Doctors in Zimbabwe's second city, Bulawayo, have gone on strike to protest against deteriorating health services characterised by widespread shortages of drugs, food and equipment. The stayaway, which started on Monday, is expected to spread to other parts of the country during the course of the week.

Health programmes in Uganda could be disrupted following a decision by the Global Fund to exclude the country from its list of beneficiaries, a senior government official said on Tuesday. The decision by the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria would exclude Uganda from the list of countries due to receive part of its sixth round of grants.

Rising demand for the services of traditional healers is drawing Tanzanian Masai practitioners across the border to fill the void left by the creaking Zambian public health system, but their discounted prices are upsetting their local counterparts.

In mid-December of 2005, the World Bank hosted a gathering of academics, policy analysts, policy makers and development practitioners at Arusha, Tanzania on the theme of New Frontiers of Social Policy. The meeting reviewed progress on commitments made at the 1995 World Summit for Social Development (WSSD). The meeting called for greater emphasis on equity outcomes in social policy. Chan Chee Khoon, Professor of Health and Social Policy at Universiti Sains Malaysia comments on these meeting outcomes in the latest newsletter of the Regional Network on Equity in Health in Southern Africa.

The Sudan Open Archive provides free digital access to contemporary and historical knowledge about Sudan. The initial version of the Archive consists primarily of technical reports and unpublished grey literature from the history of aid in Sudan, covering the period from the start of Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) in 1989 to the present day.

Providing HIV/AIDS treatment and care in countries at peace is hard enough; extending those services to people on the run from conflict or disaster seems, on the face of it, hopelessly complicated. But even during the height of the fighting in war-wracked eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the medical relief group Médecins Sans Frontières was doing it in two clinics in Bukavu, capital of South Kivu Province, developing a model that has been replicated in other conflict areas.

Massive social mobilization is needed to defeat the deadly resurgence of tuberculosis, says the Open Society Institute’s Public Health Watch in five new reports released today. The studies on TB policy in Bangladesh, Brazil, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Thailand highlight how TB, HIV/AIDS, and poverty combine to cause almost two million preventable deaths each year.

The Government of Botswana's decision to reinstate secondary school fees after a 20-year hiatus may have negative implications for the country's fight against HIV/AIDS. In the experience of other developing countries, the introduction of even modest school fees has led to falling enrollment, as the most vulnerable students drop out of school. Often parents pull girls out of school first, preferring to invest their limited resources in sons, who tend to attain higher salaries in the future.

Despite repeated promises to eradicate hunger, the number of people going hungry continues to grow - now more than 852 million - with a child dying every five seconds from malnutrition and related diseases, an independent United Nations expert said today. It is a "shame on humanity," especially when the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) calculates that our planet could feed twice the current population of 6 billion if there were better food distribution, the UNHCHR Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler told a press conference.

The United Nations' special envoy for HIV and Aids in Africa accused the world's wealthiest countries on Sunday (29 October 2006) of failing to deliver on promises to increase aid to the most impoverished continent. "Where is the G8 money? Where is the promise? ... The world is running out of patience. Why has the G8 defaulted?" Stephen Lewis told reporters in Malawi.

The Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced a joint $150 million Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), provoking immediate criticisms that the proposal fails to take into account the failures of the original Green Revolution.

Ugandan and American Aids researchers have begun the first ever clinical trial of a vaccine to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV through breast-feeding which, if successful, could prevent at least 25,000 infections in new-borns in East Africa alone. In the first phase of the trials the researchers will be testing whether the vaccine, formally known as ALVAC-HIV, is safe for use in children, following which they will study whether it can stop the transmission of the Aids virus to a suckling baby through breastmilk. Preliminary results are expected in mid-2007.

Instead of looking exclusively at international policies affecting refugees, the research also considered domestic policies and how they determine the identities, opportunities and welfare of asylum seekers. The contradictions between these policies and their actual implementation were considered, which included looking closely at the role of international, local and community-based actors.

Better and cheaper tests for tuberculosis are badly needed in developing countries, where there is a large and relatively untapped market for them, says the World Health Organization. The UN health agency called for industry investment in better tuberculosis (TB) testing methods in a report published this week (25 October), stressing the impressive market available for these diagnostic tests in developing countries.

Mr Nkhoma has a big smile on his face as we join him in front of his impressive maize field in the village of Kajintchi, 120 km to the north of Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. He is the president of one of the 42 clubs in the irrigation project implemented by the Malawi Red Cross with the support of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, who supply them with seed, a pump and give technical advice.

For the seventh year running, a mysterious black cloud has appeared over Cairo, triggering serious health concerns for the polluted city's 16-million residents. Emissions of nitrogen dioxide, which cause serious health risks above certain levels, have reached record heights in the city, from the banks of the Nile, past the industrial suburbs of the delta and even in the desert areas.

Between 3,000 to 6,000 women in Kenya die of pregnancy related complications every year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said. WHO Kenya representative, Dr Peter Eriki, said one in every 20 expectant women risked dying from pregnancy related conditions. Eriki put the number of total pregnancies in the country at 1.5 million every year.

It seems SABC's AM Live presenter John Perlman is headed for a disciplinary inquiry -- which should, at the very least, trigger alarm over a corporate culture that must be rippling with eggshell trepidation of arbitrary victimisation. After all, how is it that Perlman can be comprehensively vindicated by a commission of inquiry, yet still be up on disciplinary charges?

Trials in pregnant women in Kenya show that combining the standard malaria drug for pregnant women with high doses of folic acid make the malaria treatment twice as likely to fail. The findings, published in PLoS Clinical Trials yesterday (19 October), could mean that countries using Sulfadoxine pyrimethamine (SP) to treat malaria in pregnancy may need to reconsider their national guidelines for folic acid supplementation.

Since last year, the Namibian education system has lost an alarming number of teachers to the HIV/AIDS pandemic and indications are that more deaths are expected within the next few years from the illness. This shocking revelation was made by the Namibia National Teachers Organization (Nantu) yesterday at a meeting to discuss the impact of HIV/AIDS on the education system in the country. A number of selected teachers attended the crucial meeting in the capital.