African first ladies have vowed to raise awareness on cervical cancer, one of the leading causes of death among women on the continent. Taking the lead, Tobeka Madiba-Zuma, one of South Africa’s first ladies appealed to everyone attending the 3rd Stop Cervical Cancer in Africa conference in Cape Town to join her in paying tribute to millions of women who lost their lives to the illness.

In Sierra Leone, a mother who transmits HIV to her child can be fined, jailed for up to seven years, or both. Human Rights Watch reports that in 2008, several men were arrested in Egypt simply for being HIV positive. New legislation is currently being discussed in Angola that could lead to a three to ten year jail sentence for those who knowingly pass on HIV.

I have always been skeptical about male circumcision (MC) as a preventative measure for HIV/AIDS, pondering just how effective it is for not only men, but also their female partners. A new study - carried out in Rakai district, Uganda - gives a glimpse into the answer. Sadly, it is not what activists in gender and HIV hoped to hear. It seems that male circumcision may actually increase women’s transmission risk from their HIV positive circumcised male partner.

Providing male circumcision as an HIV prevention measure in Zimbabwe's state hospitals is off to a very slow start, and experts cite the country's crippled health sector as the main reason for the delay. Although about 140 circumcisions were successfully performed at four hospitals as part of a training exercise, health officials told IRIN/PlusNews the government was not yet ready to roll out the programme.

One in four families living in the world’s poorest countries borrows money or sells assets in order to afford health care, according to the most recent issue of the US medical journal "Health Affairs". he authors calculated almost 26 percent of households representing 3.6 billion people – most often the poorest with little or no health insurance – used "hardship financing" from 2002 to 2004 to cover health costs.

More than ten Cape Flats informal settlements hardest hit by floods did not receive any emergency assistance at all from the City of Cape Town or the Provincial Government. These include Tambo Square, Barcelona, New Rest and Gxa Gxa Square in the Gugulethu area. In addition to this, the city continues to ignore the plight of vulnerable backyard dwellers whose homes have been flooded.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) will be sending text messages to millions of Zambian parents this week as part of a new initiative to harness modern technology in the fight to prevent polio. UNICEF has joined forces with the Zambian Health Ministry and two mobile phone companies, ZAIN and MTN, to encourage parents to bring their children under the age of five to the nearest health-care centre for free polio vaccinations.

Genetically modified (GMO) crops have more unknowns than knowns. Yet the South African government whole-heartily embraces this technology in the production of food crops, particularly maize, a staple food in South Africa. The South African pro-GMO lobby is very proud of the fact that South Africa is the eighth biggest GMO producer in the world among the 13 largest biotechnology-producing countries. They also make claims that this technology is accepted worldwide, however many African countries have put a ban on GMO foods and in Europe, countries like Switzerland have put moratorium on GMOs.

HIV rates among gay men in some African countries are 10 times higher than among the general male population, says research in medical journal the Lancet. The report said prejudice towards gay people was leading to isolation and harassment, which in turn led to risky sexual practices among gay communities.

Circumcising men who already have HIV does not protect their female partners from the virus, a study in Uganda has found. Circumcision is known to protect men from acquiring HIV. But the research, from the Lancet, showed no benefit in those who already had the virus and was stopped early because of the continued risk to women.

A week after giving birth to her sixth child, Christine Achan walked 60 km (37 miles) from her village in northern Uganda to get life-saving anti-retroviral drugs to stop her and her baby becoming sick with Aids. Doctors say it is villagers like her that the results of Africa's largest and longest running clinical test, the Dart trial, should help.

Fewer Zimbabweans are getting infected with AIDS, and researchers speculate it's due in part to a battered economy that's leaving men short of money to be sugar daddies and keep mistresses. Presenting a study of the infection rate among pregnant women at a major international AIDS conference in South Africa this week, Dr. Michael Silverman said the prevalence of the virus that causes AIDS fell from 23 percent in 2001 to 11 percent at the end of 2008.

Angola will invest an estimated $1.2 billion in agricultural development over the next four years as part of a food security initiative, according to a government statement. The investment will be financed by a line of credit from the China Development Bank, private investment and other loans, said the statement in the state-owned newspaper Jornal de Angola.

The World Bank has given Congo a US$20-million loan to finance two projects in the health and education sectors. The Minister of Economy, Finance and Budget, Pacifique Issoibeka, and the World Bank operations director Marie Françoise Marie-Nelly signed two agreements - US$15 million to support basic education (PRAE BASE) and US$5 million for the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Burkina Faso was one of several countries that where a rapid rise in food prices led to rioting in the streets in 2008. Policy-makers had sensed a crisis developing, but the country was not able to build up sufficient reserves of imported commodities such as rice, wheat and oil to avoid it. There is now an emphasis on achieving food security. Bonou tells IPS that Burkina Faso is one of the handful of countries respecting the Maputo commitment to spending at least ten percent of its budget on agriculture.

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Pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has announced plans to invest up to US$97 million over 10 years in improving antiretroviral (ARV) treatment for children and adults in sub-Saharan Africa. The world's second largest drug manufacturer has pledged $16 million in seed funding to a public-private partnership that will develop new paediatric formulations of ARV drugs, GSK said in a statement this week.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned in a report that despite a drop in international food prices and good cereal harvests overall, prices in developing countries remain high, and continue to hurt millions of poor people in both rural and urban areas. In several countries, current prices exceed last year’s highs or stand at record levels, according to the “Crop Prospects and Food Situation” report.

Women who sleep with women (WSW) are not at risk of HIV transmission – or are they? AIDS advocates warn that it is time for a wake-up call about who is and is not at risk. HIV prevention among WSW and lesbian women remains off the prevention agenda, said Beverley Palesa Ditsie, a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand.

Further evidence has emerged that a substantial proportion of switches to second-line treatment in a resource-limited setting, triggered in the absence of viral load testing, are unnecessary and result in an avoidable inflation in drug costs as people switch to more expensive regimens. The findings, published in the August 1st edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases, are likely to lend further support to calls for viral load testing to be made more accessible in resource-limited settings to confirm cases of suspected treatment failure.