A survey, whose results were made public on Wednesday, shows that 8,000 clandestine abortions are carried out every year in the capital alone, Ouagadougou, on teenage girls between 15 and 19 years old. "These abortions represent a real danger for the women's health because 60 percent of them end up with very serious complications," said Baya Banza, the director of the Unit for the Teaching and Research in Demography (UERD) and coordinator of the survey.

Burkina Faso's Defence Minister, General Kouame Lougue, was sacked at the weekend, a week after the state prosecutor revealed that he had been questioned in connection with a coup plot against President Blaise Campaore. Lougue, who was very popular within the army, was replaced by Yero Boli, the head of Campaore's presidential staff, a trusted civilian aide of the president, who was Minister of the Interior until 2000.

The government of Burkina Faso has launched a nationwide survey to find out just how successful its 12-year campaign against female circumcision has been and the first results are encouraging. In 1992, when the campaign against female genital mutilation (FMG) was launched, two thirds of all women in this poor landlocked country suffered the ritual cutting out of their clitoris around the age of puberty. First results from the latest national survey show that in some areas of Burkina Faso the proportion of girls subjected to FMG has fallen to just one or two percent.

Doctors have begun clinical trials of an experimental vaccine for malaria in Burkina Faso and say they are encouraged by the initial results. The vaccine could become generally available within five years if it proves successful. Health Ministry officials said the MSP3 vaccine had been developed by the Pasteur Institute in France and was being tested on a group of 30 healthy people aged between 18 and 40.

The government of Burkina Faso has arrested Norbert Tiendrebeogo, leader of the opposition Social Forces Front (FFS) party, in connection with an alleged coup plot. FFS deputy leader Brice Yogo told IRIN that Tiendrebeogo was summoned to the police headquarters for questioning on Monday and was subsequently detained.

Burkina Faso's health minister has said the government hopes to eradicate guinea worm infections in the next five years, having reduced the number of new cases reported each year to less than 200.

Twelve people, most of them soldiers, have been arrested in Burkina Faso since last week allegedly for planning with a foreign country to overthrow the government of President Blaise Campaore, State Prosecutor Abdoulaye Barry told reporters on Tuesday.

Landlocked Burkina Faso has launched a ten-year plan to combat desertification and land erosion through district-focused reforestation programmes that would also help local people generate income from the trees.

Cotton farmers in Burkina Faso have sent a 100,000-signature petition, through their delegation, to the World Trade Organisation summit, which kicked off in Cancun, Mexico this week. Unable to travel to Mexico, the farmers hope that their demands to eliminate the cotton subsidies, being enjoyed by their counterparts in wealthy nations, would be taken seriously at the WTO negotiations in Cancun on Sep. 10-14.

Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, has managed to enrol nearly half its children in primary school thanks to an increase in the number of trained teachers, the construction of special schools for late starters and the extension of a free school meals programme.

The impoverished West African nation of Burkina Faso is giving serious consideration to planting genetically modified cotton due to the destruction of nearly half its crop seeds annually by caterpillars resistant to pesticides.

In Burkina Faso, Gueswende Public Primary School addresses local poverty and national environmental issues through agricultural education. Through a gardening programme at school, pupils are growing vegetables and maintaining a fruit orchard. A portion of the produce goes to improving the diet of the school lunches while the other portion is sold.

Twelve years after Burkina Faso launched a campaign that outlawed female genital mutilation (FGM) in 1996 and imposed heavy penalties on circumcisers, the number of women undergoing the harmful practise is declining, officials said.

Burkina Faso's government and education experts hope that the introduction of bilingual schools that teach pupils in both French and their mother tongue would increase school enrolment that are often as low as 12 percent in rural areas.

An outbreak of meningitis in Burkina Faso that has killed over 1,000 people since October, has shown signs of declining, health officials told IRIN last Thursday.

Do the parliamentary elections of May 2002 mark the end of an era in Burkina Faso? The ruling party in power since the transition towards democracy in 1991 saw its share of seats shrink. While it retains a simple majority in parliament, the ruling party will now have to share legislative power with the opposition. The authors of this report from the Centre for Democratic Governance in Burkino Faso and the The International Centre for Democratic Governance, (ICDG) at the University of Georgia (2002) maintain that the results of the elections are as extraordinary as they were unexpected.

Despite pleas last October to prepare for a serious outbreak of bacterial meningitis, public health officials are scrambling to halt a mounting epidemic in Burkina Faso. Public health officials will be forced to ration the limited supply in a way that saves as many lives as possible, and WHO officials are now trying to figure out how best to distribute the available doses of vaccine.

Meningitis has killed 401 people out of 2433 cases in Burkina Faso since the beginning of the 2002-2003 meningitis season in late October, Souleymane Sanou, head of meningitis control in the health ministry said last week.

Burkina Faso's government has asked the World Health Organisation (WHO) for help in its fight against meningitis. The request coincides with the start of the 2002-2003 meningitis season.

Reporters sans frontières (RSF) has deplored the failure to solve the murder of Norbert Zongo, publisher of the weekly paper "L'Indépendant", who was shot dead on a road in southern Burkina Faso on 13 December 1998.