It was none other than Robert Mugabe who once remarked that “absolute power is when a man is starving and you are the only one able to give him food”. Zimbabwe and the world should take note that he and his party are in deadly earnest about demonstrating the truth of this maxim. The suffering which will be inflicted upon millions in the process does not deter him – or them – for one moment. It is a price they are more than willing to pay in pursuit of that hold on absolute power. With the looming 2005 parliamentary poll already casting a deep shadow across the nation, ZANU PF has positioned itself to take total control of the food procurement, storage and distribution process, reports Sokwanele, an online activist website focusing on Zimbabwe.

Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa announced on Tuesday that the government would start distributing anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) free to HIV/AIDS patients from October. "There is no cure for AIDS yet, these drugs can only prolong lives," Mkapa said in the commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, during the signing of an US $87.9-million grant from the Global Fund for Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The Nigerian senate has gone on strike for two days - demanding President Olusegun Obasanjo sacks a minister who called them foolish. Outspoken minister for Abuja, Nasir El-Rufai, is one of President Obasanjo's most controversial appointees. He has been criticised for ordering the demolition of illegal structures in Abuja, as well as dismissing hundreds of workers in his ministry.

Battling your way past rebel and government soldiers to buy medical supplies does not fall under a nurse's usual job description. But for Sister Rosalia, trying to treat the sick in the northern half of Cote d'Ivoire, it is an unavoidable chore. The world's top cocoa producer has been split in two since an uprising in September 2002 and aid workers and residents say the humanitarian situation is deteriorating in the rebel-held north of the country.

In the next six years, the number of Tanzanians killed by malaria could be halved. They just need to start using insecticide-treated nets. "Treated nets can reduce mosquito bites by more than 80 percent and kill more than 50 percent of all mosquitoes that enter houses," Alex Mwita, manager of Tanzania's National Malaria Control Programme, said. Medical experts say the use of bed nets would cut the number of children killed by the disease by 27 percent.

The main health concerns facing displaced people in Darfur and their host communities include: malnutrition, acute respiratory infections, diarrhoeal diseases, malaria, hepatitis E and conflict-related trauma. The possibility of outbreaks of communicable diseases is particularly elevated. This is due to risk factors including limited amounts of potable water, low standards of environmental hygiene, declining nutritional status, and low vaccination coverage. Twelve communicable diseases and health events are being monitored by the Early Warning Alert and Response Network (EWARN) established by WHO, and implemented by a network of health care groups throughout the three Darfur States.

The British government is to tighten regulations on employment of health care workers from developing countries in order to stop draining key staff from nations hard hit by AIDS, Health Minister John Hutton announced this week during a visit to South Africa. "We are determined not to destabilise the healthcare systems of developing countries. The NHS is expanding, but we're not going to do that at the expense of other countries," he said this week. National Health Service hospitals are already forbidden to recruit nurses from almost all developing countries except India, China and the Philippines, but private agencies have been allowed to recruit staff from anywhere in the world on short term contracts.

Moketsi Nleya, a subsistence farmer in rural Madlambuzi, western Zimbabwe, painfully retrieves a bunch of thin brown roots from under his pillow, which he breaks into tiny fragments and chews, followed by a cupful of an analgesic herbal concoction that also acts as a sedative. Nleya, 55, is among a growing number of HIV/AIDS patients in rural Zimbabwe who have to resort to traditional medicine because they have no direct access to antiretroviral (ARV) therapy.

A programme for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) will continue in South Africa's Gauteng province, provincial health minister Gwen Ramokgopa has announced. Use of the anti-AIDS drug Nevirapine as a single dose in PMTCT programmes is currently under further research following claims by the Medicines Control Council (MCC) that the drug could create resistance in some HIV-positive expectant mothers.

Food and nutrition security are the fundamental challenges to human welfare and economic growth in Africa. Low food availability and profound poverty have caused the number of undernourished people on the continent to rise considerably in recent years. An estimated 200 million people in Africa can now be classed as undernourished - almost 20 percent more than in the early 1990s. The dismal level of food and nutrition security obvious in many African countries at both the national and the household level means that while 14 percent of the global population is undernourished, the figure is nearly double (27 percent) for Africa.

An article in Uganda's Monitor newspaper recently examined efforts by the government to provide antiretroviral drugs to HIV-positive people in the country. Although approximately 120,000 HIV-positive Ugandans need antiretrovirals, only about 13,000 are expected to be on treatment by November, according to Dr. Elizabeth Namagala, who is in charge of antiretrovirals for the country's Ministry of Health, the Monitor reports.

ACORD, an international NGO working in over 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, has just produced a report of research carried out in Northern Uganda and Burundi to gain insight into both the causes and consequences of HIV/AIDS-related stigma and discrimination. The research produced evidence of alarming levels of stigma and discrimination suffered by individuals, their carers and families in both countries. Ignorance and fear compounded by cultural and religious taboos were found to be at the root of such attitudes and behaviours. Reluctance to be tested or seek counselling and/or rejection by service providers are among the key consequences confirming that stigma and discrimination act as a major barrier to accessing services and treatment.

A new push to reproductive health services planned at a London conference next week will have to work in Sierra Leone if anywhere. Sierra Leone, a small West African country on the Atlantic bordering Liberia and Guinea has the unhappy distinction of the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. ''That's about 2,100 per 100,000 births,'' Yvonne Harding who works with Marie Stopes International in the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown told IPS.

The Department of Health (Intersectoral Aids Unit) and the Aids Consortium invites proposals from training service providers to develop a capacity building programme for their partner organisations. This request is limited to members of the Aids Consortium and grassroots organisations only.

For a moment, the Ethiopian-born activist seemed to melt into the crowd, blending into the sea of black professors, health experts and community leaders. But when he suggested focusing some attention on African immigrants, the dividing lines were promptly and pointedly drawn. The focus of the campaign, activist Abdulaziz Kamus was told, would be strictly on African-Americans. "`I said, `But I am African and I am an American citizen; am I not African-American?' '' asked Kamus, an advocate for African immigrants.

The Kenyan government plans to provide anti-retroviral treatment (ARVs) to 181,000 people living with HIV by 2005, a government statement said. The number of beneficiaries would rise to 250,000 by 2010, it added. Health Minister Charity Ngilu said the strategy would be achieved through the implementation of a National Social Health Insurance Scheme, which the Kenyan parliament is due to debate this year.

A dramatically lower number of Swazi teenage girls are being infected by HIV than was previously estimated, suggesting a turning point in the battle against HIV/AIDS in a country with the world's highest HIV infection rates, a new report has revealed. The findings in the report, 'A Baseline Study on HIV Risk Factors', commissioned by the UN Childrens' Fund (UNICEF) are derived from interviews and blood tests of over 1,000 Swazis in two rural areas and revealed that only six percent of girls aged from 15 to 19 were found to be HIV-positive, with most of the HIV infections occurring among older girls.

A cholera outbreak in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, has killed 40 people so far this month, a senior government health official told IRIN on Friday. He blamed overcrowded slums, torrential rains and infected traders arriving from neighbouring Guinea into Sierra Leone for the country's first cholera outbreak in five years.

There are so few working hospitals and health clinics in southeastern Liberia that patients in one district have to be ferried by canoe to neighbouring Cote d'Ivoire to receive any treatment at all, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a report on medical facilities in the area. The report, based on an assessment carried out by an ICRC team between 15 and 25 July, said the health services in the six remote counties of southeastern Liberia had virtually collapsed during 14 years of civil war.

Participate in the first Global Health Watch by submitting case studies. We are calling activists, health workers and academics from around the world to submit case studies and testimonies to supplement the first edition of the report.

The Global Health Watch is a non-government initiative aimed at supporting civil society to more effectively campaign and lobby for 'health for all' and equitable access to health care. This is not a matter of finding a technical or economic prescription, but is one that requires political mobilisation to shift resources and attention towards the needs of the poor, and to reform the very political and social institutions that have generated the state of ill health today.

The Global Health Watch provides a platform for academics, activists and non-government organisations to:
- Promote the accountability of governments and global institutions that affect health (such as the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and the World Bank)
- Identify policies and practices at the global and national levels that are unfair, unjust and bad for health
- Highlight the needs of the poor and reinvigorate the principle of 'health for all'
- Shift the health policy agenda to recognise the political, social and economic barriers to better health and to advocate alternatives to market-driven approaches to health and health care.

But Watch aims to do more than just produce another document - it also aims to provide a voice for health workers and the academic and non-government community from as many countries as possible. For information on how to submit a case study see http://www.ghwatch.org/english/casestudies/call.html, for more information about the Global Health Watch see www.ghwatch.org, to contact us e-mail [email protected]