Projections of the impact of circumcision on the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa based on clinical trials may underestimate the number of infections that can be averted by around 40 per cent, according to an international group of epidemiological modellers. The findings, published in advance online by the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections, come from new epidemiological modelling work that incorporates findings from a pooled analysis of two recent studies that evaluated the impact of circumcision on HIV transmission from men to women.

UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake joined the Kenya Government and other partners on Friday to roll out an innovative approach to prevent the transmission of HIV from mothers to their babies (PMTCT). The initiative includes a combination of interventions and supplies such as a 'Mother-Baby-Pack' of antiretroviral drugs and antibiotics, which women can easily administer at home. Without treatment, around half of all children born with HIV will die before their second birthday.

KwaZulu-Natal Province remains the epicentre of South Africa’s HIV epidemic but new research reveals that nearly a third of hospitals surveyed had not started a single HIV-positive infant on antiretroviral treatment in several years. The research, presented at this week’s Orphaned and Vulnerable Children (OVC) in Africa Conference in Johannesburg, was conducted by the University of the Witwatersrand’s Maternal, Adolescent and Child Health (MatCH) Unit, with the government.

Uganda has had several cases of murder following HIV-positive diagnoses, including a man in the southwestern district of Rukungiri murdering his wife in 2008, the lynching of a woman in Gulu suspected of infecting a man and, in September, a 20-year-old woman in the eastern district of Soroti being sentenced to death for killing her soldier husband after she tested positive and he was negative.

Over the past 30 years, discrimination has driven the AIDS epidemic - making marginalized groups more vulnerable to infection and making those living with HIV unable to access care. South Africa has a heroic history of overcoming apartheid, but xenophobic violence and discrimination continues to be a scourge on the country, undermining the health of migrant populations and impeding AIDS efforts.

Research on HIV/AIDS is on the rise in South Africa, a country with the largest number of HIV infections in the world, while Western research efforts have levelled out, a study has found. Only around two per cent of all research articles produced by the United States, the biggest producer of HIV/AIDS studies, are about HIV/AIDS, according to the study in Scientometrics. By contrast, 5.5 per cent of South Africa's research effort goes towards HIV/AIDS - mainly clinical medicine and social studies.

Investment houses across the globe have been considering acquisition of farmland as an increasingly attractive investment opportunity. Studies indicate that investments of over $60 billion have been committed for farmland deals by the financial investment firms alone. India’s private sector has been participating in this global phenomenon in a big way. In Africa alone for instance, it has been estimated that more than 80 companies, mainly processing and trading houses, have invested about $2.4 billion in acquiring farmlands to secure raw material supplies, scale and global presence.

The official death toll from the cholera epidemic that has hit Cameroon since April is now 559 deaths out of 8,528 cases, according to the Minister of Health, Andre Mama Fouda. The region of the Far North has the highest toll of 542 deaths from 8,227 cases.

Africa is hungry - 240 million people are undernourished. Now, for the first-time, small African farmers have been properly consulted on how to solve the problem of feeding sub-Saharan Africa. Their answers appear to directly repudiate a massive international effort to launch an African Green Revolution funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Instead of new hybrid seeds, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, family farmers in West Africa said they want to use local seeds, avoid spending precious cash on chemicals and most importantly to direct public agricultural research to meet their needs, according to a multi-media publication released on World Food Day.

The Republic of Congo has launched a 'farming village' project to boost food self-sufficiency, with the first one inaugurated in Nkouo, about 80km north of Brazzaville, the capital, on 8 October. It houses 40 families from different regions of the country. 'Forty hen-houses, a warehouse, a sorting centre and refrigerated storage space have been made available. Each family received 792 laying hens and 2ha for cultivation,' said project director Jean-Jacques Bouya.

Delayed test results often mean HIV patients in Mozambique fail to get timely treatment, but new technology is reducing the need to send tests to far away laboratories, and speeding up test results and HIV treatment. Mozambique’s Ministry of Health has increasingly begun experimenting with new technology to make diagnosing and monitoring HIV patients quicker and easier. After a successful 2009 pilot the country has nationally rolled out SMS or text message printers, which transmit the results of infant HIV tests electronically from two central reference laboratories in Maputo and the northern provincial capital, Nampula, to more than 275 health centres.

Shunned by mainstream society, sex workers with HIV-related illnesses in Nairobi are unlikely to receive help from concerned neighbours. Instead, some of them are being cared for by fellow sex workers. A group of 25 sex workers who call themselves 'Knight Nurses', have been active for a little over a year in the slum of Huruma. They regularly visit fellow members of the group and their family members who are HIV-positive and bedridden to cook for them, wash them and tidy their homes.

Zimbabwe’s debt burden of about 8,3 billion dollars, owed to internal and external institutions, is crowding out essential national budget items such as health and basic services, with detrimental effects for particularly women. Indications are that many Zimbabwean women opt to give birth at home, with some children being born HIV positive because their mothers cannot afford the maternity fees or the fees charged at hospitals and clinics for the prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV, according to the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (ZIMCODD).

New evidence that speculation on food by hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks is fuelling the rise of bread and other basic foods has been released by anti-poverty campaigners on World Food Day, October 16, 2010. The World Development Movement has calculated that over the summer, financial speculators in Chicago alone bought up corn futures contracts equivalent to nearly 1.7 billion bushels - more than the annual consumption of Brazil, a country of some 260 million people and the world’s third largest consumer of corn.

The United Nations’ special rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, has backed citizens worldwide who are demanding a fundamental shift in food and agricultural research to make them more democratic and accountable to society. De Schutter outlines his support in the foreword to a multimedia publication that the International Institute for Environment and Development launched on World Food Day (16 October).

October 16 is the United Nation’s World Food Day. It is a day set aside for?us all to reflect on the fate of the 950 million men, women and?children worldwide that, according to UN statistics, go to sleep?hungry.????

Beginning today, hundreds of inspired Canadians will take on personal and group challenges to raise funds for community-based organisations turning the tide of AIDS in Africa, as part of the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s 'A Dare to Remember' campaign. Now in its second year, the national campaign extends to World AIDS Day (December 1), engaging communities in a meaningful dialogue about HIV/AIDS.

Marie Musa, 37, is devastated. After the mother of four gave premature birth, her baby boy died a few hours later - because the hospital did not have enough incubators to rescue the infant. In August, the same month that Musa’s baby died in hospital, James Bamie Davies, commissioner of the customs and excise department of Sierra Leone’s National Revenue Authority (NRA), announced in a government gazette an auction of medical appliances, including eight incubators. One in five children die before they reach the age of five in Sierra Leone, and one in eight women die during childbirth, according to the 2008 United Nations Human Development Index.

Fairtrade has assisted greatly in steering agricultural in a developmental direction, despite its lack of a bottom–up approach, says this post on the blog of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. However, in South Africa, with its stark legacy of oppression more is needed. However, Fairtrade beneficiaries need to lead the process of bottom up development, to direct the Fairtrade movement in terms of their reality and their needs.

Under a new proposal from the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), a trade bloc of 19 African nations, the bloc would carry out science-based risk assessments on growing commercial GM crops in any of the bloc's countries. If COMESA finds the crop safe for the environment and for human consumption, the crop could then be grown in all COMESA countries, although individual countries would retain the right to withhold, says an editorial in nature.