Questions posed by the opposition Democratic Alliance to President Thabo Mbeki in the national parliament over the HIV/AIDS issue have led to a heated debate over racism in the country. In his reply to the Democratic Alliance’s Ryan Coetzee, Mbeki said: “I pray that one day the Honourable Coetzee, and others like him, will discover within themselves the intellect, the courage and the humanity to hear and understand what Frank Meintjies, Franz Auerbach, Edward Rhymes, Cynthia Kaufman, as well as millions of people in our country and elsewhere on our globe, are saying about the hurt, anger and aspirations of those who know the meaning of race oppression, which the Honourable Coetzee clearly does not.” Coetzee hit back in an open letter to Mbeki published on Tuesday: “Millions of people in our country are HIV-positive and hundreds of thousands are dying each year, according to all the best estimates. What I pray, therefore, is that one day you will discover inside yourself the intellect, courage and humanity to hear and understand the meaning of HIV/AIDS in South Africa today, which clearly you do not.” You can read Mbeki’s full reply at http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/2004/text/at42.txt and Coetzee’s response at http://www.da.org.za/DA/Site/Eng/News/Article.asp?ID=4475

In September 2004, the Ugandan government began to integrate traditional medicine in the national health system by setting up a commission to develop standards and decide which practices should be authorised. Uganda is also one of the first African nations to include traditional healing in its schools' national curriculum.

Two Kenyan radio journalists trained in how to cover HIV/AIDS under Internews Network’s Local Voices project have won a prestigious award for the best HIV/AIDS radio program in Africa. The Union of African Radio and Television Organizations (URTNA) announced recently that Ann Mikia and Sammy Muraya had won the award for their program, “A Stitch in Time.” They both work for the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation’s (KBC) English Service.

Hundreds of combatants from various former rebel groups who are cantoned at Bulamata Camp in Burundi's northwestern Bubanza Province are suffering from malaria and diarrhoea and have limited access to medical care, medical officials said on Wednesday. Some 700 combatants at Bulamata live in squalor, the provincial health director in Bubanza, Canésius Havyarimanan, told IRIN. Bubanza Hospital had treated combatants for four months without getting paid, Havyarimanan said, but it is now only treating those with life-threatening diseases.

Africa is keenly awaiting the outcome of the United States elections and wondering how it will affect the fight against HIV/Aids on the world's poorest continent, which is also the hardest hit by the deadly viral disease. Some slam US President George Bush's conservative policies but others wonder whether his rival, Democrat John Kerry can deliver on extravagant promises to double aid funds to fight the pandemic, reopen the borders to immigrants with Aids and ensure the distribution of cheap, efficient generic drugs.

Pan-African Forum promotes the role of local community in child health. Religious and traditional leaders and senior media representatives from across the continent are gathering in Dakar this week to explore how their unique influence in hard-to-reach communities can boost immunization rates and support child survival efforts in Africa, where two-thirds of child deaths are entirely preventable. Immunization and child survival rates across Africa have faltered in the past decade, according to UNICEF country data released last week in the Progress for Children report: http://www.unicef.org/media/media_24252.htm report.

Critical issue of HIV/AIDS to the effective governance in Africa formed the basis of analysis yesterday, at the Fourth Africa Development Forum (ADF IV), with participants challenging African leaders on the priorities of scaling up prevention policies and treatment of infected people. The forum tagged: "Impact of HIV/AIDS on Africa's Capacity to Governance and the Challenges of Scalling up Treatment," urged African governments "to wage a relentless fight against HIV/AIDS with similar vigour and determination which characterised the struggle against colonialism and aparthied."

Malaria has been a major killer disease in sub-Saharan Africa. Several measures have been adopted to eradicate mosquitoes, which cause the disease. The use of Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs) is one appraoch that has been advocated by experts as a panacea to the menace. Malaria has been estimated to cost Africa more than $12 billion every year. It affects between 300 to 500 million people annually with more than one million deaths. It affects mostly young children under the age of five and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa resulting to a death rate of nearly 3,000 people every day.

The second edition of the above book is now available. It is a completely revised edition of the book first published in 1993. Chapters include: introduction to health education and health promotion, understanding behaviour, teaching and learning, communication planning, interpersonal communication and patient education, folk media, schools and young people, working with communities, mass media and advocacy and political change. A special feature of this new edition is the inclusion of mini case studies from the Leeds Health Education Database of evaluated health education interventions from developing countries. A dedicated web site for the book has been set up at with details of the book, links, case studies and powerpoint presentations and training resources. Sample chapters in PDF format will be included in a forthcoming TALC CDROM. The book is available from TALC (http://www.talcuk.org).
Communicating Health: An action guide to health education and health promotion in developing countries. 2nd edition 2004 Macmillan Education. Hubley, J.

Policies and practices of the Government of Zimbabwe are undermining peoples' access to food, and violating Zimbabwe's obligations under international human rights law, a new report released by Amnesty International on the eve of World Food Day concluded. The report, "Zimbabwe: Power and Hunger, Violations of the Right to Food", examines a number of government policies and how their implementation has resulted in the violation of basic rights. These include the controversial "fast track land reform programme", and the operations of the government-controlled Grain Marketing Board (GMB).

In an unprecedented show of solidarity, 16 faith-based organisations in Mozambique have united to tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic, coming up with a national action plan. Mohamad Yassine, coordinator of the World Conference of Religion for Peace (WCRP) in Mozambique has said that religious leaders could play a major role in tackling HIV/AIDS, as about 10 million of the country's 18 million people were members of an organised religion - from Christians and Muslims to those of the Bahai faith.

Africa's cemeteries are "filled beyond capacity" because of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Ethiopian President Girma Wolde-Giorgis told experts meeting in the capital, Addis Ababa, on Tuesday to discuss combating the spread of the virus. Opening a session of the Commission on HIV/AIDS and Governance in Africa (CHGA), Wolde-Giorgis said HIV/AIDS was fuelling "social decay" and "community breakdown" that threatened the very fabric of African society.

Researchers investigate risk factors associated with the failure of syndromic management of STDs among women seeking treatment in primary healthcare center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Of the 106 women enrolled and presenting with symptomatic STDs, 67% were HIV seropositive. Syndromic STD treatment did not result in clinical improvement in 30% of the women. Only genital ulcer disease was significantly associated with treatment failure. The association between HIV and genital ulcer disease caused by herpes may, therefore, be the reason for the failure of treatment.

UNAIDS is currently in the process of updating its Global Prevention Strategy. As part of the process of examining and re-positioning HIV prevention, UNAIDS have asked the International AIDS Alliance to consult with partners and facilitate a process that will allow us to share experiences and feed them back to UNAIDS to ensure the new Global Prevention Strategy reflects the realities and challenges on the ground. We would greatly value your input into this process by taking a few minutes to provide responses to the five questions below. Deadline: Friday 15 October 2004

Do you know any person or organization, whose works or actions have helped to break the silence around HIV/AIDS in your community? Do you know any individual, organization or community-based intervention, whose impact has helped highlight the campaign against HIV-related stigma and discrimination? Do you know of any radio or television station that has shown outstanding commitment to coverage of HIV/AIDS and demonstrated accuracy, depth and innovative programming in its coverage? Here is your chance to help us select the most outstanding media and community responses to HIV/AIDS in Nigeria. Deadline for nominations: November 1, 2004

Kenya will soon be declared a polio free zone. Minister for Health Charity Ngilu says this follows the formulation of a taskforce on polio-virus laboratory containment. The Polio Taskforce would be charged with the responsibility of preparing the country for polio free certification and is also expected to provide a systematic national plan of action to minimize the risk of reintroduction of wild polioviruses from the laboratory.

Poor performance of spring and summer rains could result in a total failure of long-cycle crops and a much below average harvest of short-cycle crops. Although some improvement in harvest prospects was expected if September rains improved, a dry spell dominated the last three weeks of the month, removing the prospect for improvement. According to a Ministry of Health (MoA) nutrition survey, the prevalence of acute malnutrition in the lowland areas of the surveyed zones was found to be very high and had increased significantly since the December 2003 surveys.

A Kenyan woman with HIV has won the first round of a landmark court case claiming discrimination by her former employer. The waitress was sacked by her bosses at Home Park Caterers in Nairobi because, they discovered she had the virus that leads to AIDS from a hospital doctor who told them the results of the HIV test, which had been conducted without her consent, thus violating her right to privacy. In an 18-page ruling announced yesterday, High Court judge Lady Justice Murugi Mugo said the case was sufficiently reasonable to be heard and should go ahead.

The United Nations World Food Programme fed more than 1.3 million people in the Darfur region of western Sudan in September, exceeding its own target of 1.2 million and recording its largest food distribution since the humanitarian crisis began. Using a combination of trucks, aircraft and trains, WFP moved a total of 21,535 metric tons of food aid to 1,336,992 people in crisis-affected areas of North, South and West Darfur.

Famine-prone areas of Ethiopia are worse off now than 20 years ago at the time of the 1984 tragedy that claimed up to a million lives, Mike Aaronson, head of Save the Children UK (SC UK) said on Monday. On the eve of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's three-day visit to Ethiopia to push Africa's plight to the top of the world agenda, Aaronson said that it was "shocking" that millions of children still went hungry in Ethiopia, blaming apathy by world leaders.