The failure of the short belg rains, coupled with the late onset of the long meher rains, are pushing as many as 10.2 million Ethiopians to the edge of hunger. A multi-agency nutrition study, released last week, classified many midland and lowland parts of West Hararghe, Ethiopia, as "critical", with 15.1 percent of children under 5 suffering from global acute and severe acute (3.6 percent) malnutrition.

The post involves providing technical policy support and guidance, working within national, regional, global and external policy frameworks. Central to the role is the development and implementation of current and future HIV/AIDS work in Mozambique at both a strategic and operational level.

For the vast majority of Africans -- the 70%-plus who live on subsistence farms off in the bush, or eke out meagre livings in towns -- medical care is a dream. In terms of purchasing power, $1 to $2 a day is the absolute best that Africans, on average, can manage for essentials. In other words, the average daily wages earned are precisely the cost of even the least expensive HIV treatments. This is a Devil's Bargain, no choice at all: The choice is, very simply, between absolute destitution and death.

Rather reluctantly I have to write to say that I disagree with almost everything that Issa Shivji has to say (Pambazuka News 80&81). The reluctance is because I share Professor Shivji’s starting point: how can human rights discourse be wrested from those who use it to defend the dominant structures of society and reformulate it to advance the struggles of the oppressed? However, I find the actual content of his argument incoherent. It also fails to engage in any practical sense with the work of African human rights activists.

Malaria continues to plague the world's population, particularly inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa, where it kills at least one person every 30 seconds. Now researchers have sequenced the genetic codes of the most deadly malarial parasite and a mosquito that carries it - work that hopefully will aid in the development of novel approaches to combating the disease.

One huge piece of Malawi's food disaster is the development crisis. Poor farmers don't have the roads or the transportation to reach potential markets with significant amount of goods to lift them past the subsistence point. That means roads and transportation systems, timely information, access to credit and technical assistance, including extension services from government. All of this will take money that Malawi does not have.

Malaria has only recently been overtaken by AIDs as the largest single cause of death by transmitted disease in Africa, but for centuries, it has outranked warfare as a source of human suffering. Over the past generations it has killed millions of human beings and sapped the strength of hundreds of millions more.

An article in the October issue of the Royal Society of Medicines' International Journal of STDs implies that Africa's HIV/AIDS crisis may be fueled as much or more by unsafe medical practices as by unsafe sex. Reposted to the web by africaaction.org, the article would seem to suggest that while safe sex is vital in prevention efforts, measures to provide safe blood supplies, prevent reuse of unsafe needles, and address related issues of medical safety, are just as urgent.

HIV/AIDS has "contributed heavily" to Southern Africa's food shortage by causing the deaths of many African farmers and leaving many farmers and communities too weak to cultivate crops, according to a new U.N. report.

Last Friday’s issue of the Washington Post carried, like many leading newspapers in developed countries, a prominent story announcing the genetic sequencing of both the parasite that causes malaria and of the mosquito that transmits it to people. All such stories emphasised that the details of the sequence of these two organisms, published in the journals Science and Nature, opens up exciting new avenues for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the disease. In sub-Saharan Africa — home to almost 90 per cent of the 300 million people who are infected by the disease each year — however, the coverage was very different. The front pages of leading newspapers in cities like Kampala and Nairobi continued their coverage of local political stories.

Unless there is a coordinated international response to the HIV/AIDS crisis there will be 45 million new infections by 2010, says a report in the latest Population Bulletin. The report says that even as HIV/AIDS continues its rapid spread most countries still lack the will, the commitment, and the resources to create effective HIV/AIDS programs.

About $96 million of taxpayers' money was embezzled from the Aids Levy Fund, a report says.

The Program Manager will coordinate CRS Health/AIDS programs/projects, assist counterparts in planning, designing, implementing, monitoring and reporting of Health and HIV/AIDS projects, assist counterparts in establishing systems for implementation and monitoring of activities.

The Treatment Action Campaign, the lobby pushing for the rights of HIV/AIDS victims, says that a meeting of government's advisory and advocacy panel on the epidemic amounted to another missed opportunity to deal with urgent issues. In its statement the SA National AIDS Council, Sanac, gave no signal of national government's intentions to allow disbursement to KwaZulu-Natal of grant funding from the Global Fund. The Treatment Action Campaign accused the health minister of blocking the grant because it would expand access to antiretroviral treatment in the public sector.

A new report by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) has found that cultural practices intended to safeguard young Swazi women from unwanted pregnancies and HIV infections may actually be contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The Ugandan government has established a fund that will allow all HIV/AIDS groups to contribute toward the cost of maintaining the Ugandan AIDS Commission, a government-sponsored committee that coordinates and evaluates HIV/AIDS-related projects.

United States and international relief groups are growing increasingly concerned about the ongoing food crisis in six Southern African nations where they say as many as 14.4 million people are in urgent need of assistance. The latest figure was significantly higher than the 12.8 million the United Nations has cited in previous estimates.

Aids drugs supplied to Africa at cut rates have been illegally resold in Europe, threatening to undermine a system of preferential medicine pricing for poor countries.

IRC has operated a multi-sector program in the South Kivu region of DR Congo since early November 1996. IRC has been active in health, water and sanitation, shelter construction, structural rehabilitation and the medical care of unaccompanied minors. In response to this tremendous need, IRC Bukavu is preparing a primary health care support project for Kabare. IRC will help re-establish the health care system in this zone to reduce the excess mortality experienced there.

The UN World Food Programme has announced that the number of Angolans in urgent need of food aid has increased to 1.8 million, compared to 1.5 assisted in September. The increase is putting additional pressure on the already limited resources available to assist those in need.