Peter Richards
NASSAU, Bahamas, Nov 21 2011 (IPS) – Cracey Fernandes, the president of the Guyana Sex Work Coalition, does not hide the fact that he is homosexual.
Fernandes, who goes by the name Isabella , is also aware that despite efforts to decrease cases of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes the deadly acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), he belongs to the group men having sex with men (MSM), considered in the Caribbean among the high risk groups capable of spreading the virus.
I knew the road was not easy, he told a regional gathering here, recalling his time in prison on a murder-related charge when male sex workers were targeted for no reason at all .
Marcus Day, who heads the St. Lucia-based Caribbean Drug and Alcohol Research Inst…
PIBOR, South Sudan , Jan 23 2012 (IPS) – In the ward of a partially destroyed clinic, Mangiro (who did not give his last name) sat on a bed next to his wounded nine-year-old daughter, Ngathin. The little girl is fortunate, she survived the recent inter-ethnic clashes in Pibor county that killed her mother and sisters.
Members of the Murle ethn…
Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Mar 4 2012 (IPS) – With no money to see a doctor, Gul Lakhta,50, had resigned himself to blindness when a mobile hospital drove into his village in the Bajaur Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), on Pakistan s rugged border with Afghanistan.
At a mobile hospital camp Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
They operated on me the same day. Now, my eyesight is excellent, says Lakhta, a beneficiary of the Mobile Hospital Programme (MHP) started by the government in 2003 to provide healthcare to people in the war-torn …
KARACHI, Pakistan, Apr 12 2012 (IPS) – It was personal experience that turned Gul Bano and her cleric husband, Ahmed Khan, into ambassadors against early marriage and its worst corollary – obstetric fistula which allows excretory matter to flow out through the birth canal.
Bano and her cleric husband campaigning against child marriage. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS
As is the custom in the remote mountain village of Kohadast in the Khuzdar district of Balochistan province, Bano was married of…
UNITED NATIONS, May 16 2012 (IPS) – The statistics have remained staggering: every two minutes, a woman dies of pregnancy and child birth-related complications caused primarily by severe bleeding, infections, high blood pressure and unsafe abortions.
A pregnant woman in Kenya s North Eastern Province with one of her children. Overpopulation in the area contributes to poor maternal health. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS
And 90 percent of maternal deaths occur in the world s 132 developing na…
SANTA LUCÍA MILPAS ALTAS, Guatemala, Jun 27 2012 (IPS) – Cases like that of a little boy with an undetected metabolic disorder whose parents sold everything they owned to cover the costs of medical treatment that was ineffective prompted a doctor to create a vanguard institute of human genetics in Guatemala.
“A couple from a rural village, who longed to have children but were never able to, one day found outside their shop a box with a baby in it and a message asking them to take care of him because his parents couldn’t support him,” the director of the new institute, Gabriel Silva, told IPS.
They were happy to adopt him. But at the age of five, he had his first seizure. “His adoptive parents went to a private health centre, to pay for the first treatment. His i…
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India , Aug 14 2012 (IPS) – Four-year-old Deepak Yadav, a mentally disabled boy from Indore city in the Indian state Madhya Pradesh, was being treated for stomach problems at Chacha Nehru Bal Chikitsalaya, a government hospital for children attached to the M. G. M. Medical College.
(Right to left) Clinical trial victims with medical right activist Dr. Anand Rai. Credit: CTVA, Indore.
But when repeated administration of the anti-ulcer drug Rabeprazole started to exacerbate his condition, his parents stopped treatment and s…
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 28 2012 (IPS) – More intense rainfall, rising temperatures and climate-driven migration of human and animal populations due to repeated drought all affect the spread of tropical diseases. These changes, already the focus of study by climatologists, are now also a challenge increasingly taken up by health experts and officials.
The impact of climate change on human health generated debate among the experts attending the 18th International Congress on Tropical Medicine and Malaria, held Sept. 23-27 in Rio de Janeiro.
On one side of the debate stands researcher Ulisses Confalonieri, of Brazil’s state-run Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), who argues that the press often oversimplifies a very complex issue.
HIV positive people in New Delhi demonstrate for access to cheap generic drugs. Credit: Mudit Mathur/IPS
BEIJING, Nov 8 2012 (IPS) – As the northern Indian state of Rajasthan rolls out an ambitious universal healthcare plan, the discontent of the state’s doctors stands in stark contrast to the joys of the 68 million people who will benefit from the scheme.
Just a little over a year ago, the state government began supplying free generic drugs to its massive population, effectively stripping doctors of the ability to prescribe more expensive branded medicine.
Some 350 essential generic drugs are now being distributed free of cost. As a result, ou…
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 8 2013 (IPS) – Argentina is set to become the first country in Latin America to legalise surrogate motherhood as an option for heterosexual and homosexual couples or single people who cannot conceive but want to have a child who is biologically their own.
It s been one of the hardest topics in family law, Marisa Herrera, a lawyer who participated in a thorough reform of the civil code created in 1869, told IPS. Groups of experts worked on redrafting it under the direction of the Supreme Court, following a proposal by President Cristina Fernández.
The project was presented to Congress in early March, and if approved as expected it will make Argentina the first Latin American country to legalise this practice, also known as rent-a-womb.
Brazil …