SRI LANKA: Princey Mangalika: “My neighbours burned my house because they thought I had HIV”

Photo: David Swanson/IRIN

Princey Mangalika has come a long way since 2001

GOTHATUWA, 16 December 2010 (PlusNews) – There are few positive stories of people living with HIV out of Sri Lanka, but Princey Mangalika’s is an exception.

Since learning she was HIV positive in 2001, she has made overcoming stigma associated with HIV a personal crusade, heading the Positive Women Network, one of a handful of NGOs working to support an estimated 3,000 people living with HIV in the country.

“Before my husband died of AIDS in July 2001, I had never heard of AIDS, much less HIV. Even the word stigma meant nothing to me. My husband had been working in Germany for six years and I knew little of such things. After all, I was a stay-at-home mother with two young girls.

“That all changed, however, when he became ill and the doctors began asking me lots of questions – difficult questions to which I simply didn’t have the answers.

“They insisted I be tested as well, but I declined and returned to our village to care for my husband.

“But upon my return, I soon realized everything had changed. Once my neighbours learned of my husband’s condition, they demanded that we leave. They told us we were all ‘infected’; a risk to their families.

“Even the local shop refused to sell things to us, while others demanded that we take our children out of school, lest their own children became infected.

“Fearful of what might happen next, my husband sent me and my two daughters to my family’s village.

“However, shortly after my departure my husband fell into a deep depression; he was found four days later outside a Buddhist temple after taking a lethal dose of poison.

“The doctors were unable to save him and when I tried to bury him in my husband’s village, again my neighbours refused, forcing me to bury him in Colombo instead – with strict instructions by doctors that the grave be at least 9ft [2.7m] deep.

“After I returned to our village, I had hoped that things might improve, but instead I faced hostility. Again, people I had known for years looked and behaved differently towards me. They were afraid. I could see it in their eyes, but I didn’t understand why. For days on end, they would shout at me or place death threats under our door – demanding that we leave. They even threw stones at me, but still I refused.

“Then one night I awoke screaming and realized that the house had been set ablaze. My neighbours burned my house because they thought I had HIV.

“Shortly afterwards I was tested and learned the truth.”

ds/mw

source http://www.irinnews.org

Soft wear has been synonymous with Coimbatore for long but now the city is fast catching up on the software front too.

The Manchester of India is now the second best choice, next to Chennai, for most IT companies. And if recent government data are any indication, the city’s software exports have zoomed this year higher than any other city in the country.

This tier II town has a valuable pool of able and competent professionals and churns out close to 28000 non engineering students every year. Besides we have also seen a sizeable amount of recruits relocating from smaller town such as Salem, Erode etc. says Sanjay Shanmugham VP HR CBay systems a medical transcription. Major which has 15 crore facility in the city.

IT/BPO services is also an emerging sector in the city and advisory firm Tholons had ranked Coimbatore at 17th place among the global outsourcing cities in one of its recent surveys.

K. Mohan
associatedpressofindia@gmail.com
associatednewsofindia@gmail.com
mohanankmenon@gmail.com

CLIMATE CHANGE: Health on the back burner

Photo: UN Photo/Sophia Paris

Climate change is bad for your health

CANCUN, 10 December 2010 (IRIN) – A joint pilot study by Nurses Across the Borders, a Nigerian health NGO, and SeaTrust Institute, a US- based scientific and educational non-profit organization, will collect data to help map the impact of global warming on malaria in the West African country.

“The nurses will note if malaria is recorded in any area where it usually isn’t, and all this information will be fed into a climate model which will help prepare health-related climate change projections for the country,” said Dr Lynn Wilson, executive director of the Institute.

About 500 nurses in Lagos, Nigeria, will participate in the pilot project starting in 2011, officials of the organizations announced at a side event at the UN climate change talks in Cancun, Mexico. The initiative will also create awareness about the links between health and climate change at the community level.

Peters Omoragbon, who heads Nurses Across the Borders, said nurses were the primary healthcare givers in Nigeria and often the first point of contact during a disease outbreak.

Lack of data

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has projected that the already high burden of disease and vulnerability in Africa meant climate-related health impacts could be more severe than in other parts of the world.

Higher temperatures and altered rainfall patterns could potentially lead to an increase in the incidence of vector-born diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, onchocerciasis or river blindness, and trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness, the IPCC said in its last assessment.

The scientific body also noted that in Africa “little evidence exists of causal changes in disease transmission and climate”, but this did not mean these changes did not exist; “rather, it may reflect the lack of available epidemiological data as a result of poor or absent surveillance and health information systems”.

Wilson pointed out that many developing countries lacked data to help them map the possible impact of climate change on health, and prepare for it.

More than 71 percent of Africa’s disease burden can be attributed to infectious diseases, with malaria the single greatest contributor (10.8 percent).

Nurses Across the Borders and SeaTrust Institute are part of a global health alliance that has been trying to focus more attention on health issues at the UN climate talks.

All the speakers at the side event, including Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, a senior scientist in the department of Public Health and Environment at the World Health Organization (WHO), lamented the failure of the talks to recognize the impact of climate change on health.

Campbell-Lendrum, who has been lobbying for some years to get health put on the agenda at UN climate change talks, said the original text of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change had noted the impact of climate change on health, “but since then it has become a footnote”.

The UN Standing Committee on Nutrition has also been trying to make a case for nutrition at the talks.

Cristina Tirado, associate professor at the Centre for Global and Immigrant Health at the University of California, who drafted a policy brief on nutrition for negotiators, said undernutrition was the biggest health risk facing the world, a fact also noted by the IPCC.

In 2009 the International Food Policy Research Institute, a US-based think-tank, used climate models to show that in another four decades, higher average global temperatures would lead to water stress, causing food production and access to fall.

This could drive an additional 24 million children into hunger, and consequently increase their risk of climate-related health hazards.

jk/he

source http://www.irinnews.org

CLIMATE CHANGE: Africa to take a “quantum leap” in forecasting

Photo: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN

African countries will soon have access to more detailed climate change projections

Johannesburg, 23 November 2010 (IRIN) – Africa has struggled to make accurate and detailed predictions of the impact of climate change on its countries, but the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) which began earlier in 2010, will see the continent take a “quantum leap” in climate change projection, says Bruce Hewitson, the project’s Africa coordinator.

CORDEX, an initiative by the World Climate Research Programme, will help downscale the global climate model climate change projections being prepared for the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) so as to predict, for instance, what impact higher global temperatures might have on Lagos, Nigeria, until the end of this century.

This detailed information will feed into the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, expected to be published in 2013 or 2014.

“The priority area for CORDEX is Africa, as it is historically under-researched,” said Hewitson, who is also the co-lead author of the chapter on regional contexts in the report by IPCC Working Group II, which will look at impact, adaptation and vulnerability.

Projecting the impact of climate change requires studying changes in the long-term averages of daily weather patterns and many other factors, and can be a tricky business.

Scientists use climate models that simulate the possible impact of variables like radiation, moisture content, and the movement of air and temperature over a given period of time to help project what could happen.

To make forecasting the possible effects of climate change as comprehensive as possible, and also make the connection between current events and future consequences clearer, scientists and academics have been expanding the list of variables to include sea level rise and even food price increases and malnutrition statistics.

A climate model works by calculating what the climate is doing, say, in terms of wind, temperature and humidity at a number of points on the earth’s surface and in the atmosphere or ocean, according to an explanation on the website, climateprediction.net. The website is backed by the University of Oxford, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and The Open University, all based in the UK.

Photo: NOAA

Climate models are systems of differential equations based on the basic laws of physics, fluid motion, and chemistry.To “run” a model, scientists divide the planet into a 3-dimensional grid, apply the basic equations, and evaluate the results. Atmospheric models calculate winds, heat transfer, radiation, relative humidity, and surface hydrology within each grid and evaluate interactions with neighboring points

“These points are laid out as a grid covering the surface of the Earth, dividing it up into a lot of little boxes. The more boxes there are, the finer the resolution of the model and the smaller-scale climate features it can represent. From this point of view, the best climate model would be the one with the finest resolution.”

Previous climate change models for Africa have typically worked at 200 km resolution – the distance covered by each box in the grid – said Hewitson, who heads the Climate Systems Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa.

The target for Africa is to predict climate changes for every 50 km, but some modellers might take it down to even 25 km, said Hewitson.

Fourteen climate modelling groups have already begun work, taking into account climate data from as far back as 1950 and looking beyond into 2100. Because of a lack of capacity in Africa, only two groups – one at UCT, led by Hewitson, and the other being the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria, South Africa – are based on the continent.

The 12 other groups are led by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, the Danish Meteorological Institute and the University of Iowa, which are among the world’s foremost climate modelling institutions.

Developing capacity in Africa

The climate data generated by the modelling groups will be processed by regional teams in Africa led by African scientists, as part of the CORDEX initiative. They will be mentored by top global climate modellers such as Bill Gutowski of Iowa State University, who has been involved in efforts to build a climate research community in Africa for the last decade.

The regional teams will then use the data from the 14 climate modelling groups to develop projections, for instance, of flood frequency in a particular catchment area.

“The focus [of the modelling in Africa] is on areas that are urban, agricultural, water catchments, and other regionally important aspects,” said Hewitson.

The mentors will assist the regional teams in developing projections and writing analyses that will meet the requirement of countries wanting information on the effect of climate change on their food security, health, economic growth and a host of other sectors.

The regional teams will be finalized by the end of 2010 and data processing will start in 2011.

jk/he

source. http://www.irinnews.org