WASHINGTON, Jul 28 2011 (IPS) – When news of the disastrous BP oil well explosion reached the residents of Jean Lafitte, Louisiana last April, Mayor Tim Kerner did the only thing he could think of to stop the oil from destroying his community. He encouraged everyone in his town to join him on the water, working day and night throughout the disaster to clean-up the spill.
Now, one year after BP managed to cap the runaway well that fouled the Gulf of Mexico with an estimated five million barrels of oil, most of those people are ill.
I m afraid my neighbors will come to me and say, I wouldn t have listened to you and kept my job if I knew it would kill me, Kerner said.
Kerner s story was one of many shared by Kerry Kennedy, president of the , at a briefing Wednesday e…
Abdurrahman Warsameh
MOGADISHU, Sep 6 2011 (IPS) – Armed groups are withholding aid and preventing Somali famine refugees from leaving camps to ensure the continued supply of food by aid agencies that they are presently selling on the open market.
Armed gunmen running camps for famine victims steal their food and prevent them from leaving to search for aid elsewhere.…
Jared Ferrie
KURMUK, Sudan, Oct 20 2011 (IPS) – Hawa Jundi sat on the ground outside a makeshift shelter where she and her family now live. A violent storm was moving in and lightning streaked toward the earth as the wind began blowing hard against the tarpaulin tied to a frame of sticks.
SPLM-N soldiers clean weapons they say they took from government forces. Credit: Jared Ferrie/IPS
Jundi is one of tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who are scattered…
Kanya D’Almeida
WASHINGTON, Dec 1 2011 (IPS) – On World AIDS Day, all eyes are fixed on the global south, where a preventable HIV/AIDS epidemic across Asia, Africa and Latin America has infected almost 33 million people.
However, with the spotlight focused on the developing world, ominous trends and patterns in so-called democracies like the U.S. often go unnoticed.
During a speech in Washington Thursday morning, U.S. President Barack Obama promised to funnel 50 million dollars into to tackle HIV/AIDS.
The rate of new infections may be going down elsewhere, the president said, but it s not going down here in America. There are communities in this country being devastated still by this disease. When new infections among young, black, gay men increase by nearl…
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 3 2012 (IPS) – The rise of emerging economies in Latin America is an opportunity to improve strategies for fighting neglected illnesses and increase the region s contribution to the global struggle against them, says the regional director of an organisation devoted to this purpose.
Our region is going through a major transformation in economic and social terms, said Eric Stobbaerts, the Latin America director of the independent Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), mentioning the progress that has been made in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Mexico.
Advantage should be taken of this positive change to redefine the way these diseases have been addressed in the past, he said. Several of them are endemic in the region, like Chagas disease …
Badylon K. Bakiman
KIKWIT, DR Congo, Mar 8 2012 (IPS) – The outlook for people living with disabilities in the Democratic Republic of Congo remains bleak, despite a variety of efforts to improve their lot and bring them in from the margins of society.
There are roughly 9.1 million people with disabilities in Congo, 11 percent of the total population of 60 million, said Patrick Pindu, coordinator of the National Federation of Associations of People Living with a Disability in Congo (FENAPHACO).
Pindu, who was speaking on the occasion of the first Day of Sharing and Solidarity , organised in Kikwit, in southwestern DRC in February, said, Amongst people with disabilities, 90 percent are illiterate, 93 percent are jobless and 96 percent live in an unhealthy and inhumane …
GOROKA, Apr 20 2012 (IPS) – While the number of women dying in childbirth globally declined by 34 percent between 1990 and 2008, that number doubled in Papua New Guinea over the same time period.
The number of women dying in childbirth in rural Papua New Guinea doubled between 1997 and 2008. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS
Shocking have prompted national plans to accelerate healthcare reform and women’s access to medical …
If India followed standards set by the 2012 Human Development Report, its poverty rate would be close to 55 percent of the population. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS
GENEVA, May 23 2012 (IPS) – Ahead of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of India, a coalition of NGOs denounced the gap between the country’s growth rate and the rate of poverty, malnutrition and lack of health and sanitation.
They charged that even when laws and policies exist, their implementation is unsatisfactory and assessment of efforts is a difficult undertaking.
According to official figures, the average growth rate between 2007 and 2011 was 8.2 percent but poverty declined only …
WASHINGTON, Jul 10 2012 (IPS) – Disarmament activists and former U.S. ambassadors are urging Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to increase U.S. aid to Laos to clear millions of tonnes of unexploded ordinance (UXO) left by U.S. bombers on its territory during the Indochina War during her brief visit to the country Wednesday.
The visit, scheduled to last only a few hours on a hectic eight-nation tour by Clinton designed in part to underline the Barack Obama administration s pivot from the Middle East to Asia, will nonetheless be historic. No sitting U.S. secretary of state has visited Laos since 1955.
Sources here said Clinton is considering a 100-million-dollar aid commitment to support bomb-clearing efforts over a 10-year period. Such a commitment would more than doubl…
STOCKHOLM, Aug 27 2012 (IPS) – Paradoxically, the water we eat is likely to become one of the growing new dangers to millions of the world’s thirsty, hungering for this finite natural resource.
More than one-fourth of all the water we use worldwide is taken to grow over one billion tons of food that nobody eats, Torgny Holmgren, executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), told delegates during the opening of the annual international water conference, World Water Week, in the Swedish capital Monday.