Food aid and plastic sheeting are the hallmarks of every disaster, but not always condoms and antiretrovirals, even though humanitarian agencies recognize the link between emergencies and the increased risk of HIV and AIDS. Often HIV prevention is not prioritized, especially in sudden
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 9, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 9 June 2009 (PlusNews) - The percentage of people living with HIV in South Africa has barely changed in the last six years, but new data released on Tuesday revealed that between 2002 and 2008 there were many changes in HIV knowledge, risk behaviour and testing habits. The third national HIV prevalenc
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 8, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 8 June 2009 (PlusNews) - The routine offer of an HIV test to children admitted to a hospital in Lusaka, Zambia s capital, resulted in more than 3,000 being diagnosed with the virus over an 18-month period. HIV progresses rapidly in infants and many die before they are diagnosed or can receive life-prolong
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 4, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 4 June 2009 (PlusNews) - A new trial to test the efficacy of a tuberculosis (TB) booster shot for babies is about to start in South Africa , but when your subjects are too young to eat solids, the challenge rises to a new level. Almost 2,800 infants will participate in the two-year trial, in which researc
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 4, 2009
AMURU, 4 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Twice a day Charity Lapolo*, 15, a student in the northern Ugandan district of Gulu, sneaks away to take her life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs, terrified that other students will find out she is HIV positive. When they discovered her status at her previous school, she was called a wal
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 3, 2009
NAIROBI, 3 June 2009 (PlusNews) - African governments are failing to offer even the most basic healthcare that could save lives, speakers warned a civil society meeting in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Healthcare is a matter of life and death, and the right to life is a basic human right, said Daniel Molokele, co-coordi
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 1, 2009
NAIROBI, 1 June 2009 (PlusNews) - If governments were responsible for treating people living with HIV, and NGOs for supplementary needs like prevention, testing and food, there would be less duplication of services, civil society activists attending the recent Global Citizens Summit in Nairobi, Kenya , were
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 1, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 1 June 2009 (PlusNews) - Health care workers in South Africa s KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Province, on the east coast, are at much higher risk of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) than the general public, according to new research. A study of 3,639 patients referred to King George V Hospital, the province s speci
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - June 1, 2009
NAIROBI, Hassan Cherry, 28, an AIDS activist from Beirut, is one of only about 3,000 HIV-positive people in Lebanon . He talked to IRIN/PlusNews about the fear and ignorance that people living with HIV still face in his country. I found out about my own status in 2004 when I applied for a visa to travel to
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 28, 2009
NAIROBI, 28 May 2009 (PlusNews) - The war against HIV/AIDS, which has too often been fought in plush offices and conference centres, needs to be reclaimed by people in developing countries, who are most affected, or it will continue to be a losing battle. This was the message from the Global Citizens Summit in Nairobi,
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 27, 2009
NAIROBI, 27 May 2009 (PlusNews) - Providing HIV prevention, care and treatment services at well-equipped local clinics could be the key to success in fighting the pandemic in the developing world, a new report by the international anti-poverty NGO, ActionAid, has said. We need to target and mobilise people at the most
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 27, 2009
LUSAKA, 27 May 2009 (PlusNews) - Foreign aid for government health projects in Zambia , where most of the national health budget is donor-funded, was frozen last week after allegations of corruption. The governments of the Netherlands and Sweden announced they had suspended aid afte
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 27, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 27 May 2009 (PlusNews) - In at least five African countries, scarce resources are being spent on national HIV prevention campaigns that do not reach the people most at risk of infection, new research has found. Between 2007 and 2008, UNAIDS and the World Bank partnered with the national AIDS authorities o
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 26, 2009
NAIROBI, 26 May 2009 (PlusNews) - When Nora Adhiambo, 21, started working as a housekeeper for a family in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, she expected to cook, clean and look after their young children; not that she would have to regularly have sex with her employer. He would force me to have sex with him; every time he
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 25, 2009
NAIROBI, 25 May 2009 (PlusNews) - An estimated 900 babies in the developing world are infected with HIV every day because governments fail to reach pregnant women with prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) services. We are doing a bad job of testing women for HIV and then following them up, and an even wor
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 22, 2009
ESPUNGABERA, 22 May 2009 (PlusNews) - During its first five years of operation, between 2002 and 2007, the health centre in Mude, in the Mussorize district of Manica Province, central Mozambique , assisted in only one birth. Men are unaware of the importance of safe childbirth, said Otilia Rabissone, a nurse specialis
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 22, 2009
NAIROBI, 22 May 2009 (PlusNews) - Ugandan HIV activists have expressed concern over a recommendation by parliament s budget committee that the allocation for antiretroviral (ARV) drugs be cut. The national budget for 2008/09 allocated 76 billion shillings (US$38 million) to purchasing ARVs, the first such allocation in
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 21, 2009
GULU, 21 May 2009 (PlusNews) - On the night of 13 May, in the northern Ugandan district of Gulu, Christine Atuk was woken by piercing screams coming from the neighbouring hut where her daughter was sleeping. I peeped through the window and saw a huge ball of fire burning her hut, she recalled. I got out of my hut and s
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 20, 2009
NAIROBI, 20 May 2009 (PlusNews) - A disappointing allocation for global AIDS programmes in the United States budget means African governments will have to step up their own funding, say activists. It is time African governments started walking the talk and fulfilling their obligations, James Kamau, director of the
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 20, 2009
SÃO TOMÉ, 20 May 2009 (PlusNews) - Twenty years after the first case of HIV infection was recorded in the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the coast of Gabon , six people living with HIV/AIDS have decided to take a stand against stigma and discrimination by telling their stories on national television. A d
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 19, 2009
GARISSA, 19 May 2009 (PlusNews) - In 2002, one bus per day connected Garissa, in Kenya s North-Eastern Province, with the capital, Nairobi, and not a single case of HIV had been reported in the region. By 2008, 30 buses were running between the two cities, bringing better access to goods and services, and more interact
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 18, 2009
MAGAGADE, 18 May 2009 (PlusNews) - Not much information about HIV and AIDS has reached people in the remote village of Magagade, in the Caia district of central Mozambique s Sofala Province. There is no electricity or piped water and the roads are so bad that Manuel Colaco, 22, had to travel there by bicycle to teach r
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 15, 2009
HARARE, 15 May 2009 (PlusNews) - For the past year, Olive Mutabeni s home in Chitungwiza, a low-income suburb 20km outside Harare, Zimbabwe s capital, has been the makeshift centre of operations for the Life Empowerment Support Organisation (LESO). After 23 years as a nurse in the public health sector, most recently as
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 15, 2009
DAR ES SALAAM, 15 May 2009 (PlusNews) - Bars and nightclubs in several Tanzanian cities will soon have condom vending machines in the bathrooms as part of national efforts to combat HIV. Our goal is to make condoms widely available to the people. The programme will start in Dar es Salaam [Tanzania s commercial capital]
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 14, 2009
KARACHI, 14 May 2009 (PlusNews) - For the first time, female Pakistani sex workers have been given a chance to talk about the difficulties of protecting themselves from HIV, at a national meeting in the city of Karachi. Although Pakistan is a low-prevalence country, there are fears that a concentrated epidemic among in
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 13, 2009
BINDURA, 13 May 2009 (PlusNews) - It is harvest time in Zimbabwe s northern Mashonaland Central Province, but the only thing growing on most of the farms around Bindura, the provincial capital, is tall grass. This area used to be the breadbasket of the region, said Zivei Kabungaidze, provincial coordinator of the Farm
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 13, 2009
NAIROBI, 13 May 2009 (PlusNews) - One in three Swazi girls has experienced some form of sexual violence before the age of 18, which often leads to serious social and health problems including HIV and unwanted pregnancies, a new study has found. [Sexual violence] has devastating short-term and long-term mental, reproduc
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 13, 2009
GOMA, 13 May 2009 (IRIN) - Many people in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are dying of treatable diseases because they attribute their symptoms to a poison they believe only traditional healers can cure, according to health officials. Many people are dying in this region because of this phobia whose current
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 11, 2009
HARARE, 11 May 2009 (PlusNews) - From his office in the vast, run-down health ministry building in Harare, the capital, Dr Henry Madzorera, Zimbabwe s new health minister, has the unenviable task of resuscitating a public health system crippled by the country s prolonged economic crisis. A lack of equipment, drugs and
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 8, 2009
DAKAR, 8 May 2009 (IRIN) - No Influenza A (H1N1) cases have yet been confirmed in Africa, causing medical experts to question whether this is due to good luck or the continent s lack of fully-equipped influenza testing facilities. A (H1N1) cases have been confirmed in North and South America, Asia and Europe, but not y
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 8, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 8 May 2009 (PlusNews) - At a time when many Americans are preoccupied with the economic crisis on their doorsteps, President Barack Obama has asked Congress to approve US$63 billion for global health over the next six years. In a statement released on Tuesday, Obama emphasised his continued support of the
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 7, 2009
HARARE, 7 May 2009 (PlusNews) - At the Opportunistic Infections Clinic at Parirenyatwa Hospital, the largest referral facility in Harare, capital of Zimbabwe , a group of 30 HIV-positive patients are having the first of four counselling sessions on staying healthy by eating a balanced diet, disclosing to family members
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 7, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, Rev Paul Mokgethi-Heath has been leading the flock at the Hope and Unity Metropolitan Community Church in Johannesburg, South Africa , since 1998, when he was diagnosed with HIV. He spoke to IRIN/PlusNews about being a gay, HIV-positive pastor, and gave his advice to other discordant couples. Do I pr
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 5, 2009
WITBANK, 5 May 2009 (PlusNews) - After a demanding training session on the soccer pitch, the entire Black Aces football team has squeezed into a small, stuffy room at the club s headquarters in Witbank, a town northeast of Johannesburg, South Africa , for training of a different kind. The men are in various states
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 4, 2009
COTONOU, 4 May 2009 (PlusNews) - Many young people in French-speaking Benin are learning English to adapt to globalization, but some young women have another goal: to enter the thriving sex industry in neighbouring Nigeria , where the market is considered more lucrative. Jenifer, 20, has been taking a course at a l
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - May 4, 2009
MASENO, 4 May 2009 (PlusNews) - I knew the danger I was putting my child through but I did not want to arouse any suspicion and I complied with my husband and his mother s demands, said HIV-positive Eunice Omulo, 33, who lives in Maseno, western Kenya . Against the advice of the hospital, she bowed to family pressure t
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks -- April 29, 2009
JOHANNESBURG (PLUSNEWS) - After months of speculation about how the global economic downturn might affect HIV/AIDS programmes, a new World Bank report details the projected aftermath of the crisis and how it could place the treatment of more than 1.7 million at risk by year s end. Drug shortages, treatment interruption
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 28, 2009
NAIROBI, 28 April 2009 (PlusNews) - Burundian AIDS activists and international human rights groups have condemned a new criminal code that criminalises homosexuality in the central African country. The Burundian Senate overwhelmingly voted against the draft bill in February, but in March the lower house of parliament r
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 28, 2009
KABUL, 28 April 2009 (IRIN) - Awareness of the risks of catching HIV/AIDS and other diseases among Afghanistan s estimated 19,000 intravenous drug users is rising, but there is no reason for complacency, say experts. There is still potential for HIV transmission to reach an alarming level, Catherine Todd, an expert fro
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 23, 2009
Update 23 April 2009: A Cleaner Fix has been awarded Best Documentary at the International Drugs and Harm Reduction Film Festival. IRIN Senior Editor for Asia, Brennon Jones, accepted the award in front of hundreds of delegates to the Harm Reduction 2009 conference in Bangkok. The film was picked from a field of more t
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 23, 2009
MAPUTO, 23 April 2009 (PlusNews) - 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 tran
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 23, 2009
NAIROBI, 23 April 2009 (PlusNews) - International rights groups have welcomed the release of nine AIDS activists in Senegal , who were sentenced in January for their sexual orientation. On 20 April, an appeals court in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, overturned the convictions of the men, each sentenced to eight years i
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 22, 2009
NAIROBI, 22 April 2009 (PlusNews) - At a recent concert in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, young men in baggy jeans and fashionably dressed young women danced and sang along with the popular local artists on stage. Wadhii wana vision ni wale wako sure na status yao, au sio? [People with vision are the ones who are sure of
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 21, 2009
NEW YORK, 21 April 2009 (IRIN) - Non-profit organisations and NGOs are laying off staff and cutting back aid programmes as the global recession bites, and the prospects for 2010 also look bleak. Clearly the impact of the financial downturn on charities is widening and deepening, said Dame Suzi Leather, chair of the Cha
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 21, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 21 April 2009 (PlusNews) - Customers who come into Matseliso Lebakae s shop in Maseru, capital of Lesotho , to buy nutritional supplements, can also browse for an employee or handyman services. A notice board at the front of the store, called Positive Health, displays the CVs of people looking for work, a
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 21, 2009
GULU/AMURU, 21 April 2009 (PlusNews) - Stella Aceng, a mother of 10 living in Gulu district, northern Uganda , recently left the camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) that had been her home for the past 20 years and moved back to the village where she spent her childhood, but it has been a less than happy homeco
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 20, 2009
KARACHI, 20 April 2009 (PlusNews) - Pakistan s efforts to combat AIDS face an uncertain future as funding for a major HIV/AIDS prevention and care project comes to an end this month. The Pakistan HIV/AIDS Prevention and Care Project (PHAPCP), funded by USAID, was launched in February 2006 by the Research Triangle Insti
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 20, 2009
RIO DE JANEIRO, 20 April 2009 (PlusNews) - Men don t cry. Men take risks. Men don t ask for help. Men are strong. Men have many sexual partners. These stereotypes of masculinity are contributing to the spread of HIV throughout the world, experts warned at a recent symposium on men and boys. Among other things, these st
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 20, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 20 April 2009 (IRIN) - South Africa s public health system, which serves about 90 percent of the country s 47 million people, is failing many, especially the most vulnerable, according to a report published on 16 April by a human rights oversight body. The report, based on a public enquiry by the South Af
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 17, 2009
ISIOLO, 17 April 2009 (PlusNews) - Much of Kenya is experiencing severe food shortages. Now a new programme is helping women forced into sex work by drought, poverty and conflict to get off the streets and pursue less risky occupations. The initiative in eastern Kenya by the Arid Lands Office and several NGOs is still
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 16, 2009
GULU, 16 April 2009 (PlusNews) - People living with HIV in Uganda s northern region are facing critical shortages of essential medicines. Dr Paul Onek, director of health services in Gulu District, said supplies of malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and antiretroviral (ARV) drugs had all run out. We last received TB drugs in J
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 15, 2009
MOMBASA, 15 April 2009 (PlusNews) - Over the course of the long nights Richard Omwenga* spends guarding a building in Kenya s port city of Mombasa, a series of young women accompanied by men duck into the alley next to the building. While Omwenga keeps watch, they have sex and then walk away, usually in different direc
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 15, 2009
MBABANE, 15 April 2009 (IRIN) - Anecdotal evidence that entrenched cultural beliefs among Swazis actively encourage the spread of HIV/AIDS has been confirmed by a joint government and UN report. The study by UN the Population Fund (UNFPA) and Swaziland s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare - The State of the Swazilan
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 14, 2009
BRAZZAVILLE, 14 April 2009 (PlusNews) - Seated at his cluttered desk in the offices of Congo s National AIDS Council (CNLS), Franck Fortuné Mboussou is a very happy man. In a country where barely 10 percent of the female population has ever been tested for HIV, the organisation finally has enough money to buy a mobile
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 9, 2009
MBABANE, 9 April 2009 (PlusNews) - 2008 was a difficult year for people living with HIV in Swaziland . The cost of food and transport rose steeply, and supplies of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs and medicines for treating opportunistic infections ran low in public health facilities. Last year was a crisis, said Maphan
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 9, 2009
BISHKEK, 9 April 2009 (IRIN) - The number of HIV-positive people almost doubled in Kyrgyzstan between February 2008 and February 2009, according to a report by the National Statistics Committee of Kyrgyzstan (NSCK). The report on the socio-economic situation in the country - updated by the NSCK monthly - said in March
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 8, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 8 April 2009 (PlusNews) - This month, 5,000 orphans and vulnerable children in three districts of Lesotho will start benefiting from a new government scheme to alleviate the poverty preventing them from going to school, having enough to eat and staying healthy. About 55 percent of the estimated 180,000 or
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 7, 2009
MASENO, 7 April 2009 (IRIN) - Young people have always been adept at creating witty ways to describe everyday life, but the language they use can be hurtful to people living with HIV; western Kenya s Maseno University is now helping its students to stop using insensitive, stigmatizing language. When you hear people mak
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 7, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 7 April 2009 (IRIN) - Researchers have estimated that 1.2 million deaths in Africa were averted between 2004 and 2007 as a direct result of interventions funded by the US President s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Since former President George Bush launched the programme in 2003, it has been wid
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 6, 2009
VIENTIANE, 6 April 2009 (PlusNews) - In the car park of a local bar in Vientiane, capital of Laos , Nakhornphet Pasomsouk is watching his team of peer educators interact with young men arriving to have a drink with their friends on a Friday night. Many Lao men will try sex with another man at least once in their l
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 3, 2009
DURBAN, 3 April 2009 (IRIN) - The race is on for countries in Southern Africa to meet their targets of providing universal access to care, treatment and prevention by 2010. But will they make it? The need to meet the goals is clear: the region is the worst affected by the epidemic, and despite good intentions in many c
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 3, 2009
DURBAN, 3 April 2009 (IRIN) - Health Minister Barbara Hogan closed the 4th South African AIDS Conference in Durban on Friday by addressing some of the concerns raised about the cost and feasibility of scaling up South Africa s HIV/AIDS treatment programme to meet the enormous need. Hogan reaffirmed the government s com
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 3, 2009
DURBAN, 3 April 2009 (IRIN) - As over 4,000 delegates convened in the port city of Durban this week to talk about how to improve South Africa s HIV/AIDS response, a sobering presentation on Thursday reminded them that just across the border in Zimbabwe , people living with HIV lacked even the most basic services. P
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 2, 2009
DURBAN, 2 April 2009 (IRIN) - They formed an unlikely panel for an AIDS conference: a rugby player, a soccer player, a reality-show contestant, a comedian, a film producer, an actor and a singer. Most admitted to being out of their comfort zone, but had accepted invitations to participate in the 4th South African AIDS
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 2, 2009
DURBAN, 2 April 2009 (PlusNews) - Task-shifting is urgently needed if South Africa is to meet its ambitious goal of reaching 80 percent of those in need of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment by 2011, delegates attending the fourth national AIDS conference heard this week. South Africa will have to double the number of peop
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 2, 2009
DURBAN, 2 April 2009 (PlusNews) - The theme of the 4th South African AIDS Conference taking place in Durban this week is Scaling up for success , but activists have drawn noisy attention to the fact that expanding South Africa s antiretroviral (ARV) treatment programme will be impossible unless the government addressed
UN Integrated Regional Information System - April 1, 2009
DURBAN, 1 April 2009 (PlusNews) - South Africa s fourth national AIDS conference opened in the east-coast city of Durban this week with calls to scale up AIDS programming in a country that still has a long way to go in reversing the epidemic. Conference chair and deputy director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation, Prof
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 31, 2009
HARGEISA, 31 March 2009 (PlusNews) - Hodan* spends most of her afternoons sitting outside her tiny house in Hargeisa, capital of the self-declared republic of Somaliland, blowing fruity smoke from a hookah pipe, her face covered in a green paste to help her skin look its best. She does not trawl the streets looking for
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 30, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 30 March 2009 (IRIN) - Every trucker should know how to change a tyre and put on a condom, said Anisa Abdalla, a doctor in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, at the opening of a new roadside wellness centre offering HIV services to truck drivers and other transport workers. The centre - opened on Thursday b
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 27, 2009
BONDO, 27 March 2009 (PlusNews) - For the past year, Karen Awuor*, 15, has had a new daily ritual - taking antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. She discovered she was HIV positive during an unintended pregnancy that forced her to drop out of school; her baby died after just four months. When I was in class seven, I got into a r
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 27, 2009
HARGEISA, 27 March 2009 (PlusNews) - When three attempts to cure Abdulhakim*, 42, of tuberculosis failed, the father of nine living in Hargeisa, capital of the self-declared republic of Somaliland in northwestern Somalia , took his doctor s advice and tested for HIV - the result came back positive. His family s rea
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 26, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 26 March 2009 (PlusNews) - Findings from an ongoing South African study into preventative tuberculosis (TB) therapy suggest that prevention really may be the best medicine. In the Thibela TB study, one of the largest of its kind, almost 40,000 gold miners in South Africa received a nine-month course of is
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 24, 2009
SITEKI, 24 March 2009 (PlusNews) - Kwanele Dlamini s motorbike can carry him to most rural homesteads in the eastern Lubombo Region of Swaziland , but he has to get off and walk the final rocky stretch to Solomon Ndwandwe s property and then duck a barbed-wire fence. Ndwandwe, 58, approaches with slow, careful steps fr
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 24, 2009
NAIROBI, 24 March 2009 (PlusNews) - The last time Daniel Okado*, a tuberculosis (TB) patient, went to his local health centre in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, for his regular supply of medicine, he found the clinic had run out. Even though I got the drugs when I went back, it is inconvenient; TB medication needs consist
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 24, 2009
KAMPALA, 24 March 2009 (PlusNews) - About half of Uganda s TB patients do not know that they could be infected, which has led to very low levels of diagnosis and treatment. The community is not coming forward because they are not aware; only 51 percent of all cases are diagnosed, said Dr Francis Adatu, manager of the N
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 24, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 24 March 2009 (PlusNews) - In April 2009 the South African government will start rolling out a new test to diagnose multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), of which 16,000 cases were reported in 2007 alone. Doctors are hoping that the new rapid tests will get more patients on treatment and faster. The
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 24, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 24 March 2009 (PlusNews) - One in four tuberculosis (TB) deaths in the world is HIV-related, twice as many as previously thought, according to a new report by the World Health Organisation (WHO). The Global TB Control report, released on 24 March, World TB Day, noted that in 2007 there were an estimated 1
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 20, 2009
DAKAR, 20 March 2009 (IRIN) - In his first public statement on condoms and AIDS earlier this week, Pope Benedict XVI reignited an international debate between religious leaders working with AIDS patients and European governments that fund anti-HIV programmes in developing countries. En route to the capital Yaounde in
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 18, 2009
KISUMU, 18 March 2009 (PlusNews) - The music blaring through Nyahera village in Kenya s southwestern Nyanza Province comes from two large speakers strategically placed at Mzee Dishon Onyango s home. Youths, some as young as 12, gyrate to the beats of their favourite music and consume a local illicit brew; others smoke
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 16, 2009
MANILA, 16 March 2009 (PlusNews) - Rina was only 17 years old when she left her village in the central Philippines to work as a domestic helper in Qatar , joining tens of thousands of other migrant workers hoping to escape extreme poverty and find greater prosperity in the Middle East. She soon found that her Qatar
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 16, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 16 March 2009 (IRIN) - AIDS activists in South Africa appear to have won the final round of a protracted battle to prevent vitamin salesman Matthias Rath from promoting his unproven remedies to patients living with HIV and AIDS. Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an AIDS lobby group, reported on Monday that
UN Integrated Regional Information System - March 13, 2009
LAGOS (PLUSNEWS) - Dutch customs officials have seized a consignment of generic antiretroviral (ARV) drugs bound for Nigeria , raising the health risk to HIV-positive people in need of the life-prolonging medication. Claiming that the drugs were counterfeit and violated patent rights, Dutch authorities seized the shipm
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - March 12, 2009
LUANDA, 12 March 2009 (IRIN) - Under the noonday sun in Angola s capital, Luanda, two soccer teams are preparing to play, but the heat does not seem to faze them or the 350 young people and children waiting for the game to begin. The match was one of the activities in the Desposida programme, an initiative by local NGO
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - March 12, 2009
KAMPALA, 12 March 2009 (IRIN) - Ugandan researchers are conducting the first study to find workable HIV interventions to help the country s highly vulnerable fishing communities. We have limited data from research that has been done in small isolated studies among the fishing communities on the lake; we hope this study
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - March 9, 2009
MOMBASA, 9 March 2009 (PlusNews) - A shortage of free female condoms in public hospitals in Kenya s Coast Province is compromising the ability of women to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Female condoms are available in private hospitals and pharmacies in the province, but
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - March 9, 2009
NAIROBI, 9 March 2009 (PlusNews) - People who have suffered sexual violence in countries facing humanitarian crises need much more accessible, comprehensive and confidential care than is currently available, says a new report by the international medical charity, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). We find that the specifi
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - March 6, 2009
JOHANNESBURG (PLUSNEWS) - 2009 might just be the year that HIV prevention finally takes centre stage in South Africa . Years of workshops and speeches in which AIDS experts and politicians talked about the need to prioritise prevention are, at last, translating into action. The Scrutinize campaign, which uses hip, an
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - March 5, 2009
JOHANNESBURG (PLUSNEWS) - Despite high rates of teen pregnancy and HIV, South African high schools will remain largely condom-free zones while confusing government policies mix with morals to keep the prophylactics out of pupils pockets. For years, the battle in South Africa over whether or not condoms should be distri
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - March 5, 2009
CAPE TOWN, 5 March 2009 (IRIN) - Dance music pumps from large speakers while a half dozen shirtless young men serve drinks at a bar bathed in pink light. It is the last weekend of Gay Pride in Cape Town, South Africa , and men of all ages have come to a fetish party to launch a safe-sex campaign, Play Nice , targeting
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - March 4, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 4 March 2009 (IRIN) - They are like no other HIV awareness adverts you ve seen before. Instead of earnest celebrities or solemn voiceovers imploring the youth to abstain or practice safe sex, they feature attention-grabbing graphics and wise-cracking cartoon characters delivering HIV messages in catchy ph
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - March 3, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 3 March 2009 (IRIN) - South Africa is set to become the first country in Africa to provide its children with a life-saving vaccine that experts say could prevent the deaths of an estimated 5.4 million children globally in the next two decades. Children are the main victims of pneumococcal diseases such as
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - March 2, 2009
MBABANE (PLUSNEWS) - Swaziland s AIDS epidemic, already the most severe in the world, appears to have gained further ground with the latest government figures revealing an increase in the percentage of pregnant women infected with HIV. Of the nearly 2,000 women surveyed who attended antenatal clinics in all four of the
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 27, 2008
CAIA (PLUSNEWS) - A new bridge is being built across the Zambezi River at Caia, a town in the central Mozambican province of Sofala; near the end of the workday three young men try to get the bridge construction workers to pay attention to their HIV and AIDS prevention messages. The workers routine could be risky and c
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 25, 2009
CHIMOIO (PLUSNEWS) - Ester*, 7, returned to her home in a densely populated neighbourhood of Chimoio, capital of Manica Province in central Mozambique , after a brief outing with a 19-year-old male acquaintance and tearfully told her parents she had been raped. He came to my house to ask me to go get his girlfriend [wh
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 25, 2009
BLOEMFONTEIN, 25 February 2009 (IRIN) - Last week, regulars at the HIV treatment clinic at Pelonomi hospital, in Bloemfontein, capital of South Africa s Free State Province, would have told you that the clinic has never been this quiet. Ever since the provincial government stopped initiating new patients on antiretrovi
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 23, 2009
MAU FOREST (PLUSNEWS) - One of East Africa s last remaining hunter-gatherer communities, the Ogiek people, has largely remained separate from the rest of society, but NGOs warn that their ignorance and isolation from HIV/AIDS prevention efforts could heighten their vulnerability to the virus. According to the Centre fo
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 23, 2009
SÃO TOMÉ (PLUSNEWS) - Women in São Tomé and Príncipe have a new way to avoid unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. In late January, the initial phase of a government programme, coordinated by the Reproductive Health Programme (known by the Portuguese-language acronym PSR) and the Nati
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 20, 2009
GABORONE (PLUSNEWS) - Botswana s government has warned that it may have to cut or completely withdraw its HIV/AIDS funding, despite the rising number of people needing treatment, as the global economic crisis takes a toll on the vitally important diamond-mining sector. The government is the main financier of the nation
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 20, 2009
LUI (PLUSNEWS) - Southern Sudan s healthcare system is almost non-existent in many areas after a 21-year war with the north, and health workers are regularly forced to work with minimal medical supplies. Alice Tabu, 24, a midwife at a hospital in Lui in Western Equatoria State, talked to IRIN/PlusNews about the challen
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 19, 2009
LODWAR, 19 February 2009 (PLUSNEWS) - The Kenyan government launched a campaign to promote male circumcision in 2008, but it has not yet reached most parts of the country. In the northwestern district of Turkana, where the practice is not part of the culture and few have even heard of it, IRIN/PlusNews spoke to Isaac I
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 19, 2009
MORIJA (PLUSNEWS) - Two years ago Mopeli Mofoka, 39, left his wife and child in Maseru, Lesotho s capital, and joined the more than 50,000 men pushed by poverty and unemployment in their home country to seek work on mines in neighbouring South Africa . It was his second stint as a miner; the first had been 15 years ear
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks -- February 19, 2009
NAIROBI (PLUSNEWS) - Marriage is not a safe haven from HIV; in fact, the pandemic is spreading rapidly among married people in Kenya . This is the core message of a new campaign to discourage extramarital sex. Wacha mpango wa kando; epuka ukimwi - Swahili for stop relationships on the side; avoid HIV - is the name of
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 17, 2009
LUSAKA (PLUSNEWS) -- The recent two-percent drop in HIV prevalence in Zambia may not be a true reflection of the state of the pandemic in the country, health officials have warned. UNAIDS Monitoring and Evaluation Advisor Dr Michael Gboun told IRIN/PlusNews that while there has been a marked decline of HIV in the gener
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 17, 2009
TURBO (PLUSNEWS) - Joel Kirwa, a farmer in Rift Valley Province, western Kenya , has never been tested for HIV; he is usually too busy tending his cattle and fields and rarely visits Turbo town, where the nearest voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) centre is located. Today, however, a health team is going from door
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 17, 2009
ELDORET (PLUSNEWS) - When post-election violence struck western Kenya s Rift Valley last year, hundreds of patients failed to collect their antiretroviral medication from their regular clinics, leading health workers to fear that their patients would develop resistance, or fall ill and even die. More than 90 percent of
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 13, 2009
JOHANNESBURG (PLUSNEWS) - On Valentines Day, happy couples all over the world will be cozying up, dimming the lights and turning on Marvin Gaye - much to the chagrin of their single counterparts everywhere. But what if - when the moment is just right - the unthinkable happens? Your partner slides on a condom, only to s
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 13, 2009
BORACAY (PLUSNEWS) - A group of gay activists in the Philippines calling themselves the Butterfly Brigade are leading an innovative campaign to raise awareness of sexual health and HIV prevention that will soon be copied in 10 of the country s poorest provinces. It began on the southern Philippine island of Aklan in 20
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 12, 2009
KAMPALA (PLUSNEWS) - The female condom has resurfaced in Uganda s prevention programme almost one and a half years after the government halted distribution of the prophylactic due to poor uptake by women. Women - both married and single - have asked us to bring back the female condom, Vashta Kibirige, coordinator of th
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 11, 2009
KIGALI, 11 February 2009 (PLUSNEWS) - Rwanda is in the process of adopting male circumcision as a part of its national HIV prevention strategy, but experts worry that a spike in requests before a planned public awareness campaign has been launched could have negative implications. Alphonse Ndakengerwa, a surgeon at
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 10, 2009
CAPE TOWN, 10 February 2009 (PLUSNEWS) - Wearing an orange HIV Positive t-shirt, the new executive director of UNAIDS , Michel Sidibe, this week outlined his vision for the UN agency at the Ubuntu Clinic in Khayelitsha township in Cape Town, South Africa . Sidibe called himself an incorrigible optimist and pro
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 10, 2009
DURBAN (PLUSNEWS) - After years of disappointments, AIDS researchers have announced results from a trial in which a vaginal microbicide appeared to offer promise in preventing HIV infection in women. According to findings from a clinical trial involving more than 3,000 women in Malawi ,
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 9, 2009
PORT MORESBY (PLUSNEWS) - Yangpela is Papua New Guinea s (PNG) only youth-friendly hotline, run by the sexual and reproductive health NGO, Marie Stopes, in a cramped office in the capital, Port Moresby. Not quite knowing what burning question to ask, and feeling a bit of a fraud, IRIN/PlusNews dialled the toll-free num
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 5, 2009
BANGUI (PLUSNEWS) - After years of delays, HIV/AIDS funding in the Central African Republic is finally making its way to thousands of HIV-positive people in desperate need of care and treatment. Hope and excitement were in the air in 2003, and again in 2004, when the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 5, 2009
NAIROBI, 5 February 2009 (PLUSNEWS) - This July, I will exchange marriage vows with the man I hope to live with for the rest of my life, surrounded by family and friends; it s bound to be one of the happiest days of my life. It is also the day I will become the new face of HIV in my home country, Uganda
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 5, 2009
MASERU (PLUSNEWS) - At precisely 11:30 a.m. the parking lot of Precious Garments, one of the many clothing factories in Maseru, Lesotho s capital, fills with thousands of workers hurrying through drizzling rain to take their lunch break. The vast majority are young women who move in noisy groups, chatting and laughing.
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - February 4, 2009
ADDIS ABABA (PLUSNEWS) - Yehualshet Getu, 22, excitedly freshens up and changes his clothes: today is a big day. I have a first date with a girl I ve known for a long time at school, he tells his best friend. After I talk to her for a while I will kiss her. His date, Elizabeth Denberu, 20, is just as excited, trying to
UN Integrated Regional Information Network - February 2, 2009
JOHANNESBURG As part of an ongoing battle to secure antiretroviral (ARV) treatment for South Africa s HIV positive inmates, the AIDS lobby group, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), has gained access to a controversial report that may shed light on whether or not treatment delays are still costing lives in South African p
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 29, 2009
HARARE, 29 January 2009 (PlusNews) - Rosa Chimbindi, pregnant with her first child, recently went Parirenyatwa hospital, one of Zimbabwe s largest referral facilities, located in Harare, the capital, to have her baby. Instead, staff at the maternity wing told her the hospital was closed because of the health worker boy
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 29, 2009
NYANDO, 29 January 2009 (PlusNews) - It is early evening in Kisumu, the largest town in Nyanza Province, western Kenya , where Lillian Atieno, the teenage granddaughter of Peter Okong o, 67, is putting on her make-up before going into town for what she describes as business . In fact, she is a sex worker at Octopus, a
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 28, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 28 January 2009 (PlusNews) - Fikile Mabuza*, a young woman living in Johannesburg, South Africa , found out she was HIV-positive in 1998. She is about to get married to her high school sweetheart. Having been together for so long, her fiancé - who is HIV-negative - wasn t surprised when Mabuza said she wa
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 27, 2009
KISII, 27 January 2009 (PlusNews) - Priscilla Bosibori, now 17, was 14 when an aunt fetched her from her school in Kisii, western Kenya , on the pretext of taking her to an important family function. Once they had left the school grounds, her aunt said her family had found a way of protecting her from HIV. Bosibori
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 26, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 26 January 2009 (PlusNews) - For many women, pregnancy is a time of anticipation and celebration, but for those living positively it can be frustrating when their status - and not their pregnancy - takes centre stage. Being pregnant and positive often comes with its own brand of stigma. In a study among H
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 23, 2009
MAKUENI, 23 January 2009 (PlusNews) - Makueni District Hospital in eastern Kenya has recorded a significant drop in the weight of several of its HIV-positive patients in the past three months, which nutritionists ascribe to severe food shortages across much of the country. We have a large number of patients with a BMI
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 22, 2009
HARARE, Former model Tendayi Westerhof is better known these days as a tough-talking HIV/AIDS activist. After testing HIV positive seven years ago, she left the modelling world to found the Public Personalities Against AIDS Trust (PPAAT) to encourage other public figures and celebrities to be open about their HIV statu
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 21, 2009
LOME, 21 January 2009 (IRIN) - After two years of unreliable - or no - access to antiretroviral (ARV) drugs in Togo , HIV-positive patients are resuming or starting treatment after new donor funding has re-stocked supplies and ARVs became free as of 14 November. Simba Abalo, 47, told IRIN he was diagnosed with HIV in 2
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 21, 2009
HERAT, 21 January 2009 (IRIN) - Ebadullah, aged 26, worked in Iran illegally for four years, but was deported on 3 January. Whilst in Iran he used sex workers and intravenous drugs - unaware of the risks of contracting HIV. He is expected to marry and start a family, but is scared of doing an HIV test. Every year h
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 21, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, 21 January 2009 (PlusNews) - Hopes are high that the change promised by incoming US President Barack Obama will extend to his foreign policy, but among the more than two million people living with HIV, mainly in Africa, the changing of the guard at the White House may elicit mixed feelings. For them, outg
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 21, 2009
KAMPALA, 21 January 2009 (PlusNews) - Rejecting life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) medication seems like an odd thing to do in a country where only about half the people who need the drugs have access to them, but that is exactly what Uganda s National Medical Stores (NMS), the government s main supplier, has resolve
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 20, 2009
MONROVIA, 20 January 2009 (IRIN) - More than half of the pregnant women who test positive for HIV do not return for counselling and treatment, according to Liberia s National AIDS Control Programme (NACP). The government reported that because of high stigma and low follow-up, only half of the pregnant women identified
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 20, 2009
HARARE, 20 January 2009 (PlusNews) - Zimbabwe s defunct health system and the growing humanitarian crisis have had a devastating impact on the lives of children, particularly those who are orphaned or vulnerable, and UN officials have warned that child mortality rates will continue to rise. UNICEF executive director An
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 20, 2009
JAYAPURA, 20 January 2009 (PlusNews) - At night, Imbi Park, in the Indonesian city of Jayapura, buzzes with a furtive, sleazy energy - this is where, beneath a statue of US World War II hero General Douglas MacArthur, Jayapurians shop for sex. Knots of sex workers sit and wait among the Ojek - the motorbike-taxi driver
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 19, 2009
DAKAR, 19 January 2009 (PlusNews) - International AIDS organisations have condemned the imprisonment of nine Senegalese AIDS activists for their sexual orientation, saying it threatens to reverse gains made in Senegal s fight against HIV. The men, who were involved in providing HIV prevention, care and treatment servic
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 16, 2009
KURIA, 16 January 2009 (PlusNews) - June and Paul Nyangweso*, a married couple living in the Kuria district of Nyanza Province in western Kenya , both tested positive for HIV recently, but only June visits the hospital to collect her monthly supply of antiretroviral medication, which she brings home and shares with her
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 15, 2009
DAR ES SALAAM, 15 January 2009 (IRIN) - The busy Kariakoo market in the Tanzanian capital is stocked with knock-off merchandise - from imported car parts to handbags - and traders from across Africa come to buy cheap imports to sell at home. But the most dangerous counterfeits are the imitation medicines sold to unwitt
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 14, 2009
BAGHDAD, 14 January 2009 (IRIN) - Wife and now widow Hana a Khalil (a pseudonym she uses to disguise her identity) fainted when a doctor at one of Baghdad s hospitals told her in the late 1990s she had contracted HIV. When she came to she could not take in what the doctor was telling her. I was physically at his office
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 14, 2009
HARARE, 14 January 2009 (PlusNews) - When Mercy Mangwende*, 38, walked into her doctor s surgery in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, three years ago with flu and chest pains, she had no idea her life was about to change forever. This was the third time in less than three months she had had flu, but, eager to avoid the h
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 13, 2009
SAM OUANDJA, 13 January 2009 (PlusNews) - The inhabitants of Sam Ouandja, an isolated diamond mining town in the northeast of the Central African Republic (CAR), were exposed to their first ever HIV awareness campaign in 2007. The focus was on HIV testing, but more than a year later, those who tested positive are still
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 13, 2009
OUAGADOUGOU, 13 January 2009 (IRIN) - Local health officials in Burkina Faso recently threatened to use force against households refusing the yellow fever vaccine, according to a district medical director. More than seven million people were immunised during a December yellow fever vaccination campaign in the country s
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 13, 2009
NAIROBI, Reverend Amin Sandewa of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania was the chaplain of a university when he discovered his HIV positive status nine years ago. He told IRIN/PlusNews about the rejection and discrimination he experienced from the church and his parishioners before he found a new calling - evang
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 12, 2009
BOGOTA, 12 January 2009 (PlusNews) - When Martin Alonso Hernandez, an AIDS activist in Bogota, Colombia s capital, learned that his partner of six years was HIV positive, he waited another five years before getting himself tested for the virus. I was out of the social security system, he explained. It was very expensiv
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 9, 2009
KITUI, 9 January 2009 (PlusNews) - When Mary Muli and her husband failed to conceive a child, they followed the long-held tradition among the Kemba in Kenya s Eastern Province and brought another woman into their home to bear children for them. We were married for 30 years when we realised we would die without children
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 9, 2009
COTONOU, 9 January 2009 (IRIN) - Voodoo rituals have long been inaccessible to anyone except disciples and priests. Even though certain practices like scarification carry a high risk of HIV infection, outsiders to the voodoo community have largely been unable to penetrate the secrecy that health officials say can be de
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 8, 2009
HARARE, 8 January 2009 (PlusNews) - Tongai Chinamano*, 35, of Hopley Farm on the outskirts of the capital, Harare, describes being HIV positive in Zimbabwe as a death sentence. Chinamano was diagnosed with Kaposi s sarcoma, a type of skin cancer common in people living with HIV, in June 2008. The doctor who attended to
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 7, 2009
KATUNA, 7 January 2009 (PlusNews) - Joash Runga, 44, a long-distance trucker, is spending the night at the Rwanda- Uganda border town of Katuna. At the end of a hard day s drive, he likes nothing better than to kick back in one of the local bars and have a cold beer. He talked to IRIN/PlusNews about the dangers of the
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 7, 2009
KABUL, 7 January 2009 (IRIN) - Forty of the 504 people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in Afghanistan will be provided with standard antiretroviral therapy for the first time, as efforts are made to boost control of the killer disease, the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has said. We expect WHO [the
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 7, 2009
SANAA, 7 January 2009 (IRIN) - Maha (not her real name), 22, has been a commercial sex worker since she was 17. She told IRIN she and her sister were forced into prostitution to provide food and medical treatment for their ailing mother. My father died when we were young and so my mother had to work as a house maid. We
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 6, 2009
KARACHI - On Napier Road, the notorious red light district in Karachi, Pakistan s commercial centre and largest city, thousands of women regularly risk contracting HIV or other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) by having unprotected sex for as little as 50 Rupees (US$0.60). I was beaten black and blue by my pimp o
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 5, 2009
NAIROBI, Sheikh Muhamad Kibudde, 43, is the deputy imam of Masjid Takwa in Kitende on the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda . Two years ago, he tested positive for HIV and a year later surprised everyone by taking to the road to speak about AIDS and his own HIV status to fellow Muslims. He told his story to IRIN/PlusNews
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 5, 2009
GULU, 5 January 2009 (PlusNews) - Christopher Odong coughs incessantly in his bed in the tuberculosis ward of a hospital in the northern Ugandan district of Gulu. Diagnosed with TB six months ago, Odong did not complete his initial course of treatment and has developed a resistant form of the disease. I stopped taking
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 2, 2009
MOUNT HAGEN (PLUSNEWS) -- In a small commune on a patch of wasteland next to the waterworks in Mount Hagen, the capital of Papua New Guinea s (PNG) Western Highlands Province, Paul Ari provides shelter to people living with HIV and AIDS who fear rejection by their families. They stay until they feel ready to go home, w
Integrated Regional Information Networks - January 2, 2009
JOHANNESBURG (PLUSNEWS) - Edwin Smith had helped raise his younger sister when she was a baby, carrying her on his back to underground anti-apartheid meetings, but the two had grown apart as adults. Smith has written about the silence that surrounded her death from AIDS-related illnesses, including multi-drug resistant
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