Rising drug resistance has turned what public health officials call today's Big Three infections - HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria - even more fearsome. Together, these diseases kill millions every year, representing 10 per cent of all deaths globally. Worse, the trio of epidemics is tragically interconnected, with TB, for example, the leading cause of death among individuals infected with HIV.

Kenya’s battle to end food shortages may be won with the introduction of drought-tolerant maize in the next five years, scientists have said. This will make it the third country in the continent after Egypt, South Africa and Burkina Faso to use genetically modified (GM) crops for increased farm yields.

65 Egyptian prisoners in Israeli jails began a open-ended hunger strike, according to a report by the Israeli Yedioth Ahronot, quoted by Egypt’s state-owned news agency MENA. The Israeli Prisons Authority also on announced that three Egyptian detainees began a hunger strike to demand their release. The 65 Egyptians are held in various prisons in the Negev Desert in the South of Israel, according to statements by Ibrahim El-Darawi, head of the Palestinian Studies Center in Cairo.

A shortage of doctors and midwives in Cameroon has drawn more men into midwifery in recent years. While many Christian men and women say they prefer male midwives for their attentiveness, Muslim men and women say that it goes against their religion for a male to attend to a woman during labor. The government introduced the country’s first official midwife training program last year in order to ensure the availability of skilled midwives regardless of sex.

The farmers' union TAU SA has voiced concern over the impact toll fees would have on food prices. Union president Louis Meintjes said farmers already have their backs against the wall with rising fuel prices and higher vehicle registration and licence fees. The additional burden of toll fees on Gauteng freeways would put farmers in an impossible position, he told Transport Minister Sbu Ndebele in a letter released to the media.

Join more than 500 policymakers, activists and practitioners, including young persons, people living with HIV & AIDS, with disabilities, and LGBQTI persons from Africa and around the world at the 5th Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights. The conference will will take stock of responses to sexual health and rights on the continent since ICPD, and interrogate the status of sexual health and rights, with particular focus on women, girls, adolescents and youth.

Drawing on the power of creative and entertaining arts to communicate messages, the 'Creative Arts for Youth HIV/AIDS Prevention – Music and Comics in Chamanculo', project is designed to promote HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention, as well as inspire youth to know their HIV status. Community Media for Development (CMFD) will be working with the residents of Chamanculo, a peri-urban community of Maputo, to create music and illustrated comic stories. The music will be the focus of a concert in Chamanculo, be distributed to radio stations, and become part of local band Sigauque Project’s regular repertoire of songs.

cc E SMacky Sall should be supported, but people should be suspicious and vigilant. He is, after all, Wade's protégé.

This call is for applicants for grants for policy research into global health diplomacy , and particularly in relation to the manner in which African interests around equitable health systems are being advanced through health diplomacy.

The report contrasts the UK government’s preferred approach of ‘food security’, based on free markets supplemented by aid, with the positive alternative of food sovereignty, which returns control over the food system to farmers. It shows how the government has driven a free trade agenda at the international level, while pressing countries to remove social protections that would reduce suffering. Far from relieving hunger among the world’s poorest, the Department for International Development (DFID) funds development of new crop technologies that deepen farmers’ reliance on those companies’ seed and agrochemicals at ever greater prices, leading to hunger on an unprecedented scale.

The government has denied reports that public hospitals are experiencing drug shortages. On Tuesday 27 March, doctors took to the streets to demonstrate against drug shortage and lack of adequate medical personnel in public hospitals. The doctors marched from the University of Nairobi to Treasury to demand that the government clearly states when it intends to post medical personnel to public health institutions.

The African Union has added their backing to Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s run at becoming World Bank President. This post from blog Africa is a Country says there are those who would be pleased to see her get the job simply so that Nigeria could be rid of her. Her opponents accuse her 'of acting as an agent for global financial instutions, she was widely seen as the instigator of the removal of the fuel subsidy in January that led to the eruption of the Occupy Nigeria movement.'

Health-e news reports on Musa Ernest Nkoko, a 52-year old ex-miner with multi-drug resistant (MDR) tuberculosis. He lives in KaShoba in the Lubombo region of Swaziland with his wife and five children aged between 9 and 27 years. Co-infected with HIV, Nkoko says he has been on treatment for MDR-TB for the last four years. The disease has diminished Nkoko’s lung capacity and rendered him too weak to do any work, and he and his family relies on his wife’s income as a part time cleaner.

I just got information that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Japan has agreed with the World Food Programme to export canned fish, including that produced in disaster-affected areas to the following countries: Ghana, Congo, Senegal, Cambodia and Sri Lanka.

Political instability, civil strife and humanitarian crises in Africa have over the past decades reversed countless maternal health development gains on the continent, health experts warn. 'African countries with good maternal health statistics are generally those that have long-term political stability. This shows that stability is a fundamental basis for development. If it doesn’t exist, other priorities overtake,' Lucien Kouakou, regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF) in Africa, told IPS.

The turmoil in northern Mali is thwarting efforts to treat and prevent obstetric fistula, say health experts and local NGO workers. It is just one example of the fallout from the latest fighting between Tuareg rebels and the Malian army, triggered when rebels began attacking northern military posts in January. Since then, some 195,000 people are estimated to have been displaced by fighting, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Cote d’Ivoire’s commercial capital, which counts at least five million people, has only one clinic that offers family planning services free of charge. It is located within the premises of the public hospital in Yopougon, one of Abidjan’s largest suburbs, which lies about 15 kilometres south-west of Abobo and is run by the non-governmental health organisation Ivorian Association for Family Well- Being (AIBEF). Here, staff counsel about 80 patients a day on issues relating to sexual and reproductive rights, including contraception, safe sex, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, teenage pregnancies, and maternal and infant health.

Prostitutes in sub-Saharan Africa have one of the highest rates of HIV infections in the world, an international study has established. The research findings also recommend that prostitution should be legalised to make working conditions for sex workers more tolerable and reduce their rate of HIV infections. The study was funded by the World Bank and the UN and carried out by the US based John Hopkins School of Public Health.

Lack of adherence to the full course of Artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) treatment is threatening the effectiveness of the drug recommended as first-line treatment for uncomplicated malaria in countries where the disease is endemic, according to recent studies. In Siaya district of western Kenya, where malaria is particularly prevalent (38 per cent incidence in 2010), a study revealed that only 47 per cent of participants reported completing the given doses.

On the 26 September 2009 a political attack took place in Kennedy Road. Nothing has since been offered by eThekwini municipality to Kennedy victims who lost their homes.