A new case of the swine flu, confirmed by the Institut Pasteur laboratory, has brought to two the number of people infected by the AH1N1 virus in the Cote d'Ivoire, health sources told PANA here Thursday. The latest case involves a 20-year-old girl who was in close contact with the first case, confirmed on Monday. They were among the 57 passengers on board the Brussels Airlines aircraft which flew in from Brussels via Monrovia, Liberia, on 19 June.

The global economic crisis has had a devastating impact on the world’s hungry. In the past year, approximately 100 million people have been added to the ranks of the roughly 1 billion people worldwide considered by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization to be undernourished, according to its report issued June 19, 2009.

People who are HIV+ often have to cope with more than illness. Sometimes health rights are violated and access to treatment is denied or severely limited. Because of HIV+ status, there is discrimination at work. Discrimination is also suffered when it comes to housing and insurance. It is for this reason that ProBono.Org, a non-profit clearing house increasing access to justice via pro bono legal services, provides a weekly legal clinic where HIV+ people can access free legal advice and services. This service is available to people throughout South Africa. All you need to do, is call in on a Tuesday morning.

cc In an extract from his forthcoming book Food Wars, Walden Bello critiques the orthodox views of economist Paul Collier on the global food price crisis. Collier argues that not enough food was produced to meet increased demand from Asia, thanks to a failure to promote commercial farming in Africa, the European Union ban against GMOs and the diversion of American grain to biofuels production. Bello counters that a globalised system of production has 'created severe strains on the environment', 'marginalised large numbers of people from the market, and contributed to greater poverty and greater income disparities within countries and globally'. Defenders of peasant agriculture, says Bello, blame 'capitalist industrial agriculture, with its wrenching destabilisation and transformation of land, nature, and social relations' for today’s food crises, with 'rates of profit determining where investment will be allocated' rather than the desire to satisfy 'the real needs of the global majority'.

The South African health system is in deep crisis. We need a major transformation of our health system and we need it now. Problems in the public health sector are splashed across the front pages of our newspapers on a weekly basis: patients being turned away from public clinics and hospitals and some dying as a result, some provinces running out of antiretroviral drugs, the doctors’ strike, and so on.

An initiative that uses music and dance to convey HIV prevention messages to young people, dance4life, has won an award for Excellence in HIV/AIDS Communication in Africa from the African Network for Strategic Communication in Health and Development (AfriComNet}. "Adults are still guessing but dance4life has already taken a giant step," their press release quotes one young man, Mugalu, from Uganda, as saying.

Nearly 20 percent of Mozambique's civil servants are HIV positive, but given that several government ministries lack reliable data, this number could even be higher, a study has warned. According to a Demographic Impact Study by the government, around 19.2 percent of 167,420 public employees were found to be HIV positive, which is higher than the national prevalence rate of 16 percent.

Healthcare workers in Yambio, capital of Sudan's Western Equatoria State, have warned that the number of HIV-positive people receiving treatment has risen, and they cannot keep up with the demand for medication. About 700 HIV-positive people are being treated by a local faith-based group, the Christian Brothers. "The issue of HIV in Yambio is getting bigger and bigger every day; we even find difficulty to provide services due the big numbers of people who are infected with HIV and AIDS," said Brother Daniel Pius.

It is prayer time at the Nur madrassa (Islamic religious school) in Pemba, capital of Cabo Delgado Province, on the northern coast of Mozambique. At this school, education does not stop at religious studies; on Saturdays, the malimo (teacher), Mitilage Rashid, talks to the 120 students about HIV and AIDS. In 2008 Rashid attended a course on HIV run by the Islamic Council of Mozambique, in partnership with other organizations, where he and 30 other teachers learned about the epidemic and how to conduct education campaigns at their schools.

Mozambique has one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates, with more than ten percent of babies not reaching the age of one, according to the United Nations Children Fund’s 2009 State of the World’s Children Report. The main cause of child death in Mozambique is malaria, closely followed by HIV/AIDS, the report states.

The percentage of people living with HIV in South Africa has barely changed in the last six years, but new data has revealed that between 2002 and 2008 there were many changes in HIV knowledge, risk behaviour and testing habits.

The US State Department has named Dr Gebisa Ejeta of Ethiopia as the winner of the $250,000 World Food Prize for his monumental contributions in the production of sorghum, one of the world’s five principal cereal grains, which have dramatically enhanced the food supply of hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.

African health and human rights activists have called on leaders attending the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting on Africa to “not use the same pie and split it between more people”, but to make the pie bigger. Representing a coalition of African HIV and tuberculosis activists, Paula Akugizibwe of the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa spelt out their list of demands which includes a challenge to the region’s leaders to guarantee the right to health, ensure that it is financed as a priority, and mobilise the additional resources needed to secure universal access to TB/HIV prevention, treatment and care.

Growing numbers of children in Zimbabwe are turning to prostitution to survive, the charity Save the Children says. The aid agency says increasing poverty is leading girls as young as 12 to sell their bodies for as little as a packet of biscuits. It also claims that the coming football World Cup in neighbouring South Africa could soon make things worse.

Swine flu, otherwise known as the H1N1 virus, reached pandemic status, the Geneva-based World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday. The Pan African News Agency (PANA) learnt that more than 27,000 confirmed cases had been confirmed in several continents since the first case in Mexico in April.

The City of Geneva and the organization 3D recently organized a public debate between Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, and Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the WTO. The debate, which was opened by the Mayor Manuel Tornare, was held on May 11th and focused on “Trade liberalization: support or impediment to the right to food?"

cc With the inhabitants of the island of Rodrigues forced to purchase their water from the Rodrigues Water Company (RWC), Alain Leveque laments the commoditisation of the country's natural resource. The privately-run yet government-owned RWC has installed water meters under a user-pay system without being obliged to consult the Rodriguan population. Leveque argues that not only does the RWC's monopoly inhibit innovation and threaten price hikes, it also indicates a trend towards privatisation in direct opposition to locals' rights and representation.

A new trial to test the efficacy of a tuberculosis (TB) booster shot for babies is about to start in South Africa, but when your subjects are too young to eat solids, the challenge rises to a new level. Almost 2,800 infants will participate in the two-year trial, in which researchers from the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative (SATVI) hope to prove that a new vaccine can act as a booster shot to improve the efficacy of the only existing inoculation against TB, the Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine, in use for nearly 90 years.

Southern Africa's food security has "greatly improved", according to the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS-NET), and unofficial estimates predict a better cereal harvest than last year. "The total regional deficit for the 2009/10 marketing year is projected to be much lower [two million metric tons] than last year [2008], due to improved harvests, especially of maize, particularly in Malawi and Zambia," said the May issue of the FEWS-NET bulletin.

Implementing a policy of routine opt-out HIV testing led to the diagnosis of 3000 HIV infections in children admitted to hospital in Lusaka over an 18-month period, investigators report in a study published in the online edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.