With rare exceptions -- including Botswana President Festus Mogae and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni -- few African leaders have done much to fight the pandemic that infects more than 25 million people on the continent. Kaunda, 77, hopes he can fill the leadership vacuum.

Cases of malnutrition in the Angolan central highland town of Kuito are rapidly increasing, reported on Thursday. SFP spokeswoman Cristina Muller said although aid flights to the town had resumed earlier this week, the poor condition of the airport runway was hindering the relief effort. At the same time, more and more people were arriving in the town, driven from their homes by Unita rebels and other armed groups, Muller was quoted as saying.

COSATU is extremely worried by the statements by Minister of Health casting doubt on whether the South African government will provide anti retrovirals even if they become more affordable. The prevarication by the Minister of Health amounts to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, particularly after the victory scored against the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. COSATU believes that there is sufficient reason for the government to begin a programme of providing anti retrovirals as part of a comprehensive treatment strategy.

Why do some villages, families or individuals have a higher risk of malaria than others? What environmental factors increase susceptibility? How can structural improvements to housing protect families from infection? Researchers from the Tigray Health Bureau, Ethiopia and the UK University of Nottingham investigated malaria risk factors in the Ethiopian highlands.

What makes a healthy city? How can urban health promotion projects involve women and the poor? Researchers from the UK’s South Bank University report on an evaluation of ‘Healthy City Projects’ (HCPs) in five countries.

This special issue of Philanthropy News Digest is devoted to online resources in the field of health philanthropy. By no means comprehensive, the list is intended to provide a convenient starting point for your further explorations of this large and important field.

Tobacco is the only product which kills when used as intended. Despite scientific certainty on the health effects of tobacco it continues to be promoted and controls remain weak in most countries. This is due primarily to the economic and political influence of the transnationals tobacco industry. The negotiation of the world's first public health treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, is creating an important precedent and bringing tobacco control into the centre stage.

A group of prominent Zimbabweans calling itself Citizens' AIDS Survival Trust (CAST) is lobbying government to evoke section 13 (2) G of the Constitution of Zimbabwe to contain the AIDS pandemic. Section 13 (2) G calls for the suspension of civil liberties in the event of an outbreak of infectious and contagious diseases. CAST has called on the government to declare a state of emergency as the best option to contain the AIDS epidemic.

Islamic governments, with the connivance of the conservative Bush administration, succeeded in watering down the final declaration of commitment to strategies and targets to beat the global Aids pandemic at the UN yesterday by excluding any reference to gay men.

In a half-forgotten, time-warp-trapped building in the world's most energetic city, three days of discussions have been taking place that ought to help the world get a grip on a disease that is decimating populations and wrecking economies. The United Nations in New York has just wrapped up a special session on HIV/Aids - the first ever devoted specifically to a health problem. It should have been a high-level, superlative-invoking three days. But instead, reports Sarah Boseley, it was a shambles.

It's Friday night and it's the start of a long weekend for most Mozambicans... Rosalina, a receptionist for a South African company in the capital Maputo, was diagnosed HIV-positive early last year. "At first I could not believe it. I also did not want to believe it and for a little while I just forgot about it. But it's not something that you can forget. There is always something in your mind," Rosalina says above the music, but not without checking first that no one is listening.

Copies on CD of the WHO Reproductive Health Library #4 (2001) are now available. The Library contains 61 Cochrane reviews of evidence-based solutions to reproductive health problems and corresponding commentaries with practical recommendations. The CD is free to individuals in developing countries.

Concentration of internally-displaced people (IDPs) in camps and promiscuity are to blame for the increasing rate of HIV infection in Burundi's population, and the camps have become new centres of high infection rates in the countryside, the director of Burundi's national AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases control programme, Dr. Joseph Wakana, told the Pan-African news agency (PANA) on Monday.

The world congress in health informatics -
medinfo2001 - tutorials, papers, posters, panels and workshops detail is now up on the web. Over 400 separate contributions in 12 streams from topics as diverse as genome research to patient-centred computing, evaluation of inpatient cost efficiency, compliance with evidence-based clinical guidelines, approaches to decision support, multi-professional treatment processes, open teleheath and communicating effectively with patients.

Corné van Walbeek, principal investigator of the Economics of Tobacco Control project in South Africa, highlights some of the policy debates concerning tobacco control in South Africa, and indicates their relevance to other developing countries.

Signaling that stopping the transmission of AIDS is the foundation's top global health priority, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced that it will commit $100 million to the Global Fund for AIDS and Health. The foundation used the occasion to call on other organizations and governments around the world also to support the new fund. The foundation is making this commitment over a multi-year period for innovative HIV/AIDS prevention efforts.

THE cost of curbing the worldwide HIV/Aids epidemic in lower-income countries will soar almost fivefold by 2005, reaching an estimated $9,2-billion, compared to current expenditure on the disease of about $1,8-billion. This compares with the estimated $20-billion a year that the United States alone spends on Aids domestically.

Agricultural policy-makers at times seem more like powerless referees in a multi-sided tug-of-war - wrestling with the divergent thrusts of maximising food harvests, strengthening livestock numbers and boosting income from cash crop exports. So, asks the latest issue of Spore, would input from farmers and other stakeholders make things any easier?

Diplomats from more than 100 countries preparing a draft declaration on HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention standards for approval at the
June 25-27 U.N. General Assembly special session are struggling to agree on acceptable language, the AP/Chicago Sun-Times reports. According to the AP/Sun-Times, diplomats have engaged in "intensely angry, frustrating and emotional" meetings since May in an attempt to find a consensus on the 19-page draft document that is "acceptable to all 189 U.N. member countries".

UNAIDS today announced a partnership with The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation to bring new impetus to the battle against AIDS. Under the terms of the three-year agreement, the Foundation will co-ordinate the efforts of Coca-Cola Africa and its bottling partners across the continent to support AIDS education, prevention and treatment programmes. This partnership is fully in line with the philosophy behind the International Partnership against AIDS in Africa.