Poverty, civil war, fears of religious persecution: any one of these can push women to have abortions. In Côte d'Ivoire, however, all of these factors are present, leading to what some claim are substantial increases in the termination of pregnancies. This is despite the fact that the procedure is illegal in this West African country.

The silent storm of HIV/AIDS is ravaging communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where over 2.6 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. Some one hundred thousand people have died of AIDS and more than 700,000 children have lost one or both parents to this preventable disease that, if not tackled directly by government policy, has the potential of evolving into a raging pandemic.

The Girl Child Network of Zimbabwe, an American Jewish World Service grantee since 2004, was awarded the United Nations Development Program Red Ribbon Award on Thursday, August 16, at the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto. This newly-created award provides worldwide recognition to an organization that has been creatively addressing HIV/AIDS prevention in Zimbabwe for the past seven years.

A study from KwaZulu-Natal has revealed shocking details of a super-tuberculosis strain – XDR TB – that is resistant to all first and second line TB drugs and has an extraordinary high death rate. South Africa does not yet have any drugs to treat people with XDR TB.

A number of Concern Worldwide and Oxfam-International projects were visited in Mozambique between the 9th and 17th of April as part of the collaborative project on strengthening responses to food and nutrition security and HIV/AIDS in the Southern African region. A major issue raised by a number of partners, including the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN and the União Nacional de Camponeses (UNAC), was that of the Mozambique Land Law. Visit the website of the Southern African Regional Poverty Network for more information.

The lone doctor on duty on a Sunday morning at the New Nyanza Provincial hospital's paediatric wing has to attend to some 100 patients. He tells his audience that he loses three patients everyday to malaria, just because they reach the hospital when their health status has deteriorated.

Throughout much of Africa, the shortage of trained medical personnel is hurting the effort to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS, not to mention other diseases, including malaria and tuberculosis, that are endemic in parts of the continent. Nongovernmental organizations, including Cambridge-based Physicians for Human Rights, had hoped that leaders of the Group of Eight nations would agree to commit major new resources to this problem at their recent meeting in Russia, but they failed to do so, reports the Boston Globe.

There are at least 300 million acute cases of malaria each year resulting in over 1 million deaths, about 90% of which are in Africa. Malaria is Africa's leading cause of under-5 mortality and accounts for 40% of public health expenditure, 30 to 50% of inpatient visits, and up to 50% of outpatient visits in high malaria transmission areas.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is experiencing a deluge of forgotten diseases. The collapsing health system, wars and ensuing movements of people created fertile ground for their revival. The most feared disease is African trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness: it leads to the graveyard if left untreated.

Internews Network is currently seeking a Resident Advisor to lead our Local Voices health reporting project in Kenya; Local Voices is designed to support professional television and radio broadcasters in creating high-quality, locally relevant coverage of HIV/AIDS issues for their audiences.

Ongoing rights abuses are undermining efforts to fight the HIV pandemic and threatening the few, hard-won successes, Human Rights Watch said, a month before the XVI International AIDS Conference opens in Toronto. "Twenty-five years into the epidemic, people living with HIV or AIDS are still feared and stigmatized," said Joe Amon, director of the HIV/AIDS program at Human Rights Watch.

Zimbabwean state doctors entered the fifth day of a strike on Tuesday (18 July) that has crippled public health services and they have vowed to stay away from work until demands for better salaries and working conditions are met. Zimbabwe's health workers have staged a series of strikes in recent years to press for increases in salaries they said have failed to keep up with rising living costs amid an economic crisis widely blamed on President Robert Mugabe's 26-year rule.

Small scale farming is critical to many people’s livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa, yet there has been little or no growth in food crop productivity over the past 30 years. This failure leads us to questions about the effectiveness of agricultural liberalisation policies in reducing poverty.

Six new tuberculosis (TB) vaccines are in phase one trials in Gambia, Mali, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Africa under the supervision of World Health Organisation’s Initiative for Vaccine Research and Stop TB Programme. According to MedScape, many of the vaccines are using replicas of the bacteria. Others are recombinant vaccines where the bacteria are reproduced by genetic engineering.

Health officials in northern Nigeria, supported by UN health agencies, have declared a five-day polio immunisation campaign a success and expressed confidence they can meet a December 2006 deadline to eradicate the disease among 10 million children. "I wish to reiterate the commitment of the federal government of Nigeria to the interruption of the wide polio virus transmission by the end of 2006," Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo told a meeting of international health and donor agencies as well as health officials from the region.

One-year-old Cosmas Wambua lies unconscious on the bare hospital mattress with IV tubes draining into his weak body. He is in a critical condition following a severe attack of malaria. He is also malnourished. His mother watches over him, barely moving from her seat, afraid of the worst, but hoping and praying for her son's recovery, reports Alertnet

Efforts to assist more than 700,000 Angolans – mostly young children and returning refugees – will come to a halt unless new donations are received by the end of July, the World Food Programme warns.

Former US president Bill Clinton launched a program to help children suffering from AIDS in Ethiopia, where close to 3 million people are estimated to be infected with the deadly virus. Under the program, the Clinton Foundation will fund the program at a cost of 250,000 dollars (200,000 euros) and provide 23 medical experts from Yale University to work in 13 hospitals across the country for one year.

My first meeting with Issa Shivji was his book “Silent Class Struggle in Tanzania!, when I was a student of Africa studies in Tokyo, studying African Socialism. I later met him at the University of Dar es Salaam for several occasions during my Ph.D study on the economic liberalisation and the land question in Tanzania. Prof. Shivji was then appointed as the Chairman of the Land Commission in Tanzania. Many of us wondered why him? I remember that I had stimulating discussions on land issues with him at his office in the Land Commission and at his home. I had closely followed the work of the Land Commission, and then a surprise came that a new land policy drafted by the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Land Policy was released.

Recently, it was a happy surprise for me to meet Issa Shivji in Pumbazuka news in my office in Harare. His articles on globalisation and liberalisation reminded me of him from old days. This does not mean that Shivji’s thoughts have been stagnating without progress since 1970s. The world surrounding us has greatly changed and so did many of our colleagues around us and ourselves. But Shivji is the Shivji I know. His writings are refreshing than ever. It was as if he was fighting a lonely struggle, but the fact that many people will be celebrating the publication of his new book means that this is not the case.

I congratulate for his past work and his new book, and I will be waiting for his next work.

I can write a book on Issa's contributions in various fields he has undertaken. For now, I need to remind all movements that seek to liberate Africa of two of his contributions that are, perhaps, not so obvious: 1) I do not know of any other African revolutionary who, after the so-called collapse of socialism and communism, unwaveringly gave intellectual leadership in support of the revolutionary paradigms that imperialism, through its ideological, intellectual, economic, social, cultural and political engines, sought to bury with the rubble of the Berlin wall; 2) As a Tanzanian, East African and African, Issa has defended Mwalimu's great legacy courageously and consistently.