According to a survey, one-third of Cubans between the ages of 12 and 49 believe they have little to no chance of getting AIDS. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS
HAVANA, May 9 2013 (IPS) – “But I always used a condom!” was the sentence that played over and over in Jaime Roche’s mind when the young Cuban man tested positive for HIV in October.
“I couldn’t believe it. I’m an advocate of using condoms, even for oral sex,” the health worker, who preferred not to give his real name, told IPS. “This happened to me by accident: the condom broke during a casual encounter,” Roche said.
“Maybe I would have been protected if I hadn’t been with another person …
Teen mothers give birth to 81 out of every 1,000 children in Nepal. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS
CHAMPI, Nepal, Jul 11 2013 (IPS) – Radhika Thapa was just 16 years old when she married a 21-year-old boy three years ago. Now, she is expecting a baby and is well into the last months of her pregnancy. This is not the first time she has been with child – her first two pregnancies ended in miscarriages.
“The first time I conceived I was just 16, I didn’t know much about having babies, nobody told me what to do,” Thapa tells IPS in between assisting customers at the vegetable store she runs with her husband in the small town of Champi, some 12 km from Nepal’s capital, …
COMILLA, Bangladesh , Aug 23 2013 (IPS) – Seven months pregnant, 24-year-old Shumi Begum has travelled 220 km from her village with her paternal grandmother to consult a specialist on childbirth.
“We seek treatment here because of the good reputation of the service providers. We have had childbirth in our family in the hands of the same service providers here and for safety reasons I think this centre is still the best choice,” Shumi’s grandmother Hosne-Ara told IPS.
She was waiting at a community maternity centre here in Jafargonj in Comilla district, about 55 km from capital Dhaka.
At the crowded two-storey maternity centre popularly known as Mayer Hashi (smiling mother), a project supervised by EngenderHealth and funded by USAID, Shumi anxiously looks at…
Yvonne Shields is the community chef at Broadway Community, Inc., a soup kitchen in Morningside Heights, New York. Credit: Vadim Lavrusik/cc by 2.0
WASHINGTON, Nov 5 2013 (IPS) – Deep cuts in food aid for poor people in the United States are poised to bring higher demands on charities and food pantries across the country that provide food to families in need – and which are already overstretched.
“How are people going to feed their families?” Earle Eldridge, a volunteer at St. Anthony Catholic Church’s food pantry in Washington, told IPS on Monday. “We’re becoming a country where the government cuts such essential things as food, and we don’t know how p…
LGBT activists, human rights observers and police officers wait outside a courtroom in Uganda’s constitutional court. Many trans women have died in Uganda because of discrimination in the public health service. Credit: Will Boase/IPS
KAMPALA, Dec 16 2013 (IPS) – At an unremarkable office on Bukoto Street in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, health workers and civil society activists attend a regular meeting to offer information and advice on living with HIV and AIDS. What is unusual is that these information sessions cater to a group of around 50 transgender women.
The Come Out Post-Test Club , as the group calls itself, was established early this year as a safe space and…
Photographs of Joaquín Guzmán, alias “El Chapo”, on Interpol’s web page.
MEXICO CITY, Feb 25 2014 (IPS) – The arrest of the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, will not affect drug trafficking in Mexico, but it presents an opportunity to change the country’s drug policy, experts told IPS.
The organisational hierarchy of the Sinaloa cartel “reflects the weakness of the Mexican state,” said Edgardo Buscaglia, head of the (Institute for Citizen Action for Justice and Democracy), an NGO.
Guzmán, the world’s most wanted drug trafficker until his capture in the early hours of Saturday Feb. 22, had his centre of operations in the north…
Children in northern Pakistan line up for food rations. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
ROME, Jun 13 2014 (IPS) – Continued growth in developing countries, along with poverty-reduction policies, have helped to improve both income and food security globally.
Still, eradicating hunger remains an enormous challenge that has an impact on every other attempt to improve lives.
An estimated 842 million people were found to be chronically hungry between 2011 and 2013. Globally, one in eight people are unable to gain regular access to enough food to be able to study, work, ward off disease, and otherwise live healthy and productive lives.
Malnutriti…
Seven percent of all young boys are married before the legal age in Pakistan. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS
LAHORE, Jul 16 2014 (IPS) – At first glance, there is nothing very unusual about Muhammad Asif Umrani. A resident of Rojhan city located in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province, he is expectantly awaiting the birth of his first child, barely a year after his wedding day.
A few minutes of conversation, however, reveal a far more complex story: Umrani is just 14 years old, preparing for fatherhood while still a child himself. His ‘wife’, now visibly pregnant, is even younger than he, though she declined to disclose her name and real age.
The young couple …
With the average Indian taking some 11 antibiotic pills a year, the country consumed about 12.9 billion units in 2010. Credit: Bigstock
KOLKATA, India, Aug 28 2014 (IPS) – In 2011, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned: Combat Drug Resistance No Action Today, No Cure Tomorrow.” The slogan was coined in honour of World Health Day, urging governments to ensure responsible use of antibiotics in order to prevent drug-resistant viruses and bacteria, or ‘super bugs’.
The warning is even more salient in 2014, particularly in India, a country of 1.2 billion people that recently earned the dubious distinction of being the worst country in terms of anti…
Children in the town of Gueckedou, the epicentre of the ebola outbreak in Guinea. Credit: ©afreecom/Idrissa Soumaré
WASHINGTON, Oct 17 2014 (IPS) – President Barack Obama is under significant pressure to impose a range of restrictions on travellers coming to the United States from West African countries affected by the current Ebola outbreak.
Yet public health experts and development advocates warn that such restrictions would harm the already reeling economies of Ebola-hit countries in the region, and squeeze the international community’s ability to get health workers and goods into these countries.“If we get this wrong and just hunker down and hide, we will make …