Fears of side effects and rumours of the long-term repercussions of vaccination have surfaced as vaccination programmes have matured and approached their goals of polio eradication and tetanus elimination. The near disappearance of some target diseases has raised the quite natural question: “Why vaccinate?”

The International Centre for Insect Physiology (ICIPE) in Kenya is to lead efforts to construct a US$1.9 million plant that will manufacture an anti-mosquito pesticide. Although the chemical has been widely available for the past 50 years, manufacturing costs have until now been prohibitive to most developing countries.

Evidence indicates that a multimedia advertising campaign designed by young Zambians is helping convince young people to delay sex and reduce the number of their partners - two key factors that experts say could lead to lower HIV/AIDS infection rates.

Rwanda is to receive a US $14-million grant from the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Health Minister Ezechias Rwabuhihi said. Under the proposal Rwanda submitted to the fund, the government would use the money to expand health services to all the country's districts, the radio reported. Specifically, it reported, the services would include treatment of selected opportunistic infections associated with HIV/AIDS, and the programme to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus.

Almost a third of Lesotho's population is infected with HIV/Aids, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Maseru announced on Tuesday. The announcement was made during a workshop to determine how best to deal with HIV/Aids in the landlocked country.

Another malaria outbreak could hit the country by the end of the year, the Ministry of Health has warned. This comes in the wake of predictions that East Africa will experience El Nino.

With cut-and-run industrial logging now running roughshod across the world's last remaining rainforests, old-growth stands, and other intact forest ecosystems - along with the many indigenous peoples and communities that depend upon them - the need to shift to sustainable ways of relating to forests has never been more urgent.

The Training Course in Consultancy Skills in International Cooperation in Health – taking place between 18 November and 6 December in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania -intends to improve knowledge and skills in planning, writing, editing as well as how to assess the quality of consultancy reports in the field of international public health.

Zambia is expected to import genetically modified maize (corn) from the United States to feed its 2.3 million starving citizens, according to the Biotechnology Trust of Africa, a regional charitable trust.

Government officials say a controversial song, in the national language Swahili, contains a verse that has been inciting people to go out and catch the disease. Music lovers insist the song was meant to scare people from forced marriages, a practice prevalent among the Wazaramu ethnic group living in Tanzania's coastal region.

Religious leaders in the country have made denunciations against what they called the indiscriminate application and distribution of contraceptive devices, which are designed to check population growth at the national level.

Dual method use is featured in South Africa's new reproductive health policies as an important means of family planning as well as of prevention of infection with HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). However, little is known about current levels and predictors of dual method use in South Africa or about interventions that might promote dual protection.

The Chadian Parliament has passed a law guaranteeing protection for the reproductive health and rights of its citizens. The new law, adopted on 20 March, draws mainly from a regional document prepared at a meeting of West African parliamentarians in Dakar in 1999. Under the terms of the new law, it would be an offence to engage in any form of sexual violence, including female genital cutting, forced marriage, domestic violence or sexual slavery.

HIV/AIDS is an "increasingly important cause" of mortality in children under five in sub-Saharan Africa, according to an analysis in the 27 July issue of the Lancet.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has mobilised 10 mt of emergency relief supplies worth US $64,000 to fight a cholera outbreak in Kalemie, in the north of Katanga Province, southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to a UNICEF press release issued last Wednesday.

The coming of the rains in Southern Africa in the next few months will end the region's drought but usher in a new threat - an upsurge in malaria, Africa's number one killer.

The United Nations Children Fund (Unicef) has begun a major campaign to vaccinate thousands of women against tetanus in Mali in an attempt to halt the passing of the disease to newborn babies. Last year tetanus killed 30,000 women in developing countries across the world.

The Ethiopian government has warned that over eight million people are in need of food aid after failed rains in the country.

An estimated 860 000 primary schoolchildren lost their teachers to HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa in 1999. The effect of these kinds of losses on an education system such as SA's, where a critical shortfall of qualified educators already exists, will have repercussions throughout the economy, says Dr Murray Coombs, principal consultant: workplace health of Deloitte & Touche Human Capital Corporation.

Following recent confusion over the potential side effects of a new malaria drug - Sulphadoxine-Pyrimethamine (SP)- the Tanzanian health ministry has reiterated its faith in the drug as the most effective method of treating the deadly disease.