A new United Nations report shows for the first time how poor health is linked to poverty in cities and calls on policymakers to identify those that need the most help and target measures to improve their well-being. The report, entitled 'Hidden Cities: unmasking and overcoming health inequities in urban settings', was launched in Kobe, Japan, where leaders from governments, academia, media and non-governmental organisations have been meeting for the past three days to examine how to improve the health of city dwellers.

Barely a year ago nearly 1,000 people from 80 countries gathered enthusiastically at the Palacio de Convenciones in Havana, Cuba, under the banner 'Innovating for the health of all'. They were attending the annual meeting of the non-profit organisation the Global Forum for Health Research (GFHR).
Now, less than a year after taking office, the forum's executive director, Anthony Mbewu, has resigned, and the forum itself is in failing health. Why did this international organisation, set up in 1998, founder so spectacularly and so quickly when the need for health research remains so great?

Cuba has announced plans to build biolarvicide factories in Brazil and several African countries in a bid to tackle malaria and dengue fever. Biolarvicides are biological products that are added to water to kill mosquitoes at the larval stage. Labiofam - the Cuban laboratory in charge of the project - has been producing two biolarvicides, Bactivec and Griselesf, since the 1990s.

An economic meltdown in Swaziland, exacerbated by a major decline in revenue from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), is unlikely to leave the national AIDS response unscathed, say local health officials. Revenue from SACU - the world's oldest customs union, comprising Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland and South Africa - contributed 76 per cent of the Swazi government’s income in 2009 but dropped in 2010 and is expected to continue declining over the next decade.

A rise in armed incursions is restricting people’s movements, reducing their ability to farm and increasing food security concerns in the Haut-Mbomou and Mbomou regions in the southeast Central African Republic (CAR), says an international humanitarian agency. 'There is plenty of fertile land in the region but violence is interfering with traditional ways of life such as agriculture, hunting and fishing, with farmers often afraid to stray far from town to work their fields for fear of attack. This has reduced production, pushing up prices to the point at which not everyone can afford to buy food, even when it's available,' said Christa Utiger, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) economic security coordinator for the CAR.

The US adult film industry was brought to a virtual standstill recently after an actor tested HIV-positive and all his sexual partners were tested for the virus. There are no such precautions in Kenya's porn industry, where actors usually perform without a condom or routine HIV testing. 'I don't know my HIV status and I can't say I know that of the men we act with,' said Angela*, who recently made the switch from eight years of street-based sex work to acting in local porn films.

More than 250 health care providers, advocates, parliamentarians, women’s groups, community members and allied agencies from across Africa are meeting in Accra, to share best practices and lessons and initiate an agenda for action. The four-day conference focuses on unsafe abortion as a critical issue for reproductive health and rights in Africa, and for achieving the Millennium Development Goal 5, to reduce maternal mortality.

La Via Campesina delegates attending the conference of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) in Nagoya from 19 to 29 October 2010 regret that the conference failed to achieve a radical decision to halt the mass commercialization and destruction of biodiversity.

‘Under the guise of developing "climate-ready" crops, the world’s largest seed and agrochemical corporations are pressuring governments to allow what could become the broadest and most dangerous patent claims in intellectual property history.’ Hope Shand unpacks the findings of ETC Group’s new report into patent claims on ‘genes, plants and technologies that will supposedly allow biotech crops to tolerate drought and other environmental stresses'.

Unless the money needed for tuberculosis is invested now the world will face a drug-resistant epidemic that will affect everyone in the world, warned Dr Nils Billo, Executive Director of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union). Speaking at the launch of the World Health Organisation’s Global Tuberculosis Control Report, Billo said that TB very often fell between the cracks even though it was a critical problem in many countries, including the former Soviet Union, Russia and Asia.

A text message from a clinic each week resulted in better adherence and a higher level of viral load suppression among people with HIV after starting antiretroviral treatment in Kenya, a randomised controlled trial has shown. The results were published in the Online First section of The Lancet this week. The trial was sponsored by the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

If people don’t receive comprehensive sex education growing up, what is another option for disseminating critical sexual and reproductive health information to them? By targeting young married couples in Egypt, The Mabrouk! ('Congratulations!') Initiative strategically focuses efforts on young couples preparing to start a family. Established in 2004, the initiative combines a multimedia campaign with interpersonal and community empowerment approaches as part of the Communication for Health Living (CHL) project to create sustainable social change related to health practices.

Tunisia is becoming the number one medical haven for its Algerian and Libyan neighbours. The Health Ministry reported that Tunisian health institutions received more than 140,000 Libyan and Algerian patients last year. 'In Libya, we suffer from the bad treatment of medical professionals and from their indifference to the health problems that worry us,' frequent visitor of Tunisian clinics Bouajila Fakhri told Magharebia.

As nearly 25 years of development of a malaria vaccine come to fruition, health authorities across Africa will need to come to grips with how to effectively introduce it. Phase III testing of a malaria vaccine involving up to 16,000 infants in seven African countries has begun; success could see a vaccine ready for use by 2013.

Every year a noxious black smog hangs over Egypt as the seasonal burning of rice straw by farmers begins, and with it comes a surge in allergic reactions and lung infections. The inky haze lasts from October to November; it is a time when hospitals see a rise in patient numbers, and parents consider keeping their children out of school to avoid the worst of the throat-burning smog. 'Straw burning-induced pollution causes acute health problems,' Mahmud Abdel Meguid, chairman of the state-run Abbasiya Chest Hospital, told IRIN.

An epidemic akin to polio, which has raged for nearly two weeks in the main commercial city in southern Congo, Pointe-Noire, has already killed eight, and several dozen cases have been reported, say health officials. 'Patients admitted to hospitals have flu-like symptoms. They are also presenting with paralysis starting in the lower limbs which spreads to the upper limbs,' said Director-General of Health Alexis Elira Dockekias.

The Kenyan government is working to reduce health workers' risk of HIV infection but experts say there is a need for greater focus on providing health workers with proper safety equipment and education. According to government statistics, an estimated 2.5 percent of new HIV infections annually are health-facility related. Poor medical waste disposal, needle stick injuries and unsafe blood transfusions are some of the factors that put medical workers at risk.

In 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates committed their foundation to eradicating malaria. It was, said Richard Feachem, director of the Global Health Group, part of the University of California, San Francisco, 'a shock to the system for the malaria community, because for a couple of decades the ‘E’ words, eradication and elimination, were not used in polite company'. That reticence was due to the very public failure of elimination campaigns, but the debate has been re-opened with the publication by the medical journal, The Lancet, of a special series on the subject.

The shortage of doctors in Zimbabwe has reached crisis levels with the country having only 21 per cent of the required medical practitioners amid other frightening statistics on the worsening health situation, a Parliamentary report has revealed. 'Child health status indicators are worsening with infant mortality and under-five mortality rising from 53 percent to 77 per 1?000 live births in 1994 to 67 and 94 per 1?000 live births respectively in 2009,' a Parliamentary report said.

For a place to be deemed a health facility, there are things that are considered to be necessities such as human resources and medicinal drugs, among many others. However, we find so many health facilities in this country failing to meet these standards thereby being reduced to nothing but white elephants. Recently, it was reported that Dar es Salaam municipal hospitals are facing serious shortages of medicines and medical staff such as nurses and doctors, something that cripples the operations of these health facilities, aggravating the suffering of the general public as they fail to provide quality services to patients.