Swaziland's nursing crisis is deepening as trained nurses leave the country for better salaries abroad and the Swaziland Nursing Association renews a call for strike action. Last month another 29 Swazi nurses left the country for better paying jobs in the United Kingdom - a third of all nurses who graduate each year.

Food and nutrition security for Africa must be achieved because it is a human right as well as a moral and socioeconomic imperative. The highest-priority actions are raising agricultural productivity; fostering pro-poor economic growth through improved access to markets, better infrastructure, and greater trade competitiveness; building institutional and human capacity; improving nutrition and health with due attention to HIV/AIDS; and strengthening governance. All of these require added resources, but the benefits of food and nutrition security outweigh the resource needs. This is according to the draft outcome document of the Conference on Assuring Food and Nutrition Security in Africa by 2020 held from 1-3 April 2004. It presents recommendations on the steps necessary for moving toward the goal of assuring food and nutrition security in Africa by 2020.

This publication by the Africa Centre for Biosafety, Earthlife Africa, Environmental Rights Action - Friends of the Earth Nigeria, Grain and SafeAge makes the case that non-GM food aid is both possible and desirable. It argues moreover that non-GM alternatives exist at national, regional and international levels, and that donors should make these available to Sudan and Angola. Concluding that every country has the sovereign right to choose either to accept or reject GM food aid from donors, and highlighting the failure of the World Food Programme (WFP) to learn from previous experiences, the report denounces the 'No Choice' scenario presented to the two countries by the WFP and USAID.

The Kenyan Government plans to buy abortion kits for its public hospitals to deal with emergencies arising from unsafe abortions. The announcement was made by Director of Medical Services, Dr James Nyikal, at the launch of a new report about unsafe abortion. The kits, including manual vacuum aspiration, will be put on the health ministry's essential equipment list. The kits will be used to help deal with complications arising from unsafe pregnancy termination in areas that lack equipped hospitals.

This is a critical moment in the history of HIV/AIDS. There is more money, more political will and more attention being paid to this killer disease than ever before. And yet, more people than ever are dying of AIDS and becoming infected with HIV. By using HIV treatment programs to strengthen existing prevention programs and improve health systems, the international community has a unique opportunity to change the course of history, says The World Health Report 2004 - Changing History.

A new newsletter of Poetry on HIV/AIDS in Africa has been launched. The name of the newsletter is AIDS out of AFRICA. AIDS out of AFRICA will be a bi-annual newsletter appearing in June and December.

Programme Planning for Adolescent Sexual Reproductive Health focuses on building sound interventions for adolescent sexual and reproductive health designed to strengthen institutional capacity to effectively monitor programme operations and evaluate performance. The nuts and bolts of programme planning are fused with adolescent-centred SRH concerns through an array of provocative and interactive sessions. HIV/AIDS interventions are situated within the context of healthy sexuality and appropriate technology. Learning is facilitated through lectures, case studies, group problem solving and individualised attention.

Last week a league of non-governmental organisations met all over the world to deliberate on the Education for All (EFA) plan. The meeting which was tagged ‘Global Week of Action 2004 Roundtable on Education’ was also observed in Lagos. Various issues hindering the total achievement of the EFA goals were discussed. One of the topics discussed extensively at the roundtable, which attracted much debate, was the impact of HIV/AIDS on education in Nigeria. The participants agreed that the pandemic is having a colossal impact on the education sector of the country.

The size of Zimbabwe's population may decrease by as much as 23% between 1992 and 2010 due to the country's HIV/AIDS epidemic, according to a report published last Thursday by the country's Institute of Development Poverty Reduction Forum, Xinhua News Agency reports. According to the report, which was funded by the United Nations Development Programme, the country's population could have grown from 11.8 million in 1992 to 16.6 million in 2010 without HIV/AIDS. However, because of the disease, the country's annual population growth rate is expected to become negative by 2010.

Access to antiretroviral treatment must be drastically scaled up as a key challenge of the response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Prevention and treatment must be seen as two sides of the same coin; antiretroviral treatment improves and extends lives, and provides a boost to prevention strategies. The second challenge is the increasing impact of the epidemic on African women; because women are disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS, there must be an additional focus on women in the African response. Thirdly, the humanitarian crisis in southern Africa has brought into sharp relief the need to integrate the HIV/AIDS response with broader development and humanitarian initiatives. This is according to a report produced by UNAIDS that aims to highlight successful initiatives against AIDS across Africa.

Some 16,462 people have been vaccinated against meningitis and 1,544 children against measles in a campaign carried out by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the Central African Republic (CAR) Ministry of Health, an official told IRIN. MSF coordinator Carlos Recio said the immunisation campaign against meningitis "A" in the northwestern sub-prefecture of Boguila was conducted in collaboration with the UN World Health Organisation.

"The UN Security Council has twice discussed HIV/AIDS as a global security threat in the last two years. But, I respectfully submit, it has not yet fully grasped the issue. A number of academics and think tanks have also addressed the subject, including the International Crisis Group. But the evidence and analysis at their disposal does not yet allow them to come to firm conclusions. However, I believe that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is a fundamental underlying threat to security on this continent." This is according to a submission by Alex de Waal, of the organisation Justice Africa, to the U.N. Secretary General's High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change: The HIV/AIDS and the Threat to Security in Africa.

More than a million people in Burundi are not receiving any medical treatment because they cannot afford it, says aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres. The MSF report said a government move to get people to start paying for treatment, tests and drugs meant many now went without them altogether. Burundi's impoverished government withdrew free health care to its 6.9 million citizens two years ago.

The HIV infection rate in Burkina Faso has declined sharply over the past year, according to the country's latest sentinel survey, which is based on the voluntary testing of pregnant women at ante-natal clinics. The 2004 survey, published last Thursday, estimated that 4.2% of Burkinabe were infected with the HIV virus. That represented a sharp fall from the 6.5% HIV prevalence rate registered by the 2003 sentinel survey, and a peak of 7.2 percent in 1997.

Femi Soyinka, one of Nigeria's leading human rights activists, has decided to take a public stand against the discrimination suffered by more than one million of his countrymen and women who are living with AIDS. Soyinka, a former professor of medicine at Ife University in southwestern Nigeria, told IRIN that people living with the HIV virus and AIDS were often shunned by other members of society and treated like criminals. But he warned that their marginalisation was a major factor causing the continued spread of the epidemic in Africa's most populous country.

In a rare show of unity, several lawmakers from Zimbabwe's two rival parties on Friday underwent voluntary HIV tests in a bid to inspire others to do the same to curb the Aids pandemic in the southern African country. Zimbabwe is deeply divided politically, but at a news conference ahead of the testing, lawmakers from the ruling party and the opposition said they stood shoulder-to-shoulder in trying to combat the HIV virus.

"It was difficult to tell people that I was HIV positive because there wasn't much support," says Gladys, a teacher in her 40s. Even though a million people have died of AIDS in Uganda, and a million more are infected with the virus, attitudes towards the disease haven't changed much in this Central African country in the past two and a half decades. When the AIDS epidemic began in the early 1980s one of the hardest hit countries was Uganda. By the early 1990s, over 18 percent of the population was infected with HIV, and in some areas, the figure was over 30 percent. But Uganda is one of the few countries in Africa that has managed to turn the tide, thanks to the government's openness about the disease and the work being done by local groups across the country. Infection rates have dropped from 18 percent to just over 6 percent.

If current efforts to combat the effects of HIV/AIDS are not stepped up, Nigeria's economy will shrink by 20 percent, an expert has warned. Health economist Dr. Reginald Chima made the submission at a session on the socio-economic impact of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria during the ongoing 4th National conference on HIV/AIDS in Nigeria. After two decades of HIV devastation, Nigeria's economy will have lost 20 percent of her gross domestic product, he said.

Malaria is the leading cause of death in five of Namibia's northern regions, claiming the lives of 467 people since January this year, a senior health official told IRIN on Wednesday. "Most of these deaths are malaria-related. The incidence of malaria peaked earlier this year because of the heavy rainfall in the north," said Dr Petrina Usiko, director of primary health care services in the ministry of health.

Scientists have identified a protein produced by the malaria parasite that is responsible for the severe childhood form of the disease. They hope that this protein could be a target for a vaccine that could save thousands of children's lives in sub-Saharan Africa. The findings concern one of a number of proteins that are found on the surface of human red blood cells infected by the parasites. These proteins help the malaria parasite survive in the human body by stopping the removal of blood cells in the spleen, therefore allowing the parasite to reproduce.