Ezatullah Zawab and Abdul Samad Rohani – Pajhwok Afghan News*

KABUL, Jan 26 2006 (IPS) – The Afghan government s fight against illegal poppy cultivation will be a key point on the agenda at the London conference to discuss Afghanistan s future. More than 70 countries will be attending the two-day meeting, which starts Jan 31.
The international community has pumped in millions of dollars into Afghanistan to stop farmers from growing opium.

The United Nations Organisation for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has committed 70 million dollars for the development of alternative agricultural livelihoods in just one province, eastern Nangarhar, this year. Opium is the basis of 50 percent of Afghanistan s domestic output and virtually all its export and personal wealth.

Accord…

Ángel Páez

LIMA, Mar 2 2006 (IPS) – A report by the Office of the People s Defender in Peru states that the basic rights of indigenous communities living near the Camisea gas field have been affected by the foreign companies operating in the country s Amazon jungle region.
The report, The Camisea Project and Its Effects on the Rights of People , also contains harsh accusations regarding the failure of the Peruvian government to defend the lives and rights of indigenous residents of the Nahua-Kugapakori reserve in southern Peru.

Most of the Camisea gas field wells exploited under concession by the Transportadora de Gas del Perú (TGP) consortium are located in the indigenous reserve.

The consortium is made up of the Argentine firms Techint and PlusPetrol, Hun…

Ashfaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR, Apr 6 2006 (IPS) – A parasitic skin disease spread by a hairy fly, that thrives in insanitary conditions, has assumed epidemic proportions in Afghanistan and across the border in camps for Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
HealthNet International (HNI), which has been running clinics with support from the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the war-destroyed country since 1993, has estimated that the illness, cutaneous leishmaniasis, which causes large ulcers on the body, is prevalent in seven percent of the population (roughly 75,000 people) in Kabul alone.

According to WHO s Dr Quaid Saeed, many among the estimated two million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, also suffer from active leishmaniasis, spread by the female sandfly.

Leishmaniasis i…

Ashfaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR, Jun 3 2006 (IPS) – Pakistan s health care system is hamstrung by an acute shortage of nursing professionals the result of poor training facilities and an extremely difficult work environment.
There are a mere 46,331 registered nurses for a population of 150 million people, stated the Pakistan Economic Survey, 2005. The number of doctors, including dentists, is 108,062. As a mainly female profession, nursing ranks lower in status than medicine.

Parveen Rais, vice-president of the Pakistan Nurses Association (PNA), said that an overwhelming majority of nurses join the profession because their parents cannot afford to send them to university.

Poor parents are unable to pay the roughly 100 dollars a month fee for graduate classes, and enr…

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jul 17 2006 (IPS) – For Thais living with HIV, the country s heat and humidity have been one more enemy because the life-extending drugs they need are temperature sensitive and need to be stored in refrigerators.
So news of an anti-AIDS drug that retains potency when kept under the normal tropical climatic conditions of around 30 degrees Celsius was a welcome development for those who are on second-line medication.

Yet, till now, Thais who desperately need this medicine have little access to it. The reason, says the global humanitarian agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF or Doctors Without Borders), is because of a hurdle placed by the sole manufacturer of Iopinavir/ ritonavir, the United States-based pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laborato…

Am Johal

VANCOUVER, Canada, Aug 23 2006 (IPS) – Three former mayors of Vancouver have joined current Mayor Sam Sullivan in calling for Canada s Conservative minority government to renew the exemption which allows North America s first legal safe injection site to operate for users of heroin and other addictive drugs.
The three-year exemption is set to expire on Sep. 12 if the federal cabinet does not support the Health Canada recommendation to proceed with the exemption.

The safe injection site has been in operation for three years as part of a pilot project designed to address an overdose and HIV/AIDS health epidemic that has plagued Vancouver s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood for almost two decades.

Drugs are not provided, but the facility offers supervised …

Mattias Creffier

BRUSSELS, Oct 22 2006 (IPS) – How can Congolese doctors and nurses living in Belgium exchange information with colleagues in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)? This was the central question at a roundtable convened by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Belgium s capital, Brussels, recently.
Belgian Minister for Overseas Development Service Armand De Decker; the health minister for the DRC, Zacharie Kashongwe, and four Congolese medical experts who currently live in Belgium participated in the debate, held Oct. 18.

After years of war, the health care sector in the DRC is in tatters: 245 of every 1,000 children born in the Central African country do not live to the age of five, while life expectancy is less than 43 years. The pri…