The Africa Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC) invites applications from qualified candidates for the position of Research Trainee. The description of the position is available through the link provided. For more information about APHRC, please visit the website:

Radical changes in approach to the youth are needed if Tanzania is to curb the spread of HIV/Aids and sexually transmitted infections, an official of the international NGO Africa Medical and Relief Foundation told IRIN.

The generosity of computer magnate Bill Gates in giving money to African Aids victims isn't as simple as you might think, says this article. Gate’s demi-trillionaire status is based on a nasty little monopoly-protecting trade treaty called “TRIPS” – the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights rules of the World Trade Organisation. TRIPS gives Gates a hammerlock on computer operating systems worldwide, legally granting him the kind of monopoly the Robber Barons of yore could only dream of. But TRIPS, the rule which helps Gates rule, also bars African governments from buying AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis medicine at cheap market prices.

In 2001, Action Against Hunger celebrated its 22nd birthday with a growing awareness that the eradication of hunger requires much more than simply ensuring that global production of foodstuffs maintains pace with growing populations. In that year, AAH published The Geopolitics of Hunger, 2000-2001: Hunger and Power, an edited volume that presents an overview of contemporary food security issues. Indeed, the argument made by AAH is more complicated than supply and demand: control of food supplies is a tool wielded by authorities in power and those seeking to contest that power. Famine is more often a result of human action than environmental drought or disaster. The Geopolitics of Hunger describes the places and ways in which chronic malnutrition and the threat of starvation result from political manipulation of food supplies, despite international legal prohibitions against the use of food as weapon of war.

Approximately 18.6 million people in East and Southern Africa were HIV-positive at the end of 2002, according to World Health Organisation statistics presented last week at a WHO workshop in Harare, Zimbabwe, Xinhua News Agency reports.

Nigerian HIV/AIDS activists under the aegis of the Treatment Action Movement (TAM), a coalition of civil society groups working in the area of HIV/AIDS treatment and care, have called on U.S. President George W. Bush to ensure that his AIDS policies are not merely rhetoric, but focus on improving the quality of lives of the continent's 30 million people living with HIV/AIDS.

"Whilst we applaud President Bush's visit to this part of the world, his stance and commitment to HIV/AIDS treatment, as well as his US$15 billion financial package to help with treatment in Africa and the Caribbean, we are also painfully aware that Zimbabwe is not listed as a recipient of the President's philanthropy. We are in no doubt of the fact that the exclusion of this country is linked to the relentless and persistent human rights abuses in this country, and the explicit demands by Washington that democracy and good governance be restored."

The development of a vaccine against malaria could be five to eight years away, a leading researcher says. "We will try to shorten that, but it is not going to be easy,” Prof. Adrian Hill, a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford told media representatives.

Aids activists have questioned U.S. President George W. Bush's purported commitment to fighting the pandemic, asking whether his policies were aimed more at helping leading drugs companies. "Is the pharmaceutical industry running your Aids programme? And does it want to run ours too?" the Ugandan Access to Essential Medicines Coalition asked in an open letter to the US leader, a day ahead of his trip to the east African country.

Liberia's only major referral hospital, the John F. Kennedy Medical Centre in the capital, Monrovia, can no longer contain the influx of cholera patients, most of whom are internally displaced persons, the acting Minister of Health Nathaniel Bartee said on Wednesday.

The ministry of health has still not signed an agreement to accept R715-million in international funding to combat HIV and Aids despite a promise earlier this year to sign the agreement by May. However, an announcement would be made "very shortly" about when the agreement with The Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria would be signed, a department spokesperson said this week.

People living in remote areas in Tanzania are due to benefit from a US $5.4 million grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a public-private partnership formed in 2002 to attract resources to fight the three diseases.

As President Bush departed for Africa, key questions about his Aids policy remained unanswered; including the level of funding that will actually be appropriated. While three billion dollars a year has been authorized by the U.S. Congress, the president has requested no additional funds for this fiscal year and less than 2 billion dollars for fiscal year 2004, including only 200 million dollars instead of 1 billion dollars for the Global Fund to Fight Aids. News reports say Republicans in the House of Representatives are planning to approve even less than the president's low request.

This sourcebook documents details of HIV prevention programmes for school age children in seven African countries: Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Types of programmes include both primary and secondary school based examples, use of the media, community based and peer education programmes and outreach for street children.

Editor Ali Lmrabet ended his 47-day hunger strike on 23 June. Ali Lmrabet, editor of the newspapers Demain Magazine and Douman, was found guilty of "insulting the person of the king" and of committing an "offence against the monarchy" and "an offence against territorial integrity" on 12 May 2003 and was sentenced to four years' imprisonment. The sentence was reduced to three years' imprisonment on appeal on 17 June 2003.

East and Central African civil society organisations on Wednesday called for the suspension of the application of genetic engineering in agriculture. The organisations said genetic engineering would concentrate the means of production in the hands of multi-national companies with patents on the crops and disrupt farming communities.

With HIV prevalence rates in antenatal clinic attendees of 35.4 %, Botswana is one of the countries at the epicentre of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Despite this, the role of research in the national response to the epidemic has continued to take a back stage. The National AIDS Coordinating Agency (NACA) in collaboration with all stakeholders and developmental partners have, as a result, found it necessary to hold the first ever National HIV/AIDS/STI/and other related infectious Diseases (ORID) Research Conference - NHASORC 2003. It will be held from the 7th to the 12th of December 2003 in Gaborone.

Ghanaian health authorities have ordered anti-retroviral drugs from undisclosed sources to cater for the treatment of 2000 HIV/AIDS patients for the next two years.

Mozambican Health Minister Francisco Songane reaffirmed on Monday that malaria remains the single largest cause of death in the country. Songane was speaking in Maputo at a meeting between Ministry of Health specialists and cooperation partners under the "Roll Back Malaria" (RBM) programme.

The brain drain of health professionals is proving to be a distressing economic headache for the country. According to the State of Ghanaian Economy Report 2002 a total of 3,157 health professionals left the country between 1993 and 2002, representing over 31 percent of health personnel trained in Ghana during the same period.