All concerned parties are invited by AGRA Watch/Community Alliance for Global Justice & La Via Campesina to add their signatures to this open letter to the Gates Foundation. It acknowledges that signatories to the letter share recognition with the Foundation that hunger, poverty and climate change are inter-related through the medium of agricultural policies, but express reservations that the Foundation’s approach to these issues – directly and through its Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) subsidiary – is unlikely to adequately address them and may well aggravate their underlying causes. The letter states that the Foundation is mistakenly funding an inappropriate effort to industrialise agriculture in Africa, including the use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, monocropping of ‘improved’ and genetically engineered crop varieties, further deregulation of trade, and regulatory frameworks that will privatise seed. The authors of the letter warn that science and historical precedents indicate that these changes will come at the expense of the hungry, small farmers, consumer health and the environment.
Jobs and Announcements
This conference will consider the link between and contributions of the social sciences and humanities to HIV research and action. The International Association of HIV Social Scientists, which is organising the event, argues that social science emphasises a critical, reflexive stance and willingness to confront the social, ethical, and political dimensions of scientific investigations of the HIV epidemic, which has made it instrumental in successful HIV prevention efforts such as the normalisation of condom use against sexual transmission and the introduction of safe injecting equipment for injecting drug use. Social scientific research has also provided insights into issues related to the treatment and care of people living with HIV and AIDS, and has addressed the broader social and political barriers to effective responses to HIV. Yet there have been few forums in which scholars from different social science and humanities disciplines can come together to develop connections among the various phenomena we study, and between ourselves and our biomedical, policy and community based colleagues. This conference is a forum for those keen to extend the scope of the social sciences and its capacity to trace connections between all kinds of phenomenon, notably those that contribute to the complexity and changing nature of the epidemic. Themes include: treatment as prevention, HIV and the body, social epidemiology and social networks, global politics, and responsibility and risk governance, as well as new directions for HIV and AIDS treatment.
The Fourth World Social Forum on Social Security and Health will be held immediately before of the IX Edition of the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal from 3–6 February 2011. The theme of the Forum will be ‘Towards universal social security: A right without borders, a system without barriers: Africa in the centre of the world’. Those at the Forum will debate the collective process that tries to project the concerns and proposals of a wide range of organisations that work in different fields related to of social security and the right to health, including work protection, social assistance and economic security.
This symposium considers infectious diseases in Africa, including bacterial, viral, fungal and parasitic diseases, which comprise a major cause of death, disability, and social and economic disruption for millions of people in Africa’s developing countries. This conference will aim to look at the borderless effect of infection, its impact on children and the importance of intervention. International speakers will talk about how to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases and discuss new diagnostics vaccines and drug treatments.
According to this petition, an estimated US$44.3 billion worldwide was lost in transfer fees in 2010. This amount includes transfer fees on remittances paid by workers in developed countries who are sending money to families back home in developing countries. Western Union, a major international transfer company responsible for a large share of international transfers, charges 20% on transfers, the article notes. The World Bank recommends that costs not exceed 5% of the total amount transferred, but Western Union has never faced serious pressure to lower its charges. By signing this petition, you can help can expose these exorbitant charges and hopefully result in the company lowering its charges to the World Bank rate. Reducing the profits of companies like Western Union would dramatically increase assistance flowing into developing countries. The neediest countries coming out of war or disaster suffer the greatest losses, because of transfer companies' monopolistic privileges and exclusive deals with local banks, the authors of the petition argue.
The Second Conference of the African Health Economics and Policy Association (AfHEA) will be held in Saly Portudal (Palm Beach), Senegal from 15-17 March 2011. The overall theme of this conference is ‘Toward universal health coverage in Africa’. Universal coverage is understood to mean providing financial protection against health care costs for all, as well as ensuring access to quality health care for all when needed.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is inviting submissions of papers describing research that addresses violence against women. WHO is particularly interested in research with a strong intervention focus, including ways to get violence against women onto different policy agendas, lessons about how to address some of the challenges policy-makers face, and innovative approaches to prevention or service provision, including community-based programmes in both conflict- and crises-affected and more stable settings. Papers may address more neglected forms of violence against women or provide evidence on the costs and cost-effectiveness of intervention responses. Descriptive research that contributes to a better understanding of the global prevalence and costs of violence, or that provides evidence about the root causes of such violence, will also be considered.
At a time in which the provision and regulation of health care within national boundaries is profoundly shifting, the growing numbers of people going abroad in pursuit of health care mean that the social, political and economic significance and impacts of these flows at a range of levels cannot be ignored. This symposium provides those involved in cutting-edge empirical and conceptual studies on this issue to share their work, explore emerging research agendas and foster research collaborations. Abstracts of no more than 250 words are welcomed on topics that include but are not limited to: empirical and conceptual studies of specific medical tourisms or locations; innovative methodologies and methods for researching medical travel; national and transnational medical cultures and their impacts on medical mobilities and ‘translations’; and new and emerging agendas for transnational healthcare research. Please submit abstracts to the symposium organisers as on the website.
From its base in the University of the Western Cape’s School of Public Health, this year’s HIV in Context Research Symposium looks beyond biomedicine at some of the social determinants of HIV, and of responses to HIV, within and outside the health sector. The Symposium will examine the links between HIV, inequality and the dynamics and impacts of urbanisation – dynamics that play out between settings as people move permanently or temporarily to urban centres, and within the highly unequal spaces constituting South African cities. The particular experience of Cape Town as a destination and transit point on migration trajectories will be examined in relation to other cities in South Africa and beyond. Through diverse disciplinary and sectoral lenses,practitioners, researchers, policy makers and civil society activists will examine the many ways in which urbanisation, inequality and HIV interact and affect people’s lives.
The short course "Health for All through Primary Health Care" by Henry Perry of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health begins on 23 January 2013 and runs for five weeks. It will involve four hours of student work per week – one hour of lecture, one hour of course readings, and two additional hours of work. A statement of completion will be provided for those who successfully complete the assignments. This course is time-limited in the sense that the work must be completed weekly according to the time schedule for the course, and it will not be available to take except for the period between January 23rd and February 26th. However, it is free and open to anyone with internet access. Almost 14,000 people are currently enrolled.