"Make every mother and child count" is the slogan of World Health Day 2005. This year's World Health Report calls for a new momentum to address and improve maternal, neonatal and child health. Every year 10 million children die, 4 million of these in the first four weeks of life (the neonatal period). Policy tensions exist between maternal health and child health, and between clinical and community-based approaches. Who matters most - the mother or the child? Is skilled care the only answer and what happens while coverage is still low? These conflicts are explored in a new key issues page on maternal, newborn and child health now available on the HRC/Eldis Health Resource Guide. This clear and concise guide outlines the key policy debates, and examines what action is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals on maternal and child health. Written by experts in the field, the guide proposes a win-win solution which will benefit mothers, babies and children, while contributing to stronger health systems.

Neighbouring countries placed their health services on high alert as the death toll in Angola's deadly Marburg epidemic climbed to 192. With the number of cases of the Ebola-like bug rising to 213, efforts in Angola's northern province of Uige, the epicentre of the outbreak, focused on tracking down what potentially amounts to scores of people who have been in close contact with victims.

A Tanzanian official announced on Friday that the rate of HIV infections in the country had declined from 10 percent in 2002 to 7 percent in 2003-2004, with more infections in urban areas than in the countryside. "Tanzanians living in cities are more likely to be infected with HIV than their rural counterparts," Herman Lupogo, the executive chairman on the Tanzania Commission for AIDS (TACAIDS), said.

Residents of Angola's northern Uige province, the epicentre of a haemorrhagic fever outbreak that has killed more than 150 people, are trying as best they can to get on with their lives despite living under the shadow of the epidemic. Teca Garcia, the resident programme officer in Uige for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), told IRIN that the horror that enveloped the provincial capital in the days after the Marburg virus was identified had eased as the local population learnt more about the bug.

"Make every mother and child count" is the slogan of World Health Day 2005. This year's World Health Report calls for a new momentum to address and improve maternal, neonatal and child health. Every year 10 million children die, 4 million of these in the first four weeks of life (the neonatal period). Yet, simple cost-effective interventions exist which could save up to 3 million of these newborns. These interventions are explored in a new Key Issues page on maternal, newborn and child health now available on the HRC/Eldis Health Resource Guide.  This clear and concise guide highlights the key policy debates, and examines what action is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals on maternal and child health. Written by experts in the field, the guide proposes a win-win solution which will benefit both mother and child.
* Related Link
http://www.who.int/world-health-day/2005/en/

'Afrique Continent en Crise' is a French version of 'AIDS Africa Continent in Crisis'.  It was launched in July 2004 at the Bangkok International AIDS Conference.  Written by Helen Jackson and published and being distributed by SAfAIDS, the book was funded by Sida with further support from UNESCO. The book concentrates on the hardest-hit countries, exploring the driving forces behind the epidemic, impact of HIV/AIDS at different levels and policies and programmes to make a difference.

Breastfeeding of babies by a non-biological caregiver with HIV is one of the most important factors associated with HIV infection in children. A study released in Cape Town this week also found that there is a potential for health-care acquired transmission of HIV in the maternity, paediatric and dental facilities in the Free State health institutions. It was revealed that besides the most obvious route of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, breastfeeding of babies by a non-biological HIV positive caregiver was the single most important factor associated with HIV infection in children.

Controversial legislation approved by the lower house of India's parliament on 22 March could drastically increase the cost of cheap HIV drugs and other medicines the country produces, according to international humanitarian organisations. The law threatens to affect the provision of healthcare to hundreds of thousands of patients, many of them in Africa, for whom low-cost Indian drugs are the only affordable means of treating AIDS. The new patents bill is intended to bring India's patent regime into line with the World Trade Organization's (WTO) agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (known as TRIPS), one of the conditions of India's membership of the WTO.

Nurses in Burundi's public hospitals resumed work on Friday after a month-long strike, following the signing of an agreement between their trades union and the government. The nurses' strike had paralysed health services in the hospitals.

Senegal has one of the lowest HIV infection rates in Africa, but the central town of Touba, a Muslim shrine where over one million people gathered last week, is a hotspot where prevalence rates have shot well above the national average. “We don’t know exactly what the HIV prevalence rate is in Touba, but it is considerably higher than the national average of 1.5 percent,” Doctor Mamadou Dieng, who works in a health centre in Touba, told IRIN.

A recent advertising campaign is touting the benefits of vitamin therapy above antiretroviral therapy and claiming that antiretroviral therapy is toxic. These advertisements are wrong and misleading, said the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in a statement. WHO, UNICEF and UNAIDS have condemned the irresponsible linking of their names to claims that vitamins and nutrition therapy alone can prevent AIDS deaths.

More than 4,000 South African teachers died of HIV/AIDS-related complications in 2004, and 12.7% of the teacher workforce in South Africa - about 45,000 people - are HIV-positive, according to a survey released by the Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa's Star reports. The survey - which was commissioned by the Education Labour Relations Council and is titled "Study of Demand and Supply of Educators in South African Public Schools" - also found that about 80% of teachers who died of HIV/AIDS-related complications were younger than 45.

A serious food crisis is unfolding across many East African countries; large numbers of people, across wide areas of Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania Uganda, Kenya, and Somaliland, are short of food, says Oxfam. "Those most badly affected are pastoral groups who depend largely on livestock for their survival both for consumption and for exchange for other food and household items. Due to ongoing poor rains, the situation is worsening, and food shortages could reach critical proportions in the coming months."

"Among the most daunting barriers to addressing Africa's urgent health needs is the migration of health professionals to richer countries. Skilled personnel representing investment by poor countries end up filling in the gaps for the UK, USA, and other countries. The problem is widely acknowledged. But a new paper from Medact, based on the experience of Ghana and the UK, argues that current policy responses are not only inadequate but also based on many false assumptions," says the latest edition of the Africa Focus Bulletin.

The policy shift towards "abstinence-only programmes" to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS could reverse significant gains made by Uganda in the fight against the pandemic, Human Rights Watch (HRW), warned on Wednesday. In a new report, titled: "The Less They Know, the Better: Abstinence-Only HIV/AIDS Programs in Uganda", HRW said the Ugandan government had removed critical HIV/AIDS information from primary school curricula, including information about condoms, safer sex, and the risks of HIV in marriage.

An estimated 70,000 illegal abortions take place in Zimbabwe every year, says a new report by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF). The UN agency called for a national education drive to raise awareness of sexual and reproductive health.

Nigeria has become the third country to halt clinical trials of the antiretroviral (ARV) drug tenofovir as a prophylactic against HIV after the US-based supervisor of the trials found that proper standards were not being observed. "Regrettably, the tenofovir study in Nigeria will not be continuing because FHI has determined that the study team is not at this point able to comply with all of the standards that have been established for conducting this study," Family Health International (FHI) said in a statement earlier this month.

Efforts to curb the spread of tuberculosis worldwide are making "gradual headway," but "serious problems" remain in combating the disease in Africa and among people living with HIV/AIDS, according to a World Heath Organization report released last Thursday in observance of World TB Day, AFP/Yahoo! News reports. In its annual report, titled "Global Tuberculosis Control - Surveillance, Planning, Financing," WHO estimated that in 2003 - the latest year for which data are available - there were approximately 8.8 million new cases of TB worldwide.

A new sentinel survey of pregnant women who underwent voluntary AIDS testing in maternity clinics, indicates that 4.3 percent of Guinea's adult population is infected with HIV. That represents a big jump from the figure of 2.8 percent suggested by the previous sentinel survey carried out in 2001. The new survey was conducted last year by the government's National Council for Fighting AIDS (CNLS) and the German aid agency GTZ. It was funded by the World Bank.

TB is primarily an illness of the respiratory system, spread by coughing and sneezing, which kills about two million people across the globe each year. The disease is linked to poverty, with Africa accounting for a quarter of all notified TB cases worldwide. The strategy for treating TB, adopted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) 11 years ago, requires health workers to watch patients swallow their pills for at least the first two months of treatment. Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS) strategy, as it is known, demands that patients then be closely monitored to make sure they complete the entire six-month course of drugs.
Related Link: TB in south Africa
http://www.health-e.org.za/news/article.php?uid=20031190