Aids-related deaths in South Africa: 1 682 004 at noon on Wednesday, January 25
Zim children at risk: The worsening humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe is making children more vulnerable to abuse, according to child rights NGOs.
‘For instance, because of the hike in schools fees many children are visiting schools [trying to negotiate payment] — it makes them more vulnerable at the hands of teachers who exploit them,” said Witness Chikoko, acting director of the African Network for the Prevention and Protection Against Child Abuse and Neglect.
Staff at a boarding primary school near Marondera outside the capital, Harare, were recently charged with abusing 52 girls, while 14 primary school girls were also allegedly abused by staff members at a school in the capital.
The Girl Child Network (GCN), an NGO working in 32 of Zimbabwe’s 58 districts, said it had recorded an average of 700 rape cases of girls aged up to 16 every month in 2005 — more than 8 000 cases. According to GCN, about 93% of the children raped in Zimbabwe are girls and seven percent boys.
Unicef was educating communities to spot the signs of abuse and encouraging them to ‘protect their children by establishing child protection committees, where children themselves are represented”. Source: Irin
Estimated Aids-related deaths in South Africa: 1 675 362 at noon, Wednesday January 18 2006
Bush’s ABC: American first lady Laura Bush on Sunday began her four-day trip to West Africa full of praise for the continent’s first elected woman president, but irritated by criticism of promoting abstinence to help combat Aids.
‘She serves as an important role model for little girls on the continent as well around the world,” said Bush of Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, whose inauguration she attended on Monday.
The rest of Bush’s trip, which includes Nigeria, will focus on education and the HIV/Aids pandemic, which the United Nations estimates infects more than 30million people in Africa. The disease has killed at least 20million worldwide.
US President George W Bush has proposed a $15billion emergency plan to help stem its spread in Africa and the Caribbean, but critics have complained that the programme leans too heavily on the promotion of abstinence and fails to emphasise condom usage.
‘The plan all along has been Uganda’s plan of ABC: abstinence, be faithful, and the correct and consistent use of condoms,” said Laura Bush. Uganda has brought its Aids infection rate down from 30% in the 1990s to about 6% now.
In a part of the world where one in three people have a sexually transmitted disease, and in countries ‘where girls feel obligated to comply with the wishes of men”, women need to know that abstinence is a choice, said Bush.
‘When girls are not empowered, their chances of negotiating their sexual life with their partner and encouraging or making their partner use a condom are very low.”
Opponents contend that Bush programme money is often siphoned off to faith-based groups that preach abstinence, but supporters say promoting the use of condoms in Africa has failed to halt the disease.
Source: Reuters
Cheaper drugs and tests The developing world’s fight against HIV/Aids received a double boost from separate efforts to increase the availability of drugs and diagnostic tools.
Pharmaceutical giant Roche said it would provide technical expertise to help companies in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere make generic versions of saquinavir, a drug that stops the virus from replicating.
It hopes ‘to help as many manufacturers as possible in hardest-hit countries,” said William Burns, CEO of the pharmaceuticals division.
Meanwhile, the Clinton Foundation announced agreements with drug-makers that will cut the cost of two other HIV-drugs — efavirenz and abacavir — by more than 30%. The foundation has also secured agreements with four companies to provide developing countries with HIV tests at half the cost.
The Clinton Foundation deals will benefit 50 developing countries worldwide and will involve companies in South Africa.
Former US president and founder of the organisation Bill Clinton encouraged employers and governments in countries with high infection rates to take advantage of the agreement to make anti-retroviral drugs available to as many infected people as possible. Source: SciDev.Net