Journalists Against AIDS (JAAIDS) Nigeria has announced the commencement of a two-year project to reduce HIV/AIDS-related stigma and discrimination in the media and other identified communities in Nigeria. The project aims to harness the capacity of the Nigerian media and communities as a potential force for change to reduce the high levels of HIV-related stigma and discrimination in the country.

The UN World Health Organisation (WHO) has expressed concern over the spread of cholera in Kasai Oriental Province, central Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where three new areas were affected between 1-8 June.

Zambia, a country hit hard by HIV/ AIDS, will soon have a human rights charter to protect its HIV/AIDS-infected citizens from various forms of abuses and discrimination. Matrine Chuulu, coordinator of Women in Law in Southern Africa, a non-governmental organisation in Zambia working on the charter, said Wednesday that the charter will be launched in November this year.

"Whoever is in control of the government will need to specify who is Ivorian and who is not," stressed Abahebou Kamagate in an interview with the Digital Freedom Network. As a human rights activist, Kamagate fought to challenge the government's increasingly restrictive citizenship laws that could exclude almost half the country's population, especially those from ethnic groups associated with the northern region. Kamagate is the vice president of SOS Exclusion, an Ivorian human rights organisation, and believes that the question of citizenship is at the root of the conflict which has divided the country between north and south.

If there were a simple reason for Ethiopia's chronic food shortages, the problem would likely have been resolved before now. But the causes are complex, and addressing them requires a multifaceted approach. This article outlines the causes of food insecurity in Ethiopia and describes Oxfam's work to create solutions that are effective, fair, and sustainable.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who is in Washington, D.C., this week meeting with government and business leaders, including President Bush, to discuss AIDS, trade and terrorism, said in an interview with the Washington Times that "AIDS is not a serious sickness ... because it's not very contagious" and that people can easily avoid acquiring the virus.

The Western Cape was the first province to defy South African government policy by providing AIDS drugs to HIV-positive pregnant women in the public health sector. Two years later, the rollout campaign has achieved universal coverage and now babies and children living with HIV/AIDS are also to get access to treatment. Meanwhile, the South African cabinet is expected to discuss a national ARV costing report this week, ahead of a meeting between AIDS lobby group the Treatment Action Campaign and the National AIDS Council on 14 June. AIDS activists hope recommendations handed down by the report will end months of a bitter stand-off between them and the department of health over its refusal to implement a treatment policy.

The Namibian Government has teamed up with a local company to produce cheap AIDS drugs, Health Minister Dr Libertina Amathila announced. Speaking during a discussion between visiting UN Special Envoy on AIDS Stephen Lewis and a group of Ministers, Amathila said Cabinet last week gave approval for an Ondangwa-based company to produce generic HIV-AIDS drugs that will be affordable to Namibians infected and affected by the disease.

Zimbabwe is facing a humanitarian crisis unprecedented in its history. Save the Children has been running a food aid intervention since October 2001, and has also been providing technical support to two local NGOs undertaking supplementary and general feeding programmes. This postholder will work alongside a second food security advisor and be responsible for providing technical guidance on the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of food security interventions in Zimbabwe.

Leaders of the world's richest countries agreed at the G8 summit to provide billions of dollars to help fight AIDS in Africa but, under present trade rules, much of that cash will go to multinational pharmaceutical companies. To the disappointment of pressure groups monitoring the summit, the leaders failed to make progress on new trade rules to allow poor countries to buy cheap, generic versions of new medicines - including the drugs which arrest AIDS.

People living with HIV/AIDS take up about 80 percent of Ugandan hospital beds. This was revealed by Major Rubaramira Ruranga of the Uganda Joint Clinical Research Centre (UJCRC) during an aids awareness conference recently. "80 per cent of the hospital beds are occupied by people living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda. This shows that the disease is still an epidemic," said Mr Rubaramira.

Questions about what percentage of Africa's HIV infections are caused by dirty needles has prompted U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson -- who is also the chairman of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria -- to order a review of all research linking HIV/AIDS and medical injections, Associated Press has reported. The review could affect how funding from the $15 billion U.S. initiative to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean is distributed, AP reported.

A controversy has erupted in Nigeria over the sale to a foreign company of the rights to a patent on a locally developed drug for sickle cell anaemia. The drug, NIPRISAN, was developed by a traditional medicine practitioner working in collaboration with researchers at Nigeria’s National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Development (NIPRD) in Abuja.

The lack of rain has affected the agricultural productivity of the entire southern Africa region. In Malawi the food crisis has been particularly devastating as drought conditions alternated by floods and the selling off of government grain reserves have left Malawian farmers in dire straits.

With the end of the Iraq war, the globalisation war is heating up around trade again, this time over the issue of genetically modified food. George W. Bush is once more attacking "Old Europe," claiming that it is denying food to starving Africans, after several African countries declined US aid in the form of genetically modified food out of concern that it might taint their own crops and block sales to Europe. And once again the United States is opposing a United Nations approach, this time in the form of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, signed by more than 100 nations, which establishes rules to regulate GMOs.

In much of the literature on HIV/AIDS and mobility, mobile populations and/or migrants are described and treated as one, homogenous group. This report from the International Organisation for Migration examines the different sub-groups of mobile populations, and looks at their commonalities and differences. The report notes that mobile groups are vulnerable to HIV/AIDS in different respects, which complicates prevention and mitigation strategies. Vulnerability to HIV/AIDS is often related to a particular stage of the mobility process.

The European Commission (EC) has initiated a new health programme worth 44milion euros (about N6.6billion) to promote immunisation activities in six states in Nigeria. The programme, christened 'Partnership to Reinforce Immunisation Efficiency' (PRIME), is expected to cover one state each in the six geo-political zones. These are Abia, Cross River, Gombe, Kebbi, Osun and Plateau states.

The government has locked horns with the Private Hospitals Association (PHA) over plans to gazette and control all fees charged by private health institutions in the country, The Standard has established. Sources said the government would, in the next "few months", set all fees paid in private hospitals because the institutions were charging rates beyond the reach of the ordinary people.

Recent evidence indicates that the number of child deaths due to malaria in Africa has begun to increase, and that this is attributable to failing medicines and medicines of poor quality. Surveys indicate that due to high levels of resistance to the drugs in use, almost half of the money spent on anti-malarial medicines is being used to pay for inappropriate treatments.

U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis, during a speech at the Global Health Council's annual conference in Washington, D.C., said that he was "aghast" at the way in which "AIDS was deepening hunger and hunger was deepening AIDS" in Southern Africa. According to Lewis, Africa "reaps what the world sows, and with a vengeance."