"The private pharmaceutical industry remains the most important source for the global supply of ARVs today. While the research-based pharmaceutical companies have been responsible for development of many of the medicines used to treat HIV/AIDS, the generic industry for its part has contributed enormously to making widespread treatment possible in the developing world, because of their innovative fixed dose combination tablets (FDCs) and their more affordable prices relative to their brand-name equivalents. FDCs mean that all the required medicines can be combined into one pill which often patients take just once or twice a day."

Uganda has become the first country in the world to benefit from a healthcare information system that manages, measures and monitors the distribution of Anti retroviral drugs (ARVs). Harvey Stewart, the chief executive of Rocky Mountain Technology Group (RMTG), said the government approached them for a system which can block misuse of ARVs and improve distribution and accountability to donors satisfaction.

Niger accused aid agencies such as the World Food Programme of exaggerating the threat of severe food shortages next year to boost their funds and threatened to expel any organisation operating without government blessing. Health Minister Ary Ibrahim said reports of a looming crisis were aimed at harming Niger, after a World Food Programme dossier warned last week that millions of people could face severe food shortages if donor countries let aid funding slip.

Swaziland is facing a serious breakdown in the supply of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for patients with HIV, and some hospitals acknowledge that stocks ran out weeks ago. Sporadic ARV shortages have been reported at the main government hospital in the capital, Mbabane, and at the provincial government hospital in Siteki in eastern Swaziland.

As the UN launched its annual report on global AIDS statistics on Monday, activists warned that West African countries with low HIV/AIDS rates could not afford to be complacent. "We must not wait for the AIDS pandemic to shoot up before we react," said Baba Goumbala, executive secretary of the country’s National Alliance Against AIDS (ANCS), a group of Senegalese NGOs and community-based associations.

The government of Lesotho is to offer free HIV testing to all its citizens in a bid to reverse the spread of Aids. In what is believed to be the first programme of its kind in the world, every villager in the tiny, mountainous kingdom will be offered a test. Under the scheme, local leaders will be consulted on how best to offer HIV tests to everyone.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that eighty percent of the 11 million deaths that occur in Africa each year are as a result of preventable diseases. Dr Dick Johnson, an economist with the WHO, told a regional conference comprising regional health ministers and experts converging on Kampala that HIV/Aids, lower respiratory tract infection, malaria and diarrhoeal diseases are responsible for more than half of these deaths.

Violence against women is the most pervasive violation of human rights, occurring every day, in every country and every region, regardless of income or level of development. Its true extent is unknown, owing to fear of reprisal for reporting, refusal by authorities to recognize, or knowledge that nothing will be done. However, WHO estimates that nearly one in four women will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime — sometimes with fatal consequences.

IRC Kenya is seeking an experienced team leader with significant proposal writing experience to assist in the writing of a health/HIV proposal.

At the EU Agriculture and Fisheries Council on 22-24th November, Ministers from the 25 EU member states will decide on the future of the current EU sugar regime that is due to expire in 2006. Before the 25 Ministers is a proposal from the Commission outlining their proposed changes to the regime. In summary the main changes are:
* The EU internal (intervention) price will be cut by 39% over two years (2006-2008);
* 'Compensation' will be given to developing countries affected by loss of preferences within the EU sugar market. Currently the Commission proposes that the level of compensation would only be EUR40 million in the first year (no figures are provided for following years).

Just days before the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) got under way in Tunis last week, United States State Department spokesman Adam Ereli expressed concern about restrictions on freedom of speech and political activity in Tunisia (http://tunis.usembassy.gov/tunisian_cooperation.html). Over the next few days, the Tunisian government made quite clear that it would not tolerate freedom of expression. Journalists were harassed and beaten, an alternative civil society meeting was effectively shut down, and meetings discussing human rights and freedom of expression were disrupted. This prompted the official US delegation to the United Nations sponsored summit to express some disappointment at the role of the Tunisian government. “We are therefore obliged to express our disappointment that the government of Tunisia did not take advantage of this important opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to freedom of expression and assembly in Tunisia,” said a press note issued by the delegation (http://tunis.usembassy.gov/tunisian_cooperation.html).

Interestingly, at the same time as the US decries the human rights situation in the country, Tunisia remains an important ally in the US ‘war on terror’. The US Department of Defence International Military Education and Training (IMET) program has trained over 3,600 Tunisian military officers and technicians since its inception in the mid-1980’s. In 2004, 87 Tunisian military personnel took part in the IMET program at a value of $1.88 million. The U.S. Department of Defense also supports Tunisia’s counter-terrorism program through bilateral training exercises and special counter-terrorism training courses for selected Tunisian participants. (http://tunis.usembassy.gov/tunisian_cooperation.html)

The US has previously supplied the Tunisian government with military hardware in the form of aircraft parts, machine guns and ammunition (http://www.fas.org/asmp/profiles/655-2002/FMS/Tunisia.pdf). According to a 2005 report from the World Policy Institute, Tunisia received $4,646,000 in military assistance despite a poor human rights record and serious abuses by the government (This figure is for 2003, the latest year for which details are available).

The report’s executive summary is worth noting: “Perhaps no single policy is more at odds with President Bush’s pledge to ‘end tyranny in our world’ than the United States’ role as the world’s leading arms exporting nation. Although arms sales are often justified on the basis of their purported benefits, from securing access to overseas military facilities to rewarding coalition allies in conflicts such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, these alleged benefits often come at a high price. All too often, US arms transfers end up fueling conflict, arming human rights abusers, or falling into the hands of US adversaries.” In 2003, the report notes, more than half of the top 25 recipients of US arms transfers in the developing world were defined as undemocratic by the US State Department’s Human Rights Report because their citizens did not have the right to change their own government. (http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/wawjune2005.html)

US companies also assist the Tunisian regime in its crackdown on dissenters. Software from US company Secure Computing, called SmartFilter, is used by the Tunisian internet agency to block websites that the government does not approve of. One of the websites blocked during the course of the summit was that of the Citizen’s Summit on the Information Society (CSIS). The CSIS event ended up not taking place due to the efforts of the Tunisian government to shut it down. It was supposed to provide a forum where issues that were not a part of the main summit venue could be discussed, but the Tunisian government feared it would be used as a platform to denounce its human rights abuses. Websites mentioned in a training session on how to circumvent internet filtering were also blocked, although its not clear if they were already blocked or had been blocked during the course of the summit.

According to a Human Rights Watch report released at the summit, the Tunisian Interior Ministry employs 500 people to monitor electronic communication. Activists told Human Rights Watch of email arriving late or not at all, of responses to emails coming from third parties posing as the recipient when the intended recipient said he never received the original message, of email inboxes being filled to saturation by repeated emails saying only, for example, “You are traitor.”

The report says Tunisia has cited counterterrorism and the need to curb incitement to hatred and violence as among its justifications for censoring information online. However, tests carried out for the report showed that only four out of forty-one radical Islamist web sites were actually blocked. “The pattern of Tunisia’s online censorship suggests that, in practice, its policy has been guided less by a fear of terrorism or incitement to violence than by a fear of peaceful internal dissent,” says the report (http://hrw.org/reports/2005/mena1105/7.htm#_Toc119125755). In the name of the ‘war on terror’, the US, though its military and commercial support, is therefore propping up a regime that uses repressive policies against its own people in order to stay in power.

At the conclusion of the summit media and freedom of expression
groups called for a full investigation by the United Nations into attacks on human rights and freedom of expression that took place in Tunisia during the summit. Steve Buckley, President of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters and Chair of the Tunisian Monitoring Group of freedom of expression organisations said: “Never again should a United Nations World Summit be held in a country that does not respect its international commitments to human rights and freedom of expression.”

“This week in Tunis, both inside and outside the official Summit, we have witnessed serious attacks on the right to freedom of expression including harassment of delegates, attacks on Tunisian and international journalists and human rights defenders, denial of entry to the country, the blocking of websites, the censorship of documents and speeches, and the prevention and disruption of meetings.” (http://www.crisinfo.org/content/view/full/1029, http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15613)

The worrying trend highlighted by the holding of the WSIS in Tunisia, is the ease with which issues such as freedom of expression are sidelined as an important footnote, or simply sidelined all together. This approach allows governments to present glossy figures on their internet rollout while at the same time escape criticism over their human rights records.

Freedom of expression is a core component of a future information society and it should not be sidelined in the interests of diplomacy – nor should organisations working in the field of information and communications technology fail to acknowledge that this is an issue that should be at the centre of the agenda.

Tunis has highlighted issues related to human rights in the information society, but it should be clear that the problem is not confined to Tunisia. Efforts by governments to control internal dissent through repression, including through internet censorship, are on the increase, and pose a very real threat to the future structure and form of the information society. It will take a united front to reverse the trend.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

1- Go to Google (http://www.google.com )

2- Type in the word "Failure"

3- Instead of clicking "Google Search," click "I'm Feeling Lucky."

4- Giggle

5- Spread the word before the people at Google "fix" it.

Niger faces a second food crisis in the coming months unless the international community renews its efforts to help, the UN food agency (WFP) has warned. Many children remain malnourished and despite recent harvests, cereal stocks in many homes are low, it said. "It will take only the slightest adversity to push families over the edge again," said a WFP spokesman.

Four people have died of dysentery in northern Zimbabwe in what appears to be the first outbreak of the disease outside the capital, say reports on Tuesday. An outbreak of the highly contagious diarrhoeal disease was reported earlier this month in Harare and its satellite town of Chitungwiza. Two hundred people were taken to hospital.

The science base in the developing world cannot be strengthened without access to the global library of research information. Currently, this is nearly impossible due to the high costs of journal subscriptions, with the result that even the most prestigious institutes in poorer countries cannot afford to buy the journals they need. With the advent of the Open Access (OA) initiative, the outlook for building science capacity in developing countries has improved significantly.

A Zimbabwean government minister has admitted that farm seizures have led to repeated crop failures and severe food shortages. Zanu-PF President Robert Mugabe has always blamed Zimbabwe's food and economic crisis on years of drought and on a conspiracy by Western countries to bring down his government because of his controversial land reform programme.

Zambia's President Levy Mwanawasa has declared a national disaster and appealed for international food aid. More than one million Zambians face severe food shortages due to drought. Last week, Zambia appealed for $18m in aid to deal with the food crisis. Zambia is one of six countries across southern Africa facing a food crisis. The UN says some 12m people in the region need food aid.

Fungus-impregnated fabric could soon replace chemically-soaked bed-nets as a defence against malaria, researchers claim. As a week-long international malaria conference wrapped up in the Cameroonian capital of Yaounde this weekend, researchers unveiled findings that showed a fungus could be used to kill malaria carrying mosquitoes. Researchers sprayed black fabric with fungi spores which infected and killed mosquitoes in tests in a Tanzanian village.

Patients at Tanzania's main referral hospital continued to be neglected on Tuesday as a strike by junior doctors and medical interns entered a sixth day, despite the government acting on their demand by almost doubling their salaries. Tanzania's chief secretary, Matern Lumbanga, told a news conference on Monday that the government had raised the monthly minimum salary for the doctors from 226,860 shillings to 403,120 shillings (1 US dollar = 1,180 Tanzania shillings) effective January 2006.

Results of further tests on blood samples from South Kordofan have confirmed a yellow fever outbreak, the World Health Organization reported, adding that at least 121 people had died as of Monday. Initial field investigations and rapid tests conducted by the Sudanese health ministry had indicated a dengue fever outbreak. The tests followed earlier reports of a haemorrhagic fever outbreak in the area.