More Namibians are living up to the challenge to stop spread of HIV by getting tested for virus, with young people waiting longer to start sexual activity and use of condoms increasing, according to new 2006-07 Namibia Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) just released.

A new candidate vaccine can significantly reduce rates of tuberculosis (TB) infection in HIV-positive individuals, according to researchers. The results of the seven-year Phase III 'DarDar' trial in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, were presented at the 39th Union World Conference on Lung Health in Paris, France, this week (20 October). This is the first successful demonstration of any protective effect against TB in HIV/AIDS patients.

A cholera epidemic is spreading quickly in Guinea-Bissau, where campaigning for an upcoming election could put even more people at risk, United Nations agencies said on Friday. Some 12,225 people in the West African state have caught cholera so far this year and 201 have died, raising fears among aid workers that the water-borne disease could resurge on the devastating scale seen in 2005.

Malawi is said to be struggling to fight the stigma against HIV/AIDS. The Malawi government has managed to effectively respond to HIV/AIDS beyond what activists call average levels, but the country has failed to address human rights issues surrounding the pandemic in that country.

An excerpt from Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s

It is late into the night. Bobinga Iroko is unable to sleep. He is working on the editorial for the next issue of The Talking Drum. He has deliberately refused to carry the story on homosexuality. His priority remains the strike at the University of Mimbo, which, curiously, hasn’t attracted much coverage from the rest of the national press concentrated in Nyamandem and Sawang. He and The Talking Drum, the formidable odds against them notwithstanding, are determined to crusade along like a lone ranger, until victory day. They believe the sun must not be allowed to set on a good idea.

He is also struggling with an obituary following the sudden death, under very mysterious circumstances, of one of the rare genuine intellectuals at the University of Mimbo. Despised by the authorities as an ‘unbelievably vain, hopelessly incompetent and disestablishmentarian crank,’ and known popularly as ‘Intellectual Warrior’, Dr BP (‘Burning Pen’) was found dead last night at his home, his skull shattered, his brain and genitals missing. In his transition from Burning Pen to Buried Pen, he looked more like the victim of a ritual murder than of a robbery. Dr BP was not afraid to make career-limiting statements, and would rather die than be cowed. He had absolute disdain for those who were neither here nor there in their convictions; those who seemed to say things only to please the way a chameleon would its vicinity. To him, such people were shallow, myopic, spineless irrelevances. A screaming and fearless critic who once described the University of Mimbo as the ‘burial ground for enthusiasm’, Dr BP was writing a commentary titled ‘J’accuse’, when he was smashed to death in mid-sentence.

Dr BP died doing what he has always done: fighting to make a difference and making a difference by fighting. To Bobinga Iroko and The Talking Drum, Dr BP died keeping hope alive in a hopeless situation, adding the weight of his pen to efforts to bring back a bit of dignity to the lives of ordinary Mimbolanders stripped bare by shallow pretence, sterile rhetoric and its radical vocabulary of hate. He died fighting the battles he would want those he leaves behind to keep fighting. In a context where many an intellectual has been silenced by the lure and allure of easy virtue and the sterile politics of reckless impunity, BP was the rare exception who stayed wedded to the ideals of the genuine intellectual, academic freedom and social responsibility.

Bobinga Iroko will always cherish BP’s essays and contributions in the pages of The Talking Drum, which were as clear about what he believed to be wrong with the land of his birth as they were about what he thought it would take to make right those wrongs. It is therefore unfortunate and indeed ironic that BP should pass on in a suspicious death most cruel, and not those excesses his essays and commentaries were meant to bury. And it is equally unfortunate that he should leave the scene just when he was ready to share with the world in person the richness of his experience of a country and a university community where a reluctant government and those whose intellects it has numbed would spare nothing to derail the train of hope and human dignity.

BP epitomized those who refuse to stand by and watch the train of hope and human dignity derailed. He stood for those who would rather fight than run away (wasn’t it Bob Marley who said it all – he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day?). BP the flesh and blood may have died, BP the idea has never been more alive. This can be seen in the determination and resilience by students of the University of Mimbo to keep aglow their ambitions of academic freedom and the quest for betterment in equality, dignity and opportunity for all and sundry.

This, as BP and others who have sacrificed their lives have always claimed, requires a particular calibre of leadership. As BP has stressed ad infinitum, any leader, no matter how good, needs others to compensate for their weaknesses. A good leader is one who encourages others to lead without overly dramatizing the fact of being in charge. He or she is one who surrounds themselves with people of contradictory opinions in order to be forced to think, compare and contrast before reaching a decision.

The way forward for the University of Mimbo and for Mimboland, BP stressed in what none could have imagined was his last commentary in the pages of The Talking Drum, is by recognising that leadership is not about the leader. It is about the enabling environment the leader creates for experts in various walks of life and for all and sundry under him or her to offer leadership. A good leader is one who is able to purge him or herself of the delusion that bosses are necessarily better than the people under them. Modesty is the master key to success in leadership, for a good leader immediately recognises that he or she needs support to lead, and that a leader never leads alone. ‘Leadership is more of a privilege than a right, just as a leader is more of a servant than a master’, BP emphasised, adding that only at the University of Mimbo and in Mimboland did the contrary obtain. ‘With leaders who have neither modesty nor generosity of spirit, who thrive on the argument of force and not the force of argument, institutions dry out and wither, not for lack of talent but for lack of purpose.’ Woe betides the leader who takes decisions without consultation, and who excludes from leadership people who have a lot of talent because he or she is too afraid to be contradicted or to discover that no single individual however gifted has a monopoly of good ideas.

‘It is difficult to advise a leader who is always right,’ argued BP, ‘hence the need to create circumstances where other leaders can be fostered. This starts with inclusion, fairness and opportunity for all and sundry.’ BP ended his commentary with the words: ‘We often get the leaders we deserve by giving myopic individuals the power to silence the creativity and difference that should normally edify and strengthen an institution, a community or a country. The University of Mimbo and the people of Mimboland deserve a better fate than the disgrace lumped on them by the predicament of a mediocrity called leadership.’

* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is associate professor and head of publications and dissemination with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Nyamnjoh’s Married But Available (Langaa Publishers, 2008) is available at the both .
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Hepatitis E is on the increase in Uganda's northern district of Pader, where it has claimed scores of lives and infected thousands in the past year, officials said. Since May, there have been 55 new infections and seven deaths in Pader, according to Angelo Luganya, a health official in Pader. "More cases are being received in health units in villages and there is need for urgent attention to check on the disease that is on the rise," he told IRIN.

Isn't it time that journalists started taking HIV/AIDS beyond the newsroom and into the bedroom? In many newsrooms the highly politicised topic of HIV/AIDS remains just that - political. Journalists aren't immune to HIV/AIDS; they just don't talk about it.

Clinical trials of a new tuberculosis (TB) vaccine recently kicked off in Kenya, meanwhile international TB researchers and activists are worried by funding gaps that may worsen in the global financial crisis. In the first stage of human testing, known as Phase I trials, the new vaccine will be tested for safety on healthy adults with no previous history of TB in Kombewa, near Kisumu in western Kenya.

Malaria has killed 401 people in the last four weeks in northern Nigeria’s Katsina state, according to local health officials. “In the last 28 days 401 people have died of malaria which has become endemic in the state,” Halliru Idris, director of public health in the state’s health ministry, told IRIN.

West African governments considering lifting health care fees for all will soon have a guide to manage the financial impact of the move. The guide, which the NGO Save the Children expects to launch in November, will show policymakers in developing countries how to estimate resource needs that may arise from abolishing fees.

Tuberculosis patients who are also HIV positive and require being booked for Anti Retroviral drugs should can do that, Amon Nkhata, ART officer responsible for sexually transmitted infections has said. He said it is safe to combine the two treatments and added that earlier deaths reported were rumour.

Almost two-thirds of people - 60% - in 26 countries say higher food and energy prices this year have affected them "a great deal", a BBC report has found. The BBC World Service global study said that while all nations had felt the burden of the higher costs, the problem was most acute in poorer countries.

South Africa's new Health Minister, Barbara Hogan, has called for a renewed global effort to find a vaccine for HIV, which can lead to Aids. Ms Hogan said it was unquestionable that HIV caused Aids and conventional medicines were the best treatment.

This paper investigates the impact of the framework and strategies to retain critical health professionals (CHPs) that the Zimbabwean government has put in place, particularly regarding non-financial incentives, in the face of continuing high out-migration. The study investigated the causes of migration of health professionals; the strategies used to retain health professionals, how they are being implemented, monitored and evaluated and their impact, in order to make recommendations to enhance the monitoring, evaluation and management of non-financial incentives for health worker retention.

Grassroots AIDS organisations in Malawi are facing uncertainty as the National AIDS Commission (NAC) ends its dependence on international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for dispersing grants. The responsibility for channelling funds to more than 3,000 AIDS organisations working to alleviate the impacts of HIV and AIDS in Malawi has now shifted to local government authorities known as district assemblies.

Health facilities in Nyanza Province in western Kenya are struggling to meet the demand for medical male circumcisions since politicians threw their weight behind efforts to promote the procedure as a way of reducing HIV infections. The campaign initially faced opposition by community elders of the ethnic Luo community that makes up the bulk of the province's inhabitants and does not traditionally practice circumcision.

Review and sign on to the letter below urging the World Health Organization (WHO) to revise its guidelines to recommend full-course antiretroviral treatment for all expectant and breastfeeding mothers worldwide, in place of short-course therapy. With a united voice, we can save the lives of scores of mothers and infants, and prevent millions of orphans.

Patients starting antiretroviral therapy in sub-Saharan Africa have a high rate of mortality, according to a review article published in the October 1st edition of AIDS. Many of the deaths occurred in the first three months of treatment, and there was also notable mortality in the interval between joining a treatment programme and actually starting therapy.

The individuals, who the scientists say have powerful antibodies that neutralise the virus, stopping it from infecting new cells, have neither used any antiretroviral drugs nor been attacked by opportunistic infections despite living with the virus for over nine years. On being screened, the individuals were found to possess high CD4 count- immune cells used to fight infections- and very low viral loads-amount of HIV in the body-, which were uncharacteristic of an infected person.

More than 100 people in South Africa are under medical observation after coming into contact with people who died from suspected haemorrhagic fever. Doctors have tried to calm fears that the disease could spread throughout the wider population in Johannesburg.