Whose Reality Counts? presents a radical challenge to all concerned with development, whether practitioners, researchers or policy-makers, in all organisations and disciplines, and at all levels from fieldworkers to the heads of agencies.

Statistics show that 12,365 health professionals left the country in search of greener pastures between 1993 and 2002. Of the figure 630 were medical doctors, 410 pharmacists, 83 laboratory technicians and 11,325 nurses including auxiliaries.

A new National Policy on HIV/AIDS has been concluded and will be released before the end of the year, Chairman of the National Action Committee on AIDS (NACA), Prof. Babatunde Osotimehin, has said. Osotimehin told a News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) forum on Monday in Abuja that the policy was an improvement on the first one adopted in 1997.

Swaziland is a small country geographically, and its population numbers less than a million. But, it has an oversized AIDS problem. "We have a disproportionate AIDS dilemma. It comes from a failure in the past to own up to an emerging crisis," an official with the Ministry of Health told IPS.

Uganda’s ministry of health on Monday committed itself to offering free antiretroviral (ARV) treatment to HIV/AIDS sufferers who urgently need it but cannot afford it, starting January 2004. The announcement was made at the World AIDS Day commemoration in Kampala, attended by President Yoweri Museveni and Health Minister Jim Muhwezi.

Donor responses to the current food emergency in southern Africa need to start with an acknowledgement of their responsibility for the increase in poverty and vulnerability in southern Africa. "They must be willing to explore, together with southern African governments and citizens, pro-poor macroeconomic, debt relief and budgetary policies, even where these differ from orthodox beliefs," says a paper from Christian Aid.

IRIN is looking for an editor to expand and enhance its current coverage of HIV/AIDS issues for sub-Saharan Africa. The successful candidate will be charged with expanding IRIN's PlusNews HIV/AIDS service by increasing the news flow from West and Central Africa, using both personal contacts and IRIN's extensive stringer network in the two regions. They will be expected to write and edit well researched and sensitively written stories about HIV/AIDS in both English and French.

The AIDS epidemic and the spread of HIV infection are advancing in regions of the world long affected, and regions that saw little of the deadly virus in the first two decades of the epidemic. The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) announced in a November 25 press release that an estimated 40 million people worldwide are infected with HIV. In sub-Saharan Africa, long the world's most severely affected region, as many as one in five adults lives with the disease, according to "AIDS Epidemic Update 2003," an authoritative global census of the disease published by UNAIDS each year prior to World AIDS Day December 1. More than 3 million new infections and 2.3 million AIDS deaths occurred in Africa alone in 2003.

Where are we making progress towards equity in health in southern Africa? What are the critical driving forces for health equity? Where are the barriers? How do we build equitable expansion of ARV treatment now? What do we do about health personnel migration? Which health rights campaigns have promoted equity in health? How do we ensure an effective community voice in health systems? These are some of the questions that the conference hosted by the southern African network on Equity in Health (EQUINET) will address.

This new publication summarizes discussions from the Eighth Roundtable on Communication for Development Roundtable (Managua, 2001) on strategies to meet the urgent challenge of HIV/Aids. It highlights communications that address the needs of young people, use of community media, and community mobilization to tackle gender- based violence and discrimination.

HIV/AIDS hits schools hard, affecting both teachers and pupils. What is the economic impact in the education sector? Researchers from Imperial College London estimate HIV-related costs to the Ministry of Education (MoE) and donors in Zambia. They argue for extra funds to provide an active care and prevention programme.

Worldwide, an estimated 11.8 million people aged 15 to 24 are infected with HIV, most of whom (77%) live in sub-Saharan Africa. In Zambia, 21% of the population fall within this age group. How much do young Zambians know about HIV and how does it affect their behaviour? Researchers from Population Services International put these questions to young men in Lusaka, Zambia.

It was Rule 2.9 that finally sparked the revolt. On the evening news, cameras bobbed and weaved through a heaving crowd of furious, toyi-toying Technikon Witwatersrand students, as they demanded that management stop curtailing their personal freedom. That was August this year shortly after management issued the offending Rule 2.9 decreeing that students were not to receive visitors (of the opposite sex) in their residence rooms. While there are no formal surveys, guesstimates are that about 22 percent of South African university undergraduate students are HIV positive.

The Global Health Research Initiative invites letters of intent from teams of Canadian and developing country researchers interested in conducting operational research that will contribute to the Canadian International Immunization Initiative (CIII2). Letters of Intent due: December 15, 2003.

This short review of ICT reproductive health education projects finds that small projects have begun to demonstrate the potential value of using the technology with youth. Some studies have shown that Web-based projects, CD-ROMs, and other types of ICT can lead to changes in young people’s knowledge and attitudes about sexual and reproductive health issues.

A recent post-harvest survey in Mozambique has shown worrying levels of vulnerability for children and orphans due to the combined impact of drought and HIV/AIDS. The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said additional analysis of data collected by the national Vulnerability Assessment Committee (VAC) in May and June, showed that "maternal orphans were found to be 50 percent more likely to be chronically malnourished than the general child population and 120 percent more likely to be severely chronically malnourished.

The headline statistics about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are well known: nearly one in ten adults, a staggering 26 million people, are estimated to be infected with the deadly HIV virus. In eight countries in Southern Africa, the overall adult prevalence rate is now well over 25 per cent. But, unlike no other pandemic before it, there is very little accurate information about just how many people have died of AIDS-related illnesses during the last decade or so. A real concern is that seriously over-inflated estimates of HIV prevalence could exacerbate already high levels of despondency and even fatalism about the epidemic among many young people in Africa.

The faltering Zimbabwe public health system has been further reduced as nurses and senior doctors join junior and mid-level doctors on a month-long strike. The nurses briefly joined the doctors striking last month for higher pay. They returned to work after being promised an 800% pay rise. But the strike was on again after pay checks last Thursday showed no increase.

Although this year's good maize harvest in Zambia has alleviated food shortages, households in two provinces continue to face food insecurity, officials said. "There is still concern over the food situation in the Southern and Western Provinces," Elizabeth Phiri, secretary in charge of cooperatives and marketing in the Ministry of Agriculture told IRIN.

As on Friday, a total of 24 cases of Ebola haemorrhagic fever, including 12 deaths, in the villages of Mbomo (19 cases, nine deaths) and Mbanza (five cases, three deaths) in Mbomo District, in the country's northwestern Cuvette Ouest Department, were reported by the Ministry of Health and the World Health Organisation (WHO).