Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 3 2011 (IPS) – The United Nations is predicting that come Oct. 31, the world population will hit the seven billion mark and keep expanding till it reaches 9.3 billion by the year 2050.
Much of this increase, according to the Population Division of the U.N. s (DESA), is projected to come from 58 high-fertility countries: 39 in Africa, nine in Asia, six in Oceania and four in Latin America.
These countries include some of the poorest of the world s poor: Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Mali, Ethiopia, and East Timor, along with middle income countries such as Jordan, Pakistan, Honduras, Guatemala and the Philippines.
The projections were part of the released Tuesday by DESA.
A world of seven billion …
DAKAR, Jun 7 2011 – Think hand washing can t be fun? Think again. In Senegal, a unique water system offers people an easy, cheap and environmentally friendly way to wash their hands frequently, reducing the spread of hand-borne transmittable diseases.
Students learning how to use the canacla: 30 seconds of hand washing while singing and dancing. Credit: Benoit Vanhercke
It is recess at Clair Soleil elementary school in Dakar. …
Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Jul 22 2011 (IPS) – When Callixte Munyabikari, a potato farmer from Gakenke in northern Rwanda, was rushed to a regional hospital after he fell ill with diarrhoea, he thought it was just a bad case of food poisoning.
A contaminated stream in Kimicanga, a suburb in Kigali. A majority of people in rural Rwanda still consume pol…
Thalif Deen
STOCKHOLM, Aug 25 2011 (IPS) – The statistics coming out of Africa are staggering: 40 percent of Africa’s 1 billion people live in urban areas and 60 percent live in slums, where water supplies and sanitation are severely inadequate , according to the Nairobi-based U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).
The worst affected are countries in sub-Saharan Africa where shortage of financial resources, bureaucratic mismanagement and lack of political leadership are hampering progress towards resolving longstanding problems relating to water scarcities and lack of sanitation facilities.
The London-based WaterAid points out that at least five African countries Angola, Comoros, Zimbabwe, Liberia and Togo have no specific public sector budget-line for sanitation. Comor…
Pavol Stracansky
BRATISLAVA, Oct 5 2011 (IPS) – Almost half of all doctors working in Slovakia s hospitals have handed in their notice in a mass protest over working conditions and wages which they warn could cause the Eastern European country s healthcare system to collapse.
They have given two months notice but say that if by the end of that time their demands for better wages and reforms of the healthcare system are not met they will carry through their resignations, leaving hospitals having to limit operations, close wards and provide only essential health services.
The mass resignations have been inspired by similar action taken by doctors in the neighbouring Czech Republic.
They also come, though, as discontent among low-paid medical staff runs high in a…
PRAGUE, Jan 22 2012 (IPS) – The Czech government has defied calls from international human rights groups to stop the degrading practice of surgically castrating sex offenders.
Announcing a raft of new health care legislation earlier this month, Prime Minister Petr Necas said the government would not be putting an end to the controversial practice, defending castration as an efficient method of stopping recidivism among sexual offenders.
But rights groups have questioned the move and even the government’s own human rights commissioner has said the practice is a throwback to out of date thinking on criminal punishments and leaves the Czech Republic out of step with the rest of Europe.
Other methods of treatment are given preference all over Europe. We consider it n…
Sana Altaf
Suicide rates, particularly among teenagers, have soared in Kashmir since the insurrection began in 1989. Credit: Sana Altaf/IPS
SRINAGAR, Mar 2 2012 (IPS) – On Feb. 6, a young girl committed suicide by swallowing poison at her home in Kashmir. A few weeks later a teenaged girl from Srinagar hung herself at her residence.
On Feb. 24, two girls from the Budgam district committed suicide by consuming poisonous substances. A few days later, on Feb. 28, a youth ended his life by jumping into the Jhelum River in the Sopore district of North Ka…
HAVANA, Apr 9 2012 (IPS) – In response to the pressures of everyday life, some people in Cuba are promoting meditation as a way to protect the mind and body and foster a culture of peace.
Group meditations are held in parks and other public places in Havana. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS
People are looking for paths to inner peace and ways to live without stress. Having mechanisms for relaxation is a crying need everywhere in these times, cultural promoter Juan Dávila …
BEIJING, Jun 26 2012 (IPS) – Graphic online photographs of seven month-pregnant Feng Jianmei lying prostrate on a hospital bed next to a bloody foetus have created outrage in China over the brutal enforcement of the controversial one-child-policy. The husband of the woman whose forced late-term abortion caused uproar worldwide has gone missing, according to his family.
Feng’s husband Deng Jicai’s whereabouts are unknown, but his disappearance follows continued harassment by thugs and officials. Banners erected in the couple’s hometown in northern Zengjia county, Shaanxi, call them “traitors” and declare that they must be driven out for publicising the forced abortion online and accepting interviews from foreign media.
“The authorities concerned even threatene…
TOKYO, Aug 11 2012 (IPS) – Sachiko Masumura (79) was standing just two kilometres away from the hypocentre of Little Boy, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan over six and a half decades ago.
She lost her mother and two siblings to the horrific heat, flames and radiation that engulfed the prefecture on Aug. 6, 1945, instantly wiping out 120,000 people.
Three days later the United States dropped a second plutonium bomb, ‘Fat Man’, on Nagasaki, killing 74,000 people according to government records.
Thousands of others, like Masumura’s father, who died last year from leukaemia, suffered the after-effects of radiation for years.
Masumura’s son is disabled from a brain disorder, a disease she links to the long-term impact of radiation. …