The United Nations says Senegal leads Africa in combating AIDS on the continent and is one of only three nations worldwide to successfully contain the pandemic. AllAfrica.com's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, focuses on Senegal with a series of special reports on the country's battle against HIV/AIDS.
Equity in Health
Thousands of people in Sub Saharan Africa are dying and being damaged by a disease thought banished 30 years ago. Now in the war-scarred lands of the Democratic Republic of Congo, health workers are fighting back and hoping the outbreak of peace in the human war will let them do more.
For many years it has been known that unprotected oral sex carries a risk, albeit relatively small, of HIV transmission. Recent work in the USA and in the UK has suggested that this risk may contribute to 3-8% of HIV infections among men who have sex with men.
Do the fertility rates of the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania reflect the national levels in those countries? Or is there an independent "Maasai fertility regime"? Research at the London School of Economics has examined fertility among the Maasai and compared it with national trends.
Civil service unions are demanding action from the government in what they term as a "life threatening crisis" by making anti-retroviral drugs available to civil servants who have contracted HIV/Aids as a result of their work.
President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, where two million people are infected with the HIV virus, has said he is confident the country should be able to reverse the spread of the disease in the next five years, given the current level of nationwide mobilisation against the epidemic. "We are now at a stage of all-round mobilisation that will result in the total reversal of the trend in the next five years," the UNDP quoted Mkapa as saying at a press conference in New York to coincide with the UN General Assembly's special session on HIV/AIDS.
By Mouhamadou Gueye, Sarah Castle and Mamadou Kani Konaté
The social and economic context in which Malian adolescents begin sexual activity is different from that experienced by previous generations. Little is known about the forces that currently shape adolescents' sexuality and affect their reproductive health.
The World Health Organization and the world's six biggest medical journal publishers today announce a new initiative which will enable close to 100 developing countries to gain access to vital scientific information that they otherwise could not afford. The arrangement agreed to by the six publishers would allow almost 1000 of the world's leading medical and scientific journals to become available through the Internet to medical schools and research institutions in developing countries for free or at deeply-reduced rates.
Efforts to improve and speed up access to care for people living with HIV/AIDS are gaining new momentum, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) said today. A total of 58 countries have now expressed interest in gaining access to lower-price drugs – including treatments for opportunistic infections and antiretroviral therapy – in the context of the public-private partnership started in May 2000 by five United Nations agencies and five private sector companies.
South Africa could lose between 40 and 50percent of its current workforce to Aids, according to new research released by the HIV-Aids organisation LoveLife. Funded jointly by the Henry J Kaiser and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations, the study also confirms previous findings that HIV infections could cost individual companies between two and sixpercent of the wage bill per year.