Life is never easy for people afflicted by leprosy, but Zimbabwe's fast deteriorating socioeconomic conditions have made it even more challenging. At the Mutemwa Leprosy Settlement in Zimbabwe's northeastern Mutoko communal lands, 90 km east of the capital, Harare, the patients are desperately in need of food, clothing and financial assistance as the centre's coffers are empty. The centre also urgently needs money for bedding, repairs and maintenance of the facilities.

HIV/AIDS treatment programmes using drug cocktails that are standard in the industrialised world are proving less effective in developing countries, says a study published in The Lancet today (10 March). It shows that people taking the cocktail, known as HAART, are more likely to die in the first few months of treatment if they live in poorer countries.

This is a report of a "desk review" undertaken by the UK government at about the same time that the African Union Protocol on the Rights of Women was making its way through Africa accompanied by an intense campaign. (Warning - there are lots of acronyms, but it's worth the aggravation.) The Review is global and concerned specifically about maternal mortality: it argues that a human rights based approach can be achieved 'by enabling key policy actors in both government and civil society to recognise and find ways of directly addressing the economic, social, cultural and political forces that constrain'.

Almost one in five of child deaths worldwide are caused by pneumonia. A vaccine against the disease could reduce many of these deaths. A vaccine tested in the Gambia has proven to be effective against pneumonia, thus reducing hospital admissions and increasing survival rates.

Invasive bacterial infections are a significant cause of childhood illness and death worldwide. But clinical officers and doctors in African hospitals have few resources to diagnose and treat seriously ill children. Research in Kenya shows that simple rules based on current World Health Organisation guidelines effectively target antibiotic treatment.

Donors and the government have launched another HIV/AIDS programme in the forest region of south-eastern Guinea, the region with the highest infection rate in the country, but HIV-positive residents are still struggling to access anti-AIDS medication. Nzerekore, the main town in the forest region, has an HIV prevalence rate of about seven percent compared to the national average of 2.8 percent, according to local government officials, yet the town has some of the poorest HIV-health facilities in the country.

Kisubi Hospital, with support from the International Aids Vaccine Initiative has embarked on providing free home based HIV/Aids testing and counselling services. International Aids Vaccine Initiative is an international organisation whose mission is to fight Aids by speeding the development of a safe, effective, and affordable vaccine to prevent the disease. Speaking at the official launch of the Home Based HIV Counselling and Testing Project at the hospital on March 3, the project coordinator, Dr Bruce Kirenga, said counselling and testing was voluntary and would take a period of six months.

An outbreak of measles at a remote locality where people and animals are dying of thirst and famine has worsened the suffering of residents. At least two people have died of the disease in the past two weeks in El Wak on the Kenya-Somalia border, a Catholic sister told CISA. Sr Robbireo of the Contemplative Missionaries of Fr De Foucauld said the situation could get out of hand because of high levels of famine-induced malnutrition among children.

A few months ago, the average Mauritian might have looked blank if asked what "chikungunya" was. Now, they're probably all too familiar with the term. Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne disease that has swept through islands in the south-western Indian Ocean over recent months. The infection rate in Mauritius is climbing by the day - with health ministry officials putting the number of confirmed cases at 1,322, Thursday.

In Khayelitsha, diarrhoea and gastro-enteritis have overtaken HIV/Aids as the biggest killer of children under five years with the deaths doubling over the last four years. By mid- 2004, 60 Khayelitsha toddlers had died of diarrhoeal disease, a preventable and treatable illness. “Lack of access to basic services does impact on the health of a community, especially children,” said Dr Ivan Toms, head of Cape Town’s health services.

"Historically, slavery and colonialism played a major role in ingraining corruption in the minds and behavioral patterns of colonized people," says this article from "It is common knowledge that some colonial administrators and soldiers were themselves corrupt and used corruption as a tool for maintaining a hegemonic position within colonized societies. People previously united were divided, conquered and brainwashed. Artificial divisions were also created between house slaves and field slaves."

"It has come to our attention that there may be a lack of funding for the full participation of developing country Parties and Parties with economies in transition to the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety at the 3rd Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties of the CPB as well as the 8th Conference of the Parties of the CBD, which will take place in Curitiba, Brazil, from 13-17 March and 20-31 March 2006 respectively."

Follow the link to find a copy of the full letter petition.

The United Nations Children's Fund estimates that for every 1,000 live births in Angola, 17 women die from pregnancy-related causes. Angolan women are thought to carry a one-in-seven risk of maternal death, higher than the one-in-16 risk for sub-Saharan Africa -- and much, much worse than the one-in-2,000 and one-in-3,000 risk in Europe and the United States. To a large extent, these figures are a legacy of Angola's 27-year civil war between government and the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola - UNITA).

With billions of dollars pouring in to fight Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic, Tanzanian AIDS counsellor Gandencia Bazil has a simple request. "We need a bicycle," said Bazil, who heads the AIDS committee in this village near Lake Victoria, an area where an estimated 12 percent of people are infected with HIV. This predicament is repeated across Africa, where despite a huge jump in overseas assistance and government AIDS budgets, the cash earmarked to fight the epidemic is often not making it to the desperate people who need it most.

A new food regulation by the European Union (EU) has created a non-tariff barrier to products under Uganda's bio trade programme, a bio trade officer has said. Susan Bingi, who is in charge of the programme, said although the regulation was put in place in 1997, it had been largely unknown in developing countries yet they are the main exporters to the EU. "This regulation is intended to ensure food safety. It requires novel foods to be subjected to extensive scientific research to prove food safety beyond doubt. This presents a barrier to exotic foods entering the EU," Bingi said.

Persistent increases in the cost of food coupled with high world oil prices pose the biggest challenge to keeping inflation in check. The Central Bank of Kenya says that the expected long rains in March could help mitigate the problem, but there is still need to allay fears of persistent inflation. Releasing the 17th Monetary Policy Statement, CBK governor said the CBK continues to seek the five per cent inflation target, despite the challenges.

Samples from a poultry farm in southern Ethiopia where thousands of chickens have died are to be sent to Europe for further analysis to determine whether the birds died of avian flu, an official said on Tuesday. Local tests have found "flu-like" symptoms in 49 chickens from the farm, but more tests were needed to determine what exactly killed the birds.

In a dimly lit ward at Nairobi's Kenyatta Hospital, Florence explains why she has lost heart in what was once a revered profession. Shutting the door on fretting relatives who wander the corridor with steaming pots of porridge for the sick, she says it was all so different when she qualified 20 years ago.

Cholera, a disease associated with poor sanitation and access to potable water has claimed eight lives in a suburb of the Angolan capital, Luanda. The UN's World Health Organisation (WHO) said that 40 cases of the highly contagious disease, spread through contaminated water or food, were reported in the last few days in the Boavista shantytown located to the north of the capital.

Twelve West African nations on Thursday pledged to work together to fight the deadly H5N1 virus and called on the international community to back a joint emergency fund dedicated to the battle against bird flu. In a statement issued after two days of talks in the Senegalese capital, the group of nations - two of them bordering Nigeria, the only bird-flu-hit country in Africa to date - agreed on “the need for a concerted and coordinated approach in setting up national campaigns” against the virus.