The Treatment Action Campaign's lawsuit against the South African government over access to nevirapine for pregnant women could come to court at the same time as a lawsuit filed on behalf of a six-month-old infant who contracted HIV from her mother, the Lancet reports.

AIDS activists who have fought the U.S. government's support for international patents "should now rethink their stance," as U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has announced two "overlook[ed]" concessions, according to a Washington Post editorial.

The Zambian cabinet is "split" over whether to introduce legislation that would force presidential candidates to have an HIV test before general elections this year, government sources said yesterday.

The new genetic modification (GM) technologies that many expect will help the world meet its food needs — not only through quantity, but nutritional quality as well — raise critical issues for international trade, including this key question: What will happen if pressure from consumers and environmentalists in the developed world leads to a new generation of trade restrictions, or to the segmentation of GM-food product markets, as appears to be happening in Europe and Japan?

April 11-13, 2002, Athens, Ohio USA. Call for papers. The Institute for the African Child at Ohio University announces its fourth annual conference, HIV/AIDS and the African Child: Health Challenges, Educational Possibilities, to be held in Athens, Ohio from 11-13 April
2002. Paper and panel presentations are sought that address this complex health and social issue from all academic and practitioner perspectives. Deadline for paper abstracts: January 15 2002.

The Ethiopian Ministry of Health said on Wednesday that the government had launched a strategic plan designed to reduce malaria mortality by 50 percent by the year 2010.

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) has proposed that an HIV/AIDS summit for the mining sector be held next month to map out a common approach to the pandemic.

The mother-to-child transmission preventio(mtctp) court case has been set down for the 26th of November. There will be a march in Cape Town on this day to demand that the government implements a country-wide mtctp programme.

Seventy-one members of Kenya's Release Political Prisoners lobby group who were arrested on October 20 for holding a parallel rally have gone on a hunger strike at Kamiti Maximum Prison, on the outskirts of the city of Nairobi.

E-Library, a service from the Population Reference Bureau, enables users to obtain publications and website material by e-mail. E-Library is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as part of a PRB initiative to heighten awareness and use of population and health information, especially among audiences in lower-resource settings. We hope that you find this service useful and we welcome your comments.

The Break-the-Silence (BTS) e-mail discussion forum has been re-launched this week with the specific aim of supporting open and transparent communication around the establishment of the Global Fund to fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis, and Malaria (GFATM).

*Quality Management in International Health
*Health of Unstable Populations
*Reproductive Health Services in Resource-poor Settings
*Rational Drug Management in International Health

Pharmaceutical companies, AIDS activists and churches are trying to "force" the South African government to dispense AIDS drugs that are "almost as bad as the illness that they are supposed to alleviate," government spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama has said.

While Pfizer officials defend their "seemingly generous" plan to give away the antifungal medication Diflucan to government clinics in South Africa, many AIDS advocates are criticizing the program, calling it a "very conditional gift," Forbes reports.

Attorneys representing a six-month-old infant who contracted HIV from her mother are suing South African health authorities for negligence for failing to inform the mother of means available to reduce the odds of vertical transmission, the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian reports.

HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson's threat earlier this week to break the patent of Bayer's antibiotic Cipro if the company did not reduce the drug's price has "emboldened" developing nations hoping to "convince international trade rule makers that poor countries should be allowed to exercise such powers to improve access to essential medicines," including HIV/AIDS drugs, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Kenya and the United States are locked in a war of words over whether a parcel sent to a Kenyan doctor actually contained anthrax spores.

Informania Ltd, the world's largest electronic publisher of biomedical journals from the Third World, announced that it would provide the ExtraMED full-text database to developing country users for free or at very low cost, under the same terms as those announced last week by six leading medical publishers. It would also enable the distribution of this information through a new network of health information resource centres. Zielinski offered the use of the recently established Information Waystations and Staging Posts Network to distribute the publishers' offline material, as it already links the largest collection of health information centres in the developing world, and is set to expand rapidly.

Nearly one person in six taking strong antiretroviral drugs, suffers serious toxic side effects, a study published in the latest issue of 'The Lancet', reported.

Nigeria is to conduct an immunisation campaign between 20 and 26 October in order to contain the incidence of wild polio virus in the country, officials said on Thursday.