A deadly hemorrhagic fever which has claimed the lives of 96 people, mainly children, in Angola's northern Uige province has been identified as the rare Marburg virus, officials from the Ministry of Health and World Health Organisation (WHO) said late on Tuesday. The illness, characterised by high fever, severe headaches, vomiting and diarrhoea, was first spotted in Uige and is from the same family as the deadly Ebola virus.

Health activists urged the Indian government on Tuesday to review a patent bill that makes it illegal to copy patented drugs, saying it would make drugs unaffordable for millions suffering from AIDS. Last week, India proposed changing the country's patent laws to make it illegal to copy patented drugs, a practice that has made cheaper medicines available in India and abroad, to fulfil India's commitment to the WTO.

The Tanzanian government this year plans to "sharply" increase from about 4,000 to 44,000 the number of HIV-positive people receiving antiretroviral drugs at no cost, Tanzanian Health Minister Anna Abdallah said, Reuters reports. Abdallah said the government at the end of 2004 was providing 4,000 HIV-positive people in the country with antiretroviral drugs at a cost of $2 million. She added that the health ministry has released $3.5 million to purchase antiretrovirals for 2005 and received a "similar amount" from Canada to purchase more medications, according to Reuters.

This publication is the first in a series designed to analyse the World Trade organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture from a human rights perspective. As a backgrounder it focuses on the main characteristics of agricultural trade, and the relevant global rules. It points out what the main human rights concerns are, and suggests some possible actions human rights advocates can undertake.

Measles killed more than 500 children between January and mid-March in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Sunday. An overwhelming majority of the 561 deaths occurred in Nigeria’s northern region, where doctors say people are wary of vaccinations largely for religious reasons. And of the 23,575 cases recorded so far this year, WHO said more than 90 percent of the total were in the north.

In June 2004, the 15th meeting of the programme coordinating board of UNAIDS requested the secretariat and co-sponsor agencies to develop a global strategy to intensify HIV prevention. In order to contribute to the new HIV prevention strategy, UNAIDS is requesting HIV prevention advocates, NGOs, government agencies, the private sector and other partners to input into the strategy by answering the following questions and submitting contributions: 1. What are your current prevention priorities and how are these determined? 2. How has your organisation's prevention priorities changed over the last five years? Please list specific ongoing initiatives on prevention for each organisation 3. Please list the three most important elements of your organization or agency's current work in the field of HIV prevention. Which of these elements will be scaled up in the context of intensifying prevention? 4. What new activities does your organisation plan to undertake as part of the process of intensifying HIV prevention? 5. In your own opinion, what would it take to scale up prevention of HIV within your community or region? 6. What are you currently doing to scale up prevention? 7. What should happen globally to support action for intensifying prevention in your country?

A new report by UNAIDS, presents three possible case studies for how the AIDS epidemic in Africa could evolve over the next 20 years based on policy decisions taken today by African leaders and the rest of the world. The scenarios set out to answer one central question: 'Over the next 20 years, what factors will drive Africa's and the world's responses to the AIDS epidemic, and what kind of future will there be for the next generation?'

The TRIPS Council of the WTO, at its meeting last week, was unable to reach agreement on the "permanent solution" to the issue of Paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health relating to countries having no or inadequate drug manufacturing capacity. The Council decided to suspend its discussion on the issue and agreed that informal consultations would instead be held in an attempt to find agreement by the deadline of the end of March. The discussions on this issue at the TRIPS Council on 9 March were marked by strong differences in positions between several developing countries and major developed countries.

Someone with untreated tuberculosis (TB) will infect up to 14 others over a year. TB programmes must lower barriers to care-seeking to reduce this spread. From patients' perspectives, barriers include treatment costs and travel. Proposed reforms to TB programmes in sub-Saharan Africa, including decentralisation, must consider each country's context to prevent negative impacts on care-seeking and under-funded primary health care services.

International health advocates "welcomed" British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Commission for Africa report, which was released on Friday, but said the report should have stressed the "crucial" need for improved health to aid the continent in "emerg[ing] from poverty," the Associated Press reports. Advocates praised the report's "bold recommendation" of providing HIV/AIDS treatment to everyone who requires it by 2010 but "expressed frustration" that its impact is "dampened" by the warning that "excessive medicalization" of the disease could harm prevention efforts, according to the Associated Press.

At monthly support groups for children infected with the virus that causes AIDS in the hills of northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Ann Barnard doles out creams and antibiotics for simple HIV-related infections. But one of the most important bottles in her arsenal is not a drug, but a basic multivitamin, which she encourages caretakers to give daily to each infected child. Although anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) are becoming increasingly available across the African continent, they remain out of reach for most HIV-positive people. Only a handful of the children in the Ingwavuma Orphan Care's support group are enrolled in pre-counselling for the fledgling anti-retroviral programme at the local government hospital, Mosvold, which began offering the drugs to a limited number of patients late last year.

Although an innately rich and magnificent continent, Africa today stands braced for decades of further impoverishment and increasing death tolls if the international community does not act urgently to overhaul their commitment to economic, social and political justice for the people of Africa. The new UN report, entitled AIDS in Africa, was compiled over two years using more than 150 experts. It warns that 10% of Africans (an additional 90 million people) could be infected with HIV within the next 2 decades. The global HIV/AIDS epidemic killed more than three million people in 2004, and nearly two-thirds of those with HIV live in Sub-Saharan Africa. During 2004 an estimated 2.3 million people died as a result of AIDS in this region, that's more than 6,300 people a day.

Services in public hospitals across Burundi continued to be paralysed as an indefinite strike by nurses entered its fifth day on Friday. The nurses are demanding better pay and working conditions. Although nurses have been reporting for duty at most hospitals in Bujumbura, Burundi's capital, they have not been working as normal. "We are working as we would on weekends or on holidays," Melance Hakizimana, chairman of the nurses' trade union, le Syndicat National de Travailleurs de la Sante, told IRIN on Wednesday.

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has met with the Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Paul Hunt, to exchange views on the ways in which they could enhance their work when addressing this basic right. Mr. Hunt indicated that his mandate was to help States and other actors to better promote and protect the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health in line with the Programme of Action adopted at the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001. As a means of making the right to health manageable, he had been focusing on the right to health for those living in poverty and on stigma and discrimination on the grounds of race and ethnicity.

Measles Initiative partners the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) recently announced that global measles deaths have plummeted by 39 percent, from 873,000 in 1999 to an estimated 530,000 in 2003. The largest reduction occurred in Africa, the region with the highest burden of the disease, where estimated measles deaths decreased by 46 percent. The Measles Initiative works closely with governments of countries affected by measles, African communities and partners to make sure each at-risk child is reached with free measles vaccinations and other appropriate health interventions.

Published by The Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in collaboration with SAfAIDS (Southern Africa AIDS Information Dissemination Service), this is a 16-page quarterly newsletter on HIV/AIDS prevention programming which aims to promote the worldwide exchange of information and experiences in the field of sexual health and HIV/AIDS.

The AMREF Directorate of Learning Systems is pleased to announce the Malaria Prevention, Control and Management Course. The main objective of this course is to provide an up-date in clinical management, prevention and control of Malaria through the acquisition of knowledge and practical skills.

The African Health Research Forum (AfHRF), an organization which proposes to put African health research higher up on the continent's agenda, was launched at the November 2002 annual meeting of the Global Forum for Health Research held in Arusha, Tanzania, the first time this Forum was held in Africa. AfHRF's overall objective is to promote health research for development in Africa and strengthen the African voice in setting and implementing the global research agenda, according to their website. The AfHRF is in the early stages of encouraging the convergence of national, regional and global efforts in health research toward the goal of creating "a research agenda developed and owned by Africa" and to "strengthen the African voice in setting and implementing the global research agenda".

Some 15 people have died in a cholera outbreak in Malabo, the island capital of Equatorial Guinea, and nearly 1,000 more have fallen ill, officials at the World Health Organisation (WHO) said last Friday. “We have a confirmed epidemic of cholera,” Dr Kalambay Kalula, the WHO representative in Equatorial Guinea, told IRIN by telephone.

Nigerian Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo on Wednesday announced that the government plans to expand its antiretroviral drug program to provide low-cost drugs to 100,000 HIV-positive people by the end of this year, Reuters reports. Nigeria in 2002 launched a program to provide antiretroviral drugs to HIV-positive people in the nation at a cost of about $7 per person per month.