FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf has called for urgent attention to be directed at Africa’s present food security situation. “In sub-Saharan Africa, since 2009, over 265 million people are malnourished and 30 percent of the population suffers from hunger,” Diouf said in his opening statement for the Ministerial Segment of the 26th session of FAO’s Regional Conference for Africa in Luanda, Angola.

The world's growing population is putting ever more strain on food production, which inevitably exacerbates the situation of the world's poor and hungry, writes Hans Herren. However, Herren insists that the world has the potential to respond to this pressing demand through measures which nurture and enhance 'the link between farming and a wide range of other development sectors'.

Biofuels policies and the 2008 financial and food crisis ignited a worldwide 'land rush' that is increasing world hunger without addressing the underlying long-term threats to world food security, writes Mae-Wan Ho.

The current global food crisis is a silent tsunami, with billions of people going hungry. Hunger is indeed coming in waves, but not everyone will suffer. The recurrent food crises are making a handful of corporations very rich – even as they put the rest of the planet at risk.

With more than half of all Ethiopian adults tested for HIV in the past five years and a campaign for behaviour change in place, specialists are now calling for a more targeted approach. “Most-at-risk populations” (MARPs) have to be targeted through better understanding of how the epidemic is affecting them and in turn, to develop a more specific response.

China recently became the latest country to lift travel restrictions on people living with HIV, following in the footsteps of the United States. "Every individual should have equal access to freedom of movement, regardless of HIV status," UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé commented on China's decision.

Services to prevent the mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV are gaining ground in Malawi but the country continues to battle drug shortages and mothers and infants that disappear to follow-up and treatment. In 2005 only three percent of HIV-positive mothers were using PMTCT services, and mother-to-child transmission of HIV accounted for 30 percent of all new infections nationally.

Zambia is pushing forward with formulating an anti-counterfeit draft law which will include medicines, despite the controversy that has surrounded similar laws in East Africa and despite having existing legislation which has been used to successfully prosecute counterfeiters of medicines

A vaccine designed to be used alongside isoniazid preventive therapy to shorten the course of drug treatment in people with latent TB will shortly undergo trials in South Africa, manufacturer Archivel Farma announced this week. Latent infection with tuberculosis, in which the bacteria which cause the disease are walled off and unable to multiply in the lungs, is present in around one-third of the world’s population.

The head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has appealed for greater attention to be focused on the food security situation in sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly one third of the population is hungry. With nearly 270 million people malnourished out of a total population in the region of more than 800 million, “this situation clearly demands our urgent and undivided attention,” Jacques Diouf, FAO Director-General, told government ministers at the agency’s regional conference in Luanda, Angola.

Malawi is urgently looking for US$4.1 million to fight a measles outbreak that is on the increase in the southern African country. So far, according to Health Secretary Chris Kang'ombe, over 2, 000 cases have been recorded.

A group of Aids activists arrived in Johannesburg on Thursday afternoon after attending meetings related to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Dar es Salam. They had been detained by Tanzanian authorities in the country's capital and escorted to the airport.

A new report by Zimbabwe's National AIDS Council (NAC), showing a dramatic rise in sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among people aged 15 to 24 in the capital, Harare, has health experts worried that the country's success in reducing HIV could be unravelling. STIs heighten vulnerability to HIV infection, and this age group is one of the hardest hit. According to the NAC report, more than 24,000 people were treated for STIs in 2009, compared to 8,500 cases recorded in 2008; over 60 percent of the cases were women.

Schoolchildren in South Africa are having less sex, and those that are, are doing it more safely, the second National Youth Risk Behaviour Survey by the Medical Research Council (MRC) has found. Over 10,000 students in their last three years of high school participated in the survey, which showed "significant reductions" in risky sexual behaviour.

A new study of adult mortality tells the tale of HIV over decades and across borders and how treatment may have helped to rewrite the ending. Published in The Lancet’s 30 April early online edition, the study compares adult mortality between 1970 and 2010 in 187 countries.

At St Peter TB Specialized Hospital, high in the mountains of Entoto, north of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, a masked Johannes* is suffering from multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and has spent the last month at the hospital. While the doctors are glad he is receiving treatment, they are also worried - Johannes is a bus conductor in heavily populated Addis Ababa, so there is no telling how many people he could have infected before seeking treatment.

In a number of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, widespread HIV infection has already translated into full-blown AIDS epidemics. The effects of this disaster on lives and livelihoods are dramatic, yet the economic consequences are difficult to measure using conventional approaches. Although past and current consequences of the epidemic, and responses to these, can be empirically studied, our knowledge of the overall socio-economic impact of HIVAIDS remains deficient. This study focuses on Malawi, as a representative case. It addresses both the short and long term impact of HIV/AIDS by bringing together and analysing findings from qualitative and quantitative studies on the spread and impact of the epidemic.

The quality of research examining HIV prevention programmes targeted at young people in Africa is poor, according to the authors of a systematic review and meta-analysis published in the online edition of AIDS. Moreover, evidence that such prevention programmes had an effect was limited and confined to sub-group

The Norwegian embassy in Malawi has warned it will stop supporting government's fertilizer subsidy programme. The initiative rolled out in 2005. The embassy says only should government account for the period 2007/2008, will it continue to support the programme the years 2010 through 2011 per agreement.

South Africa – home to the one-sixth of the world’s population living with HIV – today unveiled an ambitious campaign to prevent and treat the virus, a move hailed by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The drive seeks to test 15 million people for HIV by next year, a six-fold jump in just two years, as well as reach 1.5 million people with antiretroviral treatment by June 2011, up from 1 million last year. Nearly 6 million people – or 18 per cent of all adults – in South Africa live with HIV, the largest population of people in the world.