Danielle Kurtzleben
WASHINGTON, Aug 14 2009 (IPS) – The U.S. government continues to withhold even the most basic information about prisoners in the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a New York-based legal rights organisation.
An April 2009 ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents and information about the detainment of prisoners at Bagram has yielded dead ends with both the Department of Defence (DOD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The ACLU wants the Obama Administration to make these records public, including information about the number of people currently detained at Bagram, their names, citizenship, place of capture and length of detention, as well as records pertainin…
Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Sep 17 2009 (IPS) – At 37, Dimo Kokorkov, a carpenter from Stara Zagora in central Bulgaria is broken-hearted . Dimo says this to describe his sense of deep injustice after being systematically abused in prison because of his disabilities.
Officially diagnosed as mentally disabled, Dimo suffers from frequent headaches, nausea and loss of control over his body. According to him, his problem has been caused by the pain I endured during and since my prison term.
Dimo received a 23-year prison sentence for theft. After my mother remarried, I was left on my own, I was poor, so I had to steal in order to eat, he told IPS. I started doing the usual things, stealing copper and wires. I know what I did was not right, but the sentence was extremely u…
Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Nov 4 2009 (IPS) – Sudarma Senevirathana s teenage daughter is at an age when she can already be given the rubella vaccine, administered free of charge by government health officials at schools.
But Senevirathana refuses to subject her twelve-year-old daughter to the injection. She can take it when she is nearer to getting married, says the mother from Kurunegala, about 100 kilometres east of the capital Colombo, I don t want to risk my daughter s life.
The rubella vaccine is given to girls between the ages of 12 and 13, the period medical experts say the body s immune system is at its strongest to fight any rubella infection. It is administered to prevent still births and other birth defects commonly associated with the rubella virus, which t…
Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Nov 28 2009 (IPS) – On the heels of a new report by UNAIDS that the HIV virus is now infecting Caribbean men and women at an equal rate, activist groups are urging regional leaders to eliminate laws that further the stigmatisation associated with the deadly virus.
Ahead of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, the Commonwealth HIV and AIDS Action Group (CHAAG) this week condemned Caribbean governments for retaining anti-gay laws on their books. They are calling on both regional leaders and their counterparts in the Commonwealth, a grouping of 53 member states, most former British colonies, to take immediate action to change the situation.
This is crunch time, therefore, for the Commonwealth, said Stephen Lewis of AIDS Free World, one of th…
Natalia Ruiz Díaz
ASUNCIÓN, Jan 6 2010 (IPS) – Did you have to pay for anything? is the obligatory question these days in the waiting room at the Mother and Child Hospital in Fernando de la Mora, on the outskirts of the Paraguayan capital, where people still have doubts that the public health services are free of charge, as the government had announced.
They took great care of me. I had my baby by cesarean and the operation was free, and so was the medicine, Gloria Ramírez, who gave birth on Christmas the day nearly all public health service fees were eliminated nationwide told IPS.
The measure was one of the campaign promises of centre-left President Fernando Lugo, a former bishop who took office in August 2008.
Before I was admitted to hospital, I had p…
Mohammed A. Salih
WASHINGTON, Mar 16 2010 (IPS) – Poverty is on the rise in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and various forms of corruption threaten to undermine the impact of investments made to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the continent, said the World Bank in a report released Monday on Africa s development.
The report says the number of people who live on less than two dollars a day has doubled from 292 million in 1981 to nearly 555 million in 2005.
Painting a gloomy picture of Africa s state of development, the report says the SSA region presents the most formidable development challenge of the world. It says thousands of people are dying from preventable diseases on a daily basis, and HIV/AIDS and malaria continue to spread through the continent.
…
José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Apr 21 2010 (IPS) – Non-governmental organisations in Nicaragua are questioning data on the maternal mortality rate released by the government, which is claiming a historic decline in the indicator, and they warn that the reduction target that the country has committed itself to by 2015 is still out of reach.
Miriam Chávez, the Health Ministry s head of nursing, reported that Nicaragua had achieved a reduction of the maternal mortality rate to 90 per 100,000 live births in 2009, by means of a campaign sending health brigades to work among the poor.
Health Ministry statistics indicate that in 2007, the first year of the administration of leftwing President Daniel Ortega who took office that January, there were 107 maternal deaths per 100,000…
Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, May 22 2010 (IPS) – Junko Hamada, 59, is now in her 12th year as an elected member of the city council of Isehara, a sprawling bed town west of Tokyo with an estimated population of 150,000.
The former women s rights activist, married and with three adult children and a grandchild, exudes energy and elegance and talks quietly. She shows no sign of what analysts say she represents today s breed of plucky Japanese women who are making inroads into politics, one of Japan s toughest male-dominated arenas.
Their determination, says Nori Araki, is all the more valuable when you consider that Japanese women, 65 years ago, had not a single female politician to represent them.
National women s suffrage was enacted after Japan lost World War …
Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO, Jul 22 2010 (IPS) – At a local maternity clinic in one of Bulawayo s high density suburbs, midwives are at pains to explain to a pregnant 15-year-old girl why she must be tested for HIV before she gives birth.
But the teenager, who lightly beats her chest in an effort to pacify what seems like a painful cough, will not hear of it. She is afraid that her worst fears will be confirmed as she already suspects she could be HIV-positive.
The nurses are worried about the teenager s health and decide to call in the girl s grandmother who is given the task of explaining to the teenager why she must be tested.
Getting tested is the only way she will be prescribed the medication that will not only treat her cough, but also give her longer life t…
Evelyn Matsamura Kiapi
KAMPALA, Aug 21 2010 (IPS) – The new World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation that HIV-positive mothers on antiretroviral therapy (ARVs) can exclusively breastfeed their babies for up to twelve months without infecting them has created confusion among HIV-positive mothers in Uganda as information about the new guidelines struggles to reach them.
For the last decade the policy in Uganda had been to advise HIV-positive mothers to exclusively breastfeed for three months.
But phone calls during a television talk show on the benefits of breastfeeding exposed the confusion among HIV-positive mothers about the new recommendations. Many mothers said they needed to clarify and understand how best they can protect their babies from HIV infection.