A free daily meal has been enough incentive to attract a steady increase of primary school children back into class in Zambia's Southern province. The pilot school-feeding programme, launched in July, now reaches 50 schools in five districts, providing a fortified micronutrient-rich porridge for 19,000 young children in the country's most drought-affected areas.

The Pasteur Institute in the Central African Republic capital, Bangui, has confirmed an epidemic of diarrhoea in the northwest of the country where at least 40 people died in late September, an official said on Wednesday.

The Zambian government, under new President Levy Mwanawasa, is taking "urgent steps" to fight the nation's HIV/AIDS epidemic, after almost 20 years of "struggling against the disease with little effect," the New York Times reports. Health experts believe that Zambia - where nearly one in five adults is HIV-positive - has the sixth-worst AIDS epidemic in the world. According to a United Nations report, fewer than 1% of the estimated 200,000 or more HIV-positive people in Zambia who need antiretroviral medications has access to them.

This paper describes the experiences of the Wildlife and Environmental Society of Malawi (WESM) in addressing the impacts that HIV/AIDS is having on the environment. The paper describes those impacts and the process the WESM has been through in order to mainstream HIV/AIDS into its work.

Extremely poor levels of hygiene in Sudan, coupled with a lack of health care facilities, medicines and trained personnel, are contributing to widespread preventable blindness. All the leading causes of preventable blindness, such as trachoma, river blindness, and cataracts co-exist in Sudan, Dr Serge Resnikoff, Coordinator of the World Health Organisation's (WHO) Prevention of Blindness and Deafness programme, told IRIN.

It's been months since Noma, a cancer patient at Mpilo, the largest government hospital here, has gone for radiotherapy. The process is meant to stop the cancer in her leg from spreading. But five months ago the only machine used by patients in three provinces - Matabeleland, Masvingo and Midlands - broke down and there is no foreign currency to import spares. Mpilo Hospital has also run out chemotherapy drugs.

Over 1.2 billion adolescents - one person in five - are making the transition from child-hood to adulthood. How well we prepare them to face adult challenges in a fast changing world will shape humanity's common future. Adolescents must be enabled to avoid early pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS while being given skills, opportunities and a real say in development plans, stresses The State of World Population 2003 report by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

The food crisis in Zimbabwe is worsening, with a majority of the country's districts having exhausted their food stocks, according to a UN report received on Friday. "According to reports from 58 districts in August 2003, food is becoming scarce, harvest stocks have been exhausted in a majority of districts and over half report a deteriorating food situation," the report said. The report comes a week after the UN's food agency warned that only a quarter of its appeal for funds to feed millions of starving people in southern Africa, most of them in Zimbabwe, had been met. An estimated 5.5 million Zimbabweans will require emergency food aid by early next year, out of a regional total of 6.5 million. This is one of the stories in the latest Zimbabwe Update for the beginning of October. The Zimbabwe Update is produced by ZIMCIVINFO in support of democracy, peace and civics in Zimbabwe.

Some schools in Swaziland are filling "many of the gaps" left in the country by the "double whammy" of HIV/AIDS and famine by feeding AIDS orphans and teaching them how to farm. Swazi Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini in January said that the country's official HIV prevalence had reached 38.6%, up from 34.2% in January 2002.

The cost of health care in Zimbabwe finally went beyond the reach of most people this month when medical drug suppliers and pharmacies hiked prices by more than 1,000 percent, citing an increase by the same margin in import costs.

Using the mandates of the UN General Assembly Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS in 2001, the UNAIDS Secretariat and Cosponsors collaboratively developed a series of global/ regional and national indicators to measure the global community's progress in reaching the Declaration's targets in line with the Millennium Development Goals. This report, by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/ AIDS, which presents data from the first use of these indicators, represents the most comprehensive assessment to date of the state of global, regional and national responses on the broad range of challenges posed by HIV/AIDS.

About 5 000 needy people, as well as orphans and volunteers affiliated to Catholic Aids Action, will receive emergency food relief over the next six months.

Civil society and private business are making invaluable contributions to the war against HIV/Aids, national health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Saturday.

Ghanaian doctors warn that the health services will break down unless the government takes urgent action to pay health professionals a decent wage and curb the activities of overseas recruitment agencies enticing them to accept salaries up to 20 times higher.

Over 100 children, mostly under five, have died from a suspected outbreak of whooping cough in Kimatong Budi county, Equatoria state, according to the NGO, Medair.

Health authorities in Zimbabwe have confirmed in a statement that 786 people have died of malaria in that country in the nine months to the end of September this year.

Seven of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, are in talks with a leading international workers' organisation that could result in HIV drugs being given free to some of the world's poorest nations. The talks are being held between the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM) and the main producers of HIV drugs.

About 131 children died in the paediatric hospital of Ndalatando in northern Kwanza-Norte province over the first six months of this year due to various diseases. This was said by the hospital clinic director, Celestino Teixeira, who added that 65 died from malaria, 35 from respiratory infections and acute diarrhoeas while another 30 died of other diseases.

The Generic Anti-Retroviral Procurement Project and the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) Treatment Project asked multinational pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim this week for permission to import generic nevirapine for use in combination antiretroviral therapy, failing which they will seek compulsory licenses in court.

Over 1,500 doctors have threatened to go on strike this Friday over the failure by the ministries of Health and Education to pay their allowances. The doctors are drawn from the College of Health Services, University of Nairobi and the Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH).