By api

Njenga Karume has died, 83 years old. He was suffering of prostate cancer. He was a businessman and politician.

Karume was one of the Change the constitution leaders who wanted to block former president Daniel Moi from ascending to power.

When they realised Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was getting sick due to old age, the politician led by Karume initiated a campaign to change the constitution.

The then attorney general Charles Njonjo ordered their arrest and prosecution charging them with treason for having imagined the death of President Kenyatta.

Kenyatta was Karume’s friend. He saved him from prosecution and ordered that Karume and his followers desist from campaigning for the change of the constitution.

Kenyatta was satisfied with his then vice President Daniel Moi. When Kenyatta died peacefully in his sleep, Moi took over power and ruled Kenya for 24 years (from 1978 through 2002). Kenyatta led the country from December 1963 to 1978.

End

By api

Former South African President Nelson Mandela fell sick over this weekend and was rushed to hospital. It has been reported that the now 93-year old former president was unwell , having pain in the stomach and was taken for treatment.

Hospital sources say he is now in stable condition and if all goes well, will be released from hospital in a few days.

End

HIV/AIDS: WHO clarifies guidance on hormonal contraception and HIV

Photo: Tiggy Ridley/IRIN

Birth control plays an important part in reducing maternal and infant deaths in many countries

JOHANNESBURG,  – Four months after a study suggested women on hormonal contraception may be at an increased HIV risk, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reaffirmed the birth control method’s safety, but strongly recommends that women on progesterone-only injections, like Depo-Provera, also use condoms to prevent HIV infection.

In October 2011 the British medical journal, The Lancet, published the findings of a study showing that women who relied on hormonal shots to prevent pregnancy doubled their HIV risk. They also found that women on this type of birth control and living with HIV doubled the chances that they could transmit HIV to their partners.

Although the women in the study did not identify their birth control methods, most were probably using the progesterone-only, depot medroxprogeterone acetate shot. More commonly known by the brand name, Depo-Provera, this drug is the backbone of most African family-planning programmes.

The study prompted WHO meetings in late January and February 2012, during which experts and civil society representatives reviewed research on hormonal contraception and HIV risk. However, because no clinical trial has ever looked specifically at this potential link, including the October 2011 study, evidence remains largely inconclusive.

In the absence of a proven link between hormonal contraception and HIV infection, the WHO issued a statement on 16 February standing by current guidelines that allow women living with or at high risk of HIV to use hormonal contraception. However, the body has recommended that current guidelines be amended to advise women using progesterone-only injections be strongly advised to use condoms concurrently to prevent HIV infection. 

The need for future research into the matter was discussed at side meetings, said Dr Jared Baeten of the US University of Washington, one of the authors of the 2011 study. Although no decision was taken, he added that conducting such a trial would pose serious challenges. About 12 million women in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to be on injectable contraception.

Women need options and integration

“I think the [WHO] statement really reflects what was an extremely thoughtful deliberation and detailed evaluation of the evidence,” Baeten told IRIN/PlusNews.

“They made a clear statement by issuing a strong clarification and I think that what’s important in the context of delivering family planning service is that we strongly remind women at high risk of HIV that contraception does protect against HIV and that condoms are the HIV preventative measure.”

Baeten has worked in high HIV prevalence countries such as South Africa, Kenya and Uganda – all of which depend on family planning services to help fight high maternal mortality rates – and said he was also happy that the need to integrate family planning and HIV services, voiced by policy-makers and researchers at the meeting, was recognized.

This would mean that health facilities providing care and treatment for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections would offer clients family planning and reproductive health services – and an extended array of contraceptive choices.

“What this statement should stimulate is making sure that women have access to a variety of contraceptive choices, and this could include intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUCD) or lower-dose, long-acting hormonal contraception,” Baeten added. “The point is that Depro shouldn’t be the default.”

IUCDs are available in both hormonal and non-hormonal forms. A device is inserted into a woman’s uterus, where it affects the ability of the sperm to fertilize an egg, and the egg’s ability to implant itself in the uterus. The devices are cost-effective and work for almost all women, according to research by the Maternal, Adolescent and Child Health division at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Dissent in the ranks

There has been some criticism of the WHO. Paula Donovan, former East and southern Africa AIDS advisor for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), now heads the international HIV advocacy organization, AIDS-Free World, with former UN Special Envoy on AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis.

Days before the WHO released its statement, Donovan issued a statement of her own slamming the body for not moving sooner on consultations when it had convened emergency meetings on past issues like swine flu.  She faulted the WHO for not involving more people living with HIV in discussions, and because the body did not issue clear or cautionary messaging to the public following the 2011 study.

According to Donovan, only one HIV-positive African woman was present at the WHO meeting, and confidentiality agreements prevented her from sharing what was discussed with networks of activists and people living with HIV.

Donovan has also criticised the WHO statement, saying that it goes too far by conclusively stating that women living with or at high risk of HIV can continue to use hormonal contraception when the evidence is inconclusive.

“WHO and UNAIDS have violated human rights by withholding information,” Donovan said in her statement. “They have failed to inform women that using hormonal contraception may carry some risk. Women have the right to make fully informed sexual and reproductive health decisions.”

She added that she would have liked to see the WHO go further in its recommendations, advising that all hormonal contraceptive users be given a three-month supply of condoms with every injection.

“No reasonable person can believe that condom use will increase because the WHO issued a statement declaring that hormonal contraceptives are safe – but condoms should also be used to protect against HIV,” she told IRIN/PlusNews. “Statements don’t prevent HIV. We would have hoped that [the] announcement would have been accompanied by a plan of action.”

llg/kn/he
source www.irinnews.org

SYRIA: Insecurity makes drought-hit farmers even more vulnerable

Photo: Joe Bombardier/Flickr

Syrian herders and farmers have suffered from drought for four of the past five years, and are now even more vulnerable because of the instability

BEIRUT/DUBAI,  – Instability in Syria has aggravated an already vulnerable situation for tens of thousands of farmers and herders affected by recurrent drought, but only a fraction of them have received assistance because of chronic “serious underfunding” of humanitarian programmes in Syria, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warns.

“They are really in bad shape. They need assistance,” said Abdulla Tahir Bin Yehia, FAO representative in Syria. “We are willing and able to reach many of the farming communities affected by the drought and the crisis, provided resources are made available by the donor community.”

“[But] no single donor has given us a single penny this year,” Bin Yehia said. “Funding from the donor community is absent.”

So far, FAO – a technical agency which needs to be funded to operate – has relied on its own funds, as well as money from the UN Central Emergency Response Fund.

Drought has hit much of northern and eastern Syria since 2006, causing tens of thousands of farming families to migrate to informal camps bordering urban centres in search of work.

“As they are considered internally displaced people, they lack the status of refugees and can hardly benefit from international assistance,” Rula Asad, co-founder of the group Al Hababeen, one of the few providing them with some relief, told IRIN.

But in the months since March 2011, many of those areas – namely Homs, Hama, Idlib and suburbs of Damascus – have been swept up in a popular, and increasingly armed, uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, who has responded, in some places, with mortar and grenade attacks, as well as fire from tanks and helicopters.

Because of the ongoing crisis, some 18,000 migrant farming families have had to return to their areas of origin in the northeast, and “are now left with no source of income and are in need of humanitarian assistance in order to re-start their livelihood activities,” said Abeer Etefa, regional public information officer for the World Food Programme (WFP).

We could not help due to a lack of humanitarian funding

Despite better rainfall in 2011, many of those who returned to their farmland did not plant because they had no seeds and “we could not help due to a lack of humanitarian funding,” FAO’s Bin Yehia said. Farmers in drought-hit areas are mostly small-scale and thus there are few opportunities for casual labour in these areas, he added.

Reduced mobility

Rising transportation costs and reduced mobility as a result of the insecurity in some parts of the country have contributed to business and livestock losses among rural people in the central, coastal, eastern and southern governorates who have been less able to market their products, FAO said.

In the northeastern drought-hit areas, herders now have less mobility because of the insecurity, which has also discouraged farmers from pursuing their seasonal migration to western parts of the country for casual agricultural labour. Areas in the west where agriculture remains healthy are now suffering from a shortage of seasonal casual labour.

Most irrigation pumps are powered by petrol, but a fuel shortage has hiked fuel prices, and subsequently prices of spare parts, animal fodder and transportation have increased. Thus even those who were able to scrape together a harvest are struggling, and exports have decreased. (There are differing explanations for the cause of the fuel shortage. Some say the government is hoarding it to fuel its own tanks and to collectively punish the population. Others say drivers trucking it in have been deterred by the insecurity).

While last year’s national production of wheat was the best in the past five years, 65,633 families were unable to plant because of a lack of seeds or suffered crop failures in the 2010-11 season despite the better conditions, Bin Yehia said.

This year’s rains have been decent so far, but must be sustained until mid-April to ensure a good harvest in June.

FAO support

FAO has supported 7,000 small herders in Hassakah, Deir-ez-Zor and Homs governorates with animal feed; 2,000 farmers in Deir-ez-Zor with seeds; and 500 women-headed families with income-generating activities in Hassakah and Idlib governorates – “but this is a small number out of 65,000 households who need humanitarian assistance.”

Combined with those made vulnerable by drought in the two previous years, a total of nearly 300,000 households have needed “life-sustaining assistance” in the last three years, Bin Yehia said, and less than 20 percent of them have received it because of the lack of funding.

ah/eo/ha/cb source www.irinnews.org

PHILIPPINES: Mapping “blind” fault lines

Photo: Jason Gutierrez/IRIN

Manila, one of the most dense metropolises globally, is ill-prepared for a big quake

MANILA,  – Philippine authorities are scrambling to map out previously unknown fault lines across the archipelago after a powerful 6.9 magnitude quake flattened villages, twisted roads and killed dozens in the country’s central island of Negros earlier this month.

Experts believe the quake on 6 February was caused by the movement of a “blind fault line” – or a previously unknown fault line – under a narrow strait between Negros and the island of Cebu, catching disaster response officials by surprise.

They said destruction was massive because many residents in the two Negros towns of Guihulngan and La Libertad had for years unknowingly lived in vulnerable areas – on the mountain sides and at the foot of the slopes where they farmed the fertile land.

“Many of the houses [were] made of light materials, not earthquake proof. The bridges and roads were not as strongly built to withstand a powerful quake and many had for many years ignored warnings against living on the slopes because there had never been quakes in these areas,” Benito Ramos, head of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC), told IRIN.

“The PHIVOLCS [Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology] is now trying to locate and map these so-called blind faults after this quake,” he said.

According to the NDRRMC, over 40 people were killed in the quake, but local officials in Negros say dozens remain missing and are feared dead, after landslides buried entire villages.

PHIVOLCS has, over the years, mapped up about a dozen fault lines nationwide.

But because many of these faults had been under-studied, entire communities had for years built residential areas over them.

Two other known faults are the Manila Bay and Manila Trench fault lines, which could lead to powerful destructions, according to the 2004 Metro Manila Earthquake Reduction Study.

“There is now a rush to map up all of these other so-called blind faults – or the small ones that were previously unknown,” Ramos said, adding PHIVOLCS has yet to determine how many there are.

The 2004 study concluded that a 7.2 magnitude earthquake resulting from the movement of the Manila Trench, for example, could kill more than 34,000 people, injure 110,000 and damage nearly 15 percent of the city’s 170,000 residential buildings.

Metropolitan Manila Development Authority head Francis Tolentino said disaster response training for local officials covering the 17 districts was being improved, while much needed search and rescue equipment will be pre-positioned in areas critical to saving lives, like under bridges, for example.

“We need to train more volunteers for disaster response,” said Tolentino. “We will also train volunteers from the nearby regions, because if a quake strikes Manila, they will be the first responders. We will also boost the number of container vans with emergency and rescue equipment like hydraulic tools and cutting and digging equipment, which we would preposition around Manila.”

Ramos said the warnings are not meant to scare the public, but rather empower them in case of a major earthquake. “We don’t want a repeat of Negros.”

fv/pt/cb source www.irinnews.org