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.
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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.
Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Sep 14 2010 (IPS) – The floods that have submerged one-fifth of Pakistan have begun to recede, but the crisis has brought to light one of the country s hidden miseries: the plight of mothers, who are dying in tens of thousands each year.
Many babies are being born in camps for those displaced by Pakistan s floods. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS
Doctors and relief workers are scrambling to help save the lives of expectant mothers in the…
Rebecca Murray
DAMASCUS, Nov 7 2010 (IPS) – Leila, 17, presses her hijab-clad head against the front door and strains to hear outside. There s nothing, she says cautiously, turning towards her mother Rawda, the head of the household, in their quiet basement apartment. Along the brocade couch sit her two sisters, Mona, 19, Nadja, 15, and 10-year-old brother Khaled.*
Growing up is hard for Iraqi children in Syria. Credit: Rebecca Murray
This close knit family is paranoid, and for good reason. They fled Iraq s sectarian violence to…
Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Dec 10 2010 (IPS) – Eastern European youths have been getting high on plant feed or bath salt for over two years, catching up fast with Western European trends in drug abuse. Governments in the region are now scrambling to control use.
For the past two months, authorities in Poland and Romania the most populous countries in Central and Eastern Europe and both with tough drug policies have launched attacks against street shops selling legal highs, whose number has exploded since 2008 in the absence of any regulation.
In October, Polish authorities raided over 1,000 such shops, closing many of them for breach of sanitary standards. Five Romanian localities have prohibited the functioning of legal high shops, and others are in the process of pa…
Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jan 25 2011 (IPS) – A growing number of reports in China s state media have thrust the issue of child abuse into the national spotlight. Many young parents and teachers today have shifting attitudes about corporal punishment, but incidents of abuse are being reported across the country. Affected children are virtually unprotected under the law.
Zhiyin magazine reported earlier this month that 16-year-old Zhen Xiaojing was strangled to death by her father in September because she had been involved in a relationship with a boy at her school.
Last September, a migrant worker living in Jiaxing city in Zhejiang province beat her three-year-old daughter to death because she couldn t remember a poem by the poet Li Bai, according to a report in Qianjiang…
Claire Ngozo
LILONGWE, Mar 31 2011 (IPS) – Post-partum haemorrhage is the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation. A decade of applying research to midwifery practice in one Malawi district demonstrates that PPH is quite easy to prevent.
One in four maternal deaths worldwide is due to post-partum haemorrhage (PPH) excessive bleeding after childbirth; for Africa the figure is one in three.
Malawi has an extremely high rate of maternal mortality, at 807 women per 100,000 live births, with 25 percent of these due to PPH. But these figures represent an improvement over 2004 when maternal mortality was 1,120 per 100,000 live births.
Prevention
Maternal deaths are overwhelmingly preventable, if warning signs …