The World Health Organisation last Thursday announced a plan to provide antiretroviral drugs to about half of the HIV-positive people in Ghana by the end of 2005, Reuters reports. The program is part of WHO's 3 by 5 Initiative which aims to treat three million people with antiretroviral drugs by 2005, according to WHO Ghana Program Director Napoleon Graham.

Members of the African Union struck a deal with wealthy members of the World Health Organisation to be compensated for the loss of their health care workers to richer countries, the Nairobi Daily Nation reported Friday. The negotiations were held during the 57th World Health Assembly in Geneva May 17-22. "The African Union pushed the agenda of compensation as one voice and we will jointly negotiate the terms like the European Union does," said Gideon Konchella, Kenya's assistant minister for health.

Activists have expressed outrage at South Africa's decision to stop a roll-out of anti-Aids drugs for children. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) accused the authorities of putting people's lives at risk. The health department is advising hospitals not to enrol new children on the programme in case there are not enough drugs for them to continue.

Health officials at district level in northwestern South Africa have been put on "red alert" to prevent the spread of polio from neighbouring Botswana, a government spokesperson told IRIN. Southern Africa recorded its first case of polio in more than a decade when the disease was reported in Botswana earlier this year.

Sylvia Ssinabulya, an MP in Uganda and a member of the Ugandan Family Planning Association (FPAU) has urged the government to legalize abortion. She said legalizing abortion would give women raped in war zones opportunity to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

Swazi authorities and health workers have expressed concern over the rising rate of HIV infection among the country's truck drivers. The landlocked southern African country is heavily dependent on road transport and there are fears that the spread of the virus could have a serious impact on the economy.

The job purpose is to provide public health support to the humanitarian programme for Sudanese Refugees in Chad and to strengthen Oxfam's response to humanitarian emergencies through specialist public health assessment and analysis.

Spending on research on diseases of the poor, such as malaria, tuberculosis and dengue fever, has increased substantially over recent years, according to the annual report of the Global Forum for Health Research. Major donations from governments and charities pushed global health research funding to more than US$100 billion in 2001, up from US$30 billion in 1987.

This report from Partners for Health Reformplus presents estimates of the total cost of providing comprehensive antiretroviral (ARV) treatment in the public sector in Nigeria. Drugs are not the only major cost of an ARV program, but they are the largest single component. Overall treatment costs, currently borne by the patient, are well beyond the resources of most Nigerians. The development of an effective ARV programme, therefore, must include support not only for ARV drugs but all aspects of patient cost.

Mozambique Health Minister Francisco Songane has said that the country will not be able to launch a nationwide antiretroviral drug program due to "serious" staff and equipment shortages, Reuters reports. This follows an announcement by Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano that the country had launched a pilot program to provide free antiretroviral drugs to 8,000 HIV-positive adults.

Global trade unions have warned of the consequences of the increased migration of workers; in particular skilled labour moving from poor to rich countries. The health sector, which is booming in aging Europe, has become the new focus of skilled Africans deserting their country. Mauritian, South African and Kenyan unions accuse European governments of "poaching".

Africa and AIDS activists say the Bush Administration’s pledge to expedite its approval process for low-cost, generic anti-retroviral drugs by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will really slow delivery of drugs to those suffering while undermining the authority of the United Nations and World Health Organisation. “The net effect is to continue to delay the delivery of life-saving drugs to the most needy,” said Salih Booker, executive director of Africa Action, a Washington-based grassroots network and frequent critic of the administration’s anti-AIDS plan. “It looks to us like an elaborate ruse to protect the interests of the patent-holding U.S. drug companies while, at the same time, undermining the World Health Organisation’s own approval process.”

Asian and North African countries could be polio-free within months, while west and central African countries must change track to stop the virus, according to data presented in Geneva by Health Ministers from the world's six remaining polio-endemic countries. The ministers announced a two-pronged strategy to further accelerate eradication activities in both areas.

The 57th conference of the World Health Assembly (WHA) opened at the Palais des Nations here on Monday. The WHA is the supreme decision-making body of the World Health Organisation (WHO), which has a total of 192 members. The conference is scheduled to end on Saturday. Key issues including HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, road safety, a proposed strategy on diet, and physical activity and health will top the agenda of the conference.

Meningitis has killed more than 800 people in the impoverished West African country of Burkina Faso since the start of the year, health officials said on Monday, double the death toll given two months ago. Like its neighbours in Africa's "meningitis belt" stretching from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east, the landlocked country is often struck by outbreaks of the disease in the early months of the year.

If U.S. President George W. Bush is expecting bouquets from AIDS activists for his proposal to expedite approvals for life-saving anti-retroviral drugs by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), he is in for a disappointment. Africa and AIDS activists are assailing the proposal not only as a new attempt to delay the delivery of desperately needed, low-cost generic drugs to needy AIDS victims in Africa and the Caribbean, but also as an effort to undermine the World Health Organisation's (WHO) own expedited approval process which has already authorized the use of generics by the World Bank, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

A year from now, according to Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the minister of health, South Africans should be paying nearly 33 percent less, on average, for generic and brand-name products. But dispensing doctors, whose revenue will drop by an estimated R503-million once the new medicine pricing regulations are in place, are likely to increase their consultation fees to compensate for their losses. Hospitals too, whose biggest cash cows are medicines, could increase theatre costs to reduce their losses.

With young people in Zimbabwe most at risk from HIV/AIDS, a new project is seeking to empower youth representatives to make a difference among their peers. The District Response Initiative (DRI), which works to reduce the effects of HIV/AIDS on rural youth in seven of the country's most impoverished districts, is already using trained peer educators to encourage HIV/AIDS awareness at youth-friendly clubs and centres. Now the DRI has drafted youth office-bearers - teenagers appointed as young parliamentarians, governors and councillors by the ministry of youth - into the cause.

Twenty-five years ago WHO promised 'Health for All' through the Alma Ata declaration. However, the UN body abandoned the primary health care agenda in the later years. ‘Health systems, including primary health care’, a new WHO document, endorses the primary health care agenda. It is a welcome return to the basics. Grassroots movements like the People’s Health Movement (PHM) offer a cautious welcome, but say this is not enough. The UN health body’s new ‘road map’ that is being presented during the ongoing World Health Assembly endorses the importance of primary health care - something that grass roots movements like the PHM has been demanding for years.

Zimbabwean men have become increasingly involved in caring for AIDS patients, challenging the stereotype that caring for the terminally ill is women's work. For 48-year-old Luckson Murungweni, until recently it would have been inconceivable that he would one day be actively involved in caring for the chronically ill, let alone those dying from AIDS. Now his attitude is different and he has become the focal point of a home-based care project in rural Goromonzi, some 35 kilometres east of the capital, Harare.