Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Apr 13 2011 (IPS) – April has traditionally been the time for hanami , or cherry blossom festivals, when millions of Japanese hold parties under the pink flowering trees in parks and streets lit up gaily by lanterns.

A girl writes a message to Tohoku victims on a message board at the Okinawa International Film Festival. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS

But, one month after the …

Keya Acharya

BANGALORE, May 12 2011 (IPS) – Moves to enact a new law on animal welfare in India have upset public health advocates, who fear it will interfere with efforts to control rabies-carrying stray dogs.

Stray Dogs in Cochin, Kerala, India Credit: SingChan/Creative Commons Licence

The draft animal welfare act, formulated by the Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI), seeks to expand AWBI branches across the country, define cruelty to animals more stringently and impose higher fines for violations.

What…

Milfred Perkins

WASHINGTON, Jun 13 2011 (IPS) – Between 2011 and 2012, 6.4 million children could die of preventable diseases, a number greater than the total population of Denmark or Norway.
According to a June 2011 by Save the Children, a child in the poorest fifth percent of the world s population is three times less likely than a child in the richest fifth to be immunised, and twice as likely to die before the age of five.

And while vaccination rates are at their highest point in history with an average of four out of five children receiving the DPT3 immunisation against diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus one-fifth or 24 million of the world s children are not receiving even the most basic life-saving vaccines.

According to , a study commissioned by the J…

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Jun 24 2011 (IPS) – Twenty-eight-year-old Yushi Sato washes cars for a living, but they are no ordinary cars. Every day, Sato hoses down vehicles contaminated with radiation from the Fukushima Nuclear Power plant that was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami that hit north-east Japan Mar 11.
Sato, who has worked at the Fukushima plant for the past five years, used to be a welder, but after the disaster struck he was assigned the job of washing the plant s various vehicles. We wash on average around 200 vehicles that show higher than normal radiation levels, he told IPS.

Wearing heavy protective gear and checked daily for radiation exposure, Sato says he worries about the effects of radiation on his health but is determined to keep working.

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 …