KENYA: Victory for Anti-Abortion Lobby

Susan Anyangu-Amu

NAIROBI, Feb 2 2010 (IPS) – The threat by influential Christian leaders to mobilise a vote against Kenya s draft constitution if it does not explicitly prevent any expansion of abortion rights appears to have succeeded.
Thousands of young women risk their health procuring abortions each year: will a new constitution entrench restrictive laws on termination? Credit: Ann Weru/IRIN

Thousands of young women risk their health procuring abortions each year: will a new constitution entrench restrictive laws on termination? Credit: Ann Weru/IRIN

The draft assembled by a Committee of Experts for consideration by the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) contained no specific reference to abortion, but the National Council of Churches (NCCK) and the Catholic Church were up in arms about a phrase stating that everyone has a right to life while failing to define where life begins and ends.

Canon Peter Karanja of the NCCK told IPS, Life is sacrosanct. The definition of life must be stipulated in the supreme law of the land, the Constitution. Life must be defined as starting at conception and ending at natural death.

The parliamentary committee has completed deliberations on the draft, and decided to define life as beginning at conception.

Phrases guaranteeing everyone the right to health care (including reproductive health care) and stating that no one may be refused emergency medical treatment have been deleted; added is a phrase ruling out abortion unless in the opinion of a registered medical practitioner the life of the mother is in danger .

The changes have raised an uproar, with professional associations of medical practitioners saying it will have negative effects on Kenya s attempt to reduce maternal deaths.
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As health care providers, we are familiar with both the human impact of unsafe abortion and the public health burden it represents. Including prohibition against abortion in the constitution and defining life as beginning at conception will fail to prevent incidences of abortion, says Dr Otieno Nyunya, chairman of the reproductive health committee of the Kenya Medical Association.

Grace Maingi-Kimani, the acting executive director of Federation of Women Lawyers Kenya (FIDA), says the move by the PSC is disheartening and will serve to limit access to choice for women and young girls who are raped and end up pregnant.

The PSC was not thinking about the hundreds of women who were raped during the post-election violence and were forced to have children sired by men who violated them and possibly killed their husbands. The PSC was not thinking of young girls who are abused by their teachers and forced to cut short their education due to unwanted pregnancies, Kimani says.

It is the poor women and teenage girls who die at the hands of quacks, says Professor Joseph Karanja, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Nairobi.

He says wealthy, well-educated women are able to find safe ways to terminate pregnancies; ignoring international commitments Kenya has made guaranteeing the right to health, he charges, the PSC, has created a platform that puts the most vulnerable at still greater risk.

On its part, the Church is happy with the prohibition of abortion and definition of life as beginning at conception, and has again warned it will reject anything less.

We should not victimise the innocent unborn children, who do not have a say in this matter. Even in the case of rape and incest, the life in the womb of the woman is innocent, says Father Paulino Wondo of the Holy Trinity Catholic Mission in the Nairobi slum of Kariobangi.

Members of the Kenya Medical Association, FIDA, Kenya Obstetrical and Gynaecological Society, Family Health Options Kenya and the National Nurses Association of Kenya, have written a protest note to the PSC, the Committee of Experts and Parliament, calling for the controversial phrases to be reviewed.

Currently, abortion is permitted in Kenya only to save the life of the mother. Despite this, every year large numbers of women seek assistance to terminate pregnancies wherever they can find it.

Dr Joachim Osur, an advisor with reproductive health rights organisation IPAS a member of the RHRA argues that opponents of expanded abortion rights in Kenya have their heads buried in the sand.

Despite termination of pregnancy being restricted in Kenya, induced abortions remain common. In Kenya it is estimated that 300,000 spontaneous and induced abortions occur annually, about 29 abortions for every 100 live births, says Osur.

Unsafe abortions contribute a significant margin to the maternal deaths in this country at 30 percent. It is estimated that 2,000 women die annually from unsafe abortions.

Dr Otieno Nyunya, chairman reproductive health committee of the Kenya Medical Association says research done by his association alongside IPAS and FIDA in 2004 found 316,560 spontaneous and induced abortions occurred that year.

Nearly 21,000 women are admitted each year to Kenya s public hospitals for treatment of complications from incomplete abortions, either spontaneous or induced.

The study further shows that 800 unsafe abortions are performed every day and 2,600 women die from unsafe abortions in Kenya each year, representing 30 to 40 percent of Kenya s total maternal deaths, according to Kenya Obstetric and Gynaecological Society and Kenya Medical Association.

Nyunya says that 60 percent of the beds in the gynaecological ward at Kenyatta National Hospital, the largest referral hospital in East and Central Africa, are occupied by patients suffering from abortion complications.

He says a conservative estimate of the cost to the state for the management of these cases is approximately four million dollars a year.

The cost to women s lives is much higher.

 

ENVIRONMENT-UGANDA: Landslides – Experts Warn Worst is Yet to Come

Joshua Kyalimpa

KAMPALA, Mar 9 2010 (IPS) – Fourteen-year-old Isaac Wadyegere of Bundesi village in Bududa district woke up to a rainy and chilly Monday morning and went to school as usual. But Mar. 1 was not a usual day in eastern Uganda.
Officials assessing the damage caused by the latest landslides in Kabale, western Uganda. Credit: Joshua Kyalimpa/IPS

Officials assessing the damage caused by the latest landslides in Kabale, western Uganda. Credit: Joshua Kyalimpa/IPS

When he heard the sound of rocks and soil tumbling down Mountain Elgon on a path to destroy part of his school, Wadyegere, along with other pupils, fled home.

But instead of finding the refuge he hoped for, disaster awaited Wadyegere.

His house and family were destroyed.

My father, mother, step-mother, and five siblings all died when our house was covered by the landslides, the boy says.

Orphaned Wadyegere now stays in a camp set up by the Uganda Red Cross for survivors of the landslides that buried three other villages including; Nametsi, Namakansa and Kubewo villages in the Bududa district.
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So far 92 bodies have been dug out of the rubble by the army and rescue workers and over 300 people are still missing. More than 300,000 people will be displaced by the worst disaster in the region according to Joel Aguma, the police commander for eastern Uganda. We never planned for this and here we are, with so many people to look after, the scale of this disaster is surely beyond our capacity but we are trying our best, Aguma said as the rescue continued.

Government has now declared the scene of the Bududa landslides a mass grave.

Minister of state for disaster preparedness, Musa Ecweru, says government has called off the search for survivors after dysentery broke out and rescuers contracted it. We realised it will take longer to get all the bodies out and it was increasingly risky for the rescuers, Ecweru says.

Experts warn that the worst is yet to come. A weather outlook report released recently by the Intergovernment Authority on Development s (IGAD) Climate Prediction and Adaptation Centre (ICPAC) based in Nairobi, stated that the region was expected to have higher rainfall than normal.

The statement was released during the Climate Outlook Forum for the Greater Horn of Africa held in Nairobi, Kenya in February. National, regional and international climate scientists reviewed the state of the global climate system and its implications on the seasonal rainfall over the region.

Experts said regional systems that include sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, which are currently warmer than average, and Atlantic Ocean will have greater influence on the rainfall performance over Uganda

Professor Laban Ogalo, director of ICPAC advises countries in the region to plan accordingly as the changing rainfall pattern may be both a blessing and a curse.

Rain is a good thing if managed well. The region can benefit from it if it s used to spur food production for those who get it in plenty so they can supply others who will get less rain, says Ogalo. He said heavy rains in the region could be destructive to infrastructure and may lead to loss life.

Ugandan weather experts are warning of more landslides and floods in the east, central and western parts of the country as heavy rains continue in most parts of the country. River Malaba in Busia district in eastern Uganda, near the Bududa district, has already burst its banks.

Bildard Baguma, deputy secretary general of the Uganda Red Cross, says there is an increasing possibility of flooding from the river if rains continue. Baguma says people in the affected areas will be evacuated from their villages to higher ground where temporary camps are to be set up.

Uganda s government has asked residents in low-lying and flood-prone areas to move before tragedy hits. The ministry for disaster preparedness has already started registering people in high risk areas for relocation. Over 300,000 affected people in the Mountain Elgon region and the neighbouring lowlands of Butaleja, Budaka and Tororo are expected to be relocated.

Deus Bamanya, a senior meteorologist with the department of metrology, explains that extreme weather conditions in southern Europe weakened the high pressure systems in north Africa, which in turn pushed the rain belt down to Uganda. Heavy rains that could lead to flooding are expected to continue until June.

Prime Minister Apollo Nsibambi has told parliament government is appealing for donor funds to carry out the relocation exercise before further rainfall causes more destruction.

As the country still mourns the death of those in Bududa district, landslides have displaced hundreds in western Uganda. Heavy rainfall resulted in landslides on Mar. 4. Officials from the ministry for disaster preparedness have rushed to Kabale, which borders Rwanda and DR Congo, to assess the extent of the damage.

District authorities say landslides hit Rubaya and Butanda sub-counties destroying houses and blocking the only access road. Rescuer workers spent an entire day clearing the road before they could access the area.

Three people have been confirmed dead after they were swept by fast running waters off Kigarama Bridge in Kabale district. Soldiers have joined Kabale district authorities in verifying reports that some people are still trapped under the collapsed mud walls of their houses.

Mark Choono, the United Nations Children s Fund s Uganda emergency coordinator, warns that an outbreak of water borne diseases is also likely.

We are concentrating on providing safe drinking water, which is the biggest problem in areas affected by landslides and floods. We have begun providing water purifying chemicals to affected people, says Choono.

Already in Bududa 60 people have contracted cholera.

But as the devastation continues some experts say that the destruction of the natural vegetation on the mountains by settlers, who have cleared the areas for cultivation of crops, has made the soil loose, resulting in the landslides.

Dr. Festus Bagoora, an expert on weathering and land formations at the Department of Geography at Makerere University, says past human activity has contributed to the catastrophe.

A combination of factors is causing this, of course the rocks have been weakened due to weathering but people have removed all the natural vegetation on (the) mountains for faming and with the heavy rains landslides are bound to happen, says Bagoora.

He told IPS that he and other experts submitted a study for the National Environment Management Authority warning of areas where landslides are more likely to happen but no action was taken.

He says they had recommended the relocation of people in areas they considered to be more prone to floods and landslides.

 

MIDEAST: Adding Torture to Injury

Pam Bailey

GAZA, Apr 13 2010 (IPS) – It was bad enough that Ahmad Asfour was severely maimed by an Israeli drone strike outside his house on Jan. 9, 2009. But, his search for advanced treatment landed the journalism student, now 19, in Israeli prison where he remains.
Samir Asfour with a picture of his son, Ahmed, at a weekly protest in Gaza by families of Israeli prisoners. Credit: Pam Bailey/IPS

Samir Asfour with a picture of his son, Ahmed, at a weekly protest in Gaza by families of Israeli prisoners. Credit: Pam Bailey/IPS

According to Mahmud Abo Rahma of the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, not many Palestinians are arrested as Ahmed was, but it is increasingly common for patients entering Israel to be denied treatment unless the patient or family agrees to collaborate.

Al Mezan has joined the Physicians for Human Rights and the ADALA Centre (which defends the rights of Palestinian Arabs in Israel) to charge Israel with blackmailing Palestinian patients in Gaza, exploiting their need for medical treatment to pressure them into collaborating with its intelligence agencies.

Ahmad and four teenaged cousins were hit by fragments from a missile fired by an Israeli drone, east of Khan Younis, in the southern region of the Gaza Strip, just 14 days after Israel launched its massive, 22-day assault on the densely populated strip of land wedged between Israel and Egypt. The fragments lodged in his left eye, broke his jaw, shattered his teeth, severely lacerated both hands and right thigh, destroyed his genitals, and damaged his pancreas and intestines.

His father, Samir, was in Egypt at the time with one of Ahmad s brothers, who had been injured just eight days before. Due to the siege imposed by Israel since Hamas took control in 2007, medical care in Gaza is often inadequate. Gazans have been unable to repair the 15 (out of 27) hospitals and 43 (of 110) primary healthcare facilities damaged in last year s Israeli invasion, because of the ban on importation of construction materials.

Treatment in Egypt is not advanced and, according to Abo Rahma, the risk of contracting Hepatitis C is significant. Getting permission to enter Israel is difficult for Palestinians during normal times, and it was impossible during and immediately after the invasion. Even a year later, the UN reports that almost a quarter of the 1,103 patients who had sought permits for treatment in Israel in December 2009 were denied or delayed. As a result, 27 patients died while awaiting referral last year.
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Ahmad and his cousins were rushed to the local hospital by his oldest brother, and the medical director sent them immediately to Egypt. Ahmad spent the next eight months there, but little could be done. In fact, because of the damage to his pancreas and the lack of appropriate treatment, he soon developed diabetes.

Doctors caring for Ahmad recommended he travel to Germany. But there was a catch: Ahmad needed a visa, and for that he was required to go to Tel Aviv an impossibility for Gazans.

Finally, one physician suggested a hospital in Jerusalem, St. Joseph s. As part of the approval process, Samir took his wheelchair-bound son to the Erez Crossing into Israel on Nov. 23. After waiting four hours, they were turned away, and told to return two days later. When they arrived, they were subjected to a harrowing ordeal.

Here I am with my injured son, terrified about his health, and we were forced to remove all of our clothes so we could be strip searched. Then they took my son away from me, recounted Samir through an interpreter. Ahmad needed insulin every two hours, but I couldn t give it to him The next thing I know he is in shackles! They took the medication I had brought for Ahmed and all the money I had collected from charities (about US$2,500) and he was gone.

It was 20 days, says Samir, before he finally found out what had happened to his son, after he sought help from human rights organizations.

Lawyers from the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights discovered that other young men who had gone before Ahmad to Erez and been interrogated had apparently implicated him, claiming he had been in possession of a gun and an explosive for one of the Gaza-based militias. (Samir claims the explosive was actually his son s insulin vials.)

Ahmad maintained his innocence during his four hours of interrogation at Erez, and as a result, he was transferred to an Israeli prison in Ashkelon. After five consecutive days of further interrogation, Ahmad could take no more and confessed. The charges: membership in a terrorist organization, observation of and passing information to the enemy, providing services for a terrorist organization and possession of firearms.

He was subjected to practices that we consider torture and ill treatment, mainly in the form of forced stress positions for long hours, such as sitting on a chair with hands cuffed behind, the Al Mezan legal team said in a response to an inquiry. Torture is unconscionable at any time, but it is particularly cruel when the victim is already medically vulnerable.

Samir, who receives information on his son from the attorneys and the Red Cross, said he learned later that his son had been told that his father was in jail as well, and that therefore he must cooperate with the Shin Bet, Israel s internal security agency. Meanwhile, Physicians for Human Rights learned that Ahmad was being denied all medical treatment except for his insulin, and has been advocating on his behalf. Samir says the latest news he received is that one of his son s arms may need to be amputated.

Today, Ahmed is still in prison, although he has been transferred to Beersheba. Based on his confession, he was offered a plea bargain of 33 months incarceration or a shortened list of charges with sentencing to be determined. He rejected the bargain and at a Mar. 24 session, the court set a new hearing for June, to allow the prosecution to call its witnesses the police who conducted the interrogation.

Every Palestinian has the right to health, which is enshrined in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Al Mezan stated in a March 2009 report. This right must be provided without any conditions hinged to it, a principle that Israel repeatedly violates. The Shin Bet has on numerous occasions pressured Palestinians in need of external medical treatment to become informants in exchange for permission to leave Gaza.

According to Physicians for Human Rights, agents interrogate Gazans who want to enter Israel for medical care about their relatives, neighbors and friends; those who don t cooperate often don t get travel clearance. It has received reports from 32 patients in Gaza who say they were denied permission to leave for refusing to cooperate with Israeli questioners at the Erez Crossing by answering questions about the political affiliations of relatives, friends and acquaintances.

Samir has hired an Israeli attorney to plead his son s case, but so far doesn t have the money to pay her. He will sell his house, he says, if he has to.

My son is not guilty! exclaims Samir in frustration and pain. If my son was a militant, would I have tried to take him through Erez? He is just a boy who needs treatment, who is being used as part of their game.

 

African Grandmothers Demand Support in Role as Caregivers

Mantoe Phakathi

MANZINI, Swaziland, May 13 2010 (IPS) – Africa cannot survive without us, is the message from grandmothers representing all corners of the continent.
March at the birth of the African Grandmothers Movement: We demand economic independence to support our families. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

March at the birth of the African Grandmothers Movement: We demand economic independence to support our families. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

More than 3,000 grandmothers marched in the streets of Swaziland s commercial hub, Manzini on May 8, demanding financial independence to provide nutritious food, decent housing, access to ongoing quality education for their grandchildren and a better life.

We demand the economic independence to support our families, said 90-year-old Judith Simelane as she read the Manzini statement, marking the birth of the African Grandmothers Movement.

Freda Shabangu (70), a grandmother of 12 whose five children have all passed away, also participated in the march. From the meagre grant equivalent to about U.S. $80 that she receives from the Swazi government every three months, Shabangu has to provide for all the needs of her grandchildren.

I m happy that for the first time grandmothers are speaking for themselves about their problems, she told IPS.

With sub-Saharan Africa accounting for two-thirds of people living with HIV and AIDS globally, grandparents, especially grandmothers like Shabangu, have had to take up the responsibility of caring for ailing children and raising their grandchildren. Unfortunately, most African nations provide little or nothing in the way of social security support for this group. They also receive little recognition their contribution to national efforts to deal with HIV.
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We must have the resources to build our own capacity to raise healthy families and assist one another, said Simelane. We call for more training in critical areas such as home-based care, HIV/AIDS education, parenting orphans, healthcare, literacy and financial management.

Supported by the Stephen Lewis Foundation, the first ever African Grandmothers Gathering brought together 500 grandmothers from 14 countries in Africa and 42 of their Canadian counterparts.

The Canadian grandmothers present here are part of thousands back home who are in solidarity with their African sisters, said Elizabeth Rennie from the Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign.

These Canadian grandmothers, Rennie added, are raising funds back home to support programmes that are aimed at giving their African counterparts a better life .

The idea of the gathering, according to Swaziland Positive Living (SWAPOL) director Siphiwe Hlophe, was conceived back in 2006 in Toronto, Canada, in response to the emerging crisis grandmothers face in sub-Saharan Africa.

This event is the beginning of a process for Africa to recognise grandmothers who have been valiantly coping with the HIV/AIDS pandemic for over two decades, said Hlophe. Ilana Landsberg-Lewis, the executive director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, said her organisation has a philosophy that if communities were to get the money they need to start businesses, they could turn the tide around.

That s what these grandmothers are asking for, said Landsberg-Lewis. They are demanding for better policies that would support them in their communities.

Towards this end, the foundation is funding income-generating programmes for grandmothers in some African countries. In Uganda, an NGO called St. Francis is helping grandmothers establish businesses and also save their profits. The organisation has been working with 120 grandmothers since 2007. Most of these grandmothers are living with HIV/AIDS.

We give each granny 100 dollars to start whatever business they think is suitable for them, said Angela Kirabo Ashaba, St. Francis grandmothers programme officer. St. Francis removes the burden of travelling to banks and engaging in complicated paperwork by keeping grandmothers savings safe at their offices.

Besides the fact that banks are intimidating to grandmothers, said Anne Mwangi from Kenya s WEM Integrated Health Services (WEMIHS), interest generated through the traditional revolving money fund goes back to the grandmothers. It doesn t go to the bank or micro-lending company.

The organisation also helps the grandmothers decide how to spend their savings on necessities such as school fees for their grandchildren and buying food.

Conference delegates also discussed strategies for coping with HIV/AIDS through the establishment of support groups for grandmothers, disclosure of HIV-positive grandchildren, social security and violence against grandmothers.

Speaking at the official opening, Ntombi Tfwala, the Queen Mother of Swaziland, said rape of grandmothers is now common. In other cases we hear that thugs attack and rob elderly women of the little that they have, said Tfwala. I take this opportunity to rebuke these evils that are making life uncomfortable for all of us.

A good look at the grandmothers attending the gathering was enough to dispel the stereotypical image of a grandmother. Not only your typical grey-haired women, the definition of grandmothers is contextual as observed by United Nations Population Fund country representative-Swaziland Aisha Camara-Drammeh.

In the African context, particularly in Swaziland, a grandmother can either be an elderly woman irrespective of age, married or unmarried but as long as she has a grandchild, said Camara-Drammeh.

She said a grandmother could also be someone who does not have children of her own but becomes granny because of being part of an extended family.

From the above description, Camara-Drammeh said the roles of grandmothers are different and the burden felt varies depending on the situation at hand.

 

WORLD: “Anti-Counterfeit Deal Threatens Accessibility of Drugs”

Adam Robert Green

LONDON, Jun 28 2010 (IPS) – A proposed anti-counterfeit trade deal between 10 countries and the European Union (EU) could create a new set of barriers to the export of generic medicines to low income countries .
Everest Panda gets medicine for her baby from nurse Khetase Kapira in the children s ward at Kamuzu Central Hospital, Lilongwe, Malawi. Credit: Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam

Everest Panda gets medicine for her baby from nurse Khetase Kapira in the children s ward at Kamuzu Central Hospital, Lilongwe, Malawi. Credit: Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam

This warning comes from Rohit Malpani, senior advisor at Oxfam America, who spoke to IPS on the eve of the ninth round of negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) taking place from Jun 28 to Jul 1 in Lucerne, Switzerland.

ACTA is aimed at tackling the trade in fake products from luxury watches and cosmetics to car parts and medicine and those persons infringing on intellectual property (IP) rights by strengthening powers of customs officials in signatory countries to seize counterfeit goods.

International trade of IP-infringing products is worth over 150 billion euro per year, according to estimates of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), representing rich countries.

Instigated by the U.S. and Japan in 2006, the ACTA negotiators now include the EU, Australia, Canada, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and Switzerland.

But, critics warn, by not clearly distinguishing between fake medicines and legal generic drugs, which are often subject to patent dispute, the agreement could lead to the wrongful seizure of generic medicines en route to developing countries.
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ACTA is not just focusing on issues related to trademark law that is, medicines that are illegally and deceptively mislabelled but will also include patent law, which means that generic drugs will be covered, explains Joel Lexchin, MD, professor in the school of health policy and management at York University, Canada.

A patent involves the exclusive right, granted by a government, to use an invention for a specific period of time.

According to Lexchin, ACTA s inclusion of patents could substantially impede the flow of generic medicines. For instance, a company could claim that its IP rights have been violated in the production of a generic drug. That drug could then be seized by customs officials when it enters the country.

According to the World Trade Organisation s (WTO s) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), WTO members must grant exclusive patent rights on medicines.

However, they can in some circumstances allow the production of lower-cost, generic versions of patented drugs in exchange for royalties paid to the patent holder.

But, crucially, TRIPs only allows such medicines to be sold in the domestic market of the developing country that produces it. Problems thus arise when low income countries, which cannot make their own generics, import them from larger developing countries like India, and in transit they enter a country where the patent is active.

Under ACTA, a multinational pharmaceutical company can say to customs officials in the transit country: That product infringes our patent in this territory, so even though the medicine is safe and can be legally exported from one developing country to another, we still want you to prevent it from reaching its destination , Malpani explains.

Such seizures occurred after the European Commission (EC) issued a crackdown on IP infringement which led to shipments of generic drugs being wrongfully intercepted.

Companies from India dubbed the pharmacy of the developing world for its leading generics sector had HIV, cardiovascular disease and common infections drugs, on their way to African countries, turned back by overzealous EU customs officials.

A famous case concerns the antiretroviral medicine, abacavir, shipped from India with Nigeria as destination but intercepted in the Netherlands. GlaxoSmithKline, the patent-holder, did not wish to initiate a legal action but Dutch customs authorities still referred the case to the criminal courts.

Felix Addor, deputy director general of the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, told IPS that such outcomes mean the broad approach is unworkable.

Initially we did not see how you could discriminate between different IP rights. But having analysed the various transit cases, we now advocate that ACTA should either exclude patent-protected goods entirely or at least exclude these products from any border measures.

We expect that this decision will ultimately be supported by other delegations.

Swiss pharmaceutical companies deny civil society accusations that the industry wants to use ACTA to crack down on competing generics.

It is neither the policy nor the practice of our member companies to encourage authorities to use IP law enforcement to prevent the flow of legitimate generic products, says Bruno Henggi, head of public affairs at Interpharma, which represents major Swiss multinationals including Novartis and Roche.

We advocate that ACTA excludes patents from its scope. Our companies contribute to improving access to medicines in developing countries via large-scale donation programmes, preferential pricing and voluntary licensing, as well as through extensive participation in not-for-profit partnership activities.

If ACTA includes patent-protected generics and more developing countries sign up to the agreement, generics will be obstructed. This will cause competition to be delayed, (hence) medicine prices will increase, Malpani predicts.

Ultimately, high prices for medicines encourage counterfeiters to sell those very fake medicines that ACTA is trying to stamp out.

The justification that ACTA will tackle fake medicines, which account for almost 10 percent of world medicine, is widely rejected. Wilfully mislabelled medicines are already illegal under TRIPS, and patent infringement has nothing to do with fake or dangerous medicines , Malpani argues.

Lexchin adds that, the public health problem related to counterfeits is that substandard medicines will be used or medicines will contain contaminated or substituted ingredients.

The way to address this, though, is through better regulation of the pharmaceutical supply chain from producer to end user, particularly by strengthening regulatory authorities in developing countries .

 

KENYA: HIV Strain Among Gays Same as Strain in Heterosexuals

Isaiah Esipisu

NAIROBI, Jul 20 2010 (IPS) – Because of societal pressure and the criminality associated with men who have sex with men (MSM) in Kenya, Omondi Maina* married a woman. This is despite being involved in a homosexual relationship for the last 10 years.
David Kuria of the Gays and Lesbians Coalition of Kenya says hundreds of members of the coalition are married and hide their homosexuality. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

David Kuria of the Gays and Lesbians Coalition of Kenya says hundreds of members of the coalition are married and hide their homosexuality. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

And Maina is not the only gay man in Kenya having sexual intercourse with both a homosexual man and heterosexual woman.

New research has found that the strain of HIV among gays in Kenya is 100 percent similar to the HIV strain found in heterosexuals in the country. It is unlike the clearly defined strains of HIV found among homosexuals and heterosexuals in most countries.

The study released by the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) found that MSM in Kilifi, a region along Kenya s coast, have a HIV strain similar to the one found in female sex workers, as well as in the general public.

The findings are a clear indication that sex within gays in Kenya is interlinked with female sex workers and the general public, said Dr Mary Mwangome, the lead researcher of the study: Evaluation of HIV Type 1 Strains in Men Having Sex with Men and in Female Sex Workers in Mombasa, Kenya.

David Kuria, the chairman of the Gays and Lesbians Coalition of Kenya (GALCK) says that hundreds of members of the coalition are married men and women, but on the side they engage either in homosexuality, or lesbianism.
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All gays in Kenya are stigmatised. And to avoid this, most of them end up marrying women to guise as being straight . Or even worse, because they do not want permanent heterosexual relationships, they end up hiring female sex workers for their friends to think that they are straight, said Kuria, one of the most outspoken Kenyan gay activists.

And recent studies have shown that due to the sexual link between homosexual men and heterosexual women, the dangers associated with homosexuality are directly passed on to the general public.

Anal sex is ten times riskier than vaginal sex in terms of HIV transmission. This puts MSMs at the highest risk of transmission, which is automatically transmitted to the general public if at all they engage in unprotected heterosexual affairs, said Dr Preston Izulla, a health research scientist at the University of Nairobi.

It also means that homosexuality is not traded by foreigners alone. It is present among indigenous Kenyans. We expected to find gays and female sex workers HIV strains commonly found in the Western World because of the tourism activities. But instead, we discovered that the strain found in most of the subjects was local, meaning that it was not contracted from foreigners, said Mwangome.

The study involved 211 MSM, 96 percent of whom are Kenyan citizens and 148 female sex workers, 98 percent of who are Kenyans. Out of them 23 were found to be HIV-positive. Upon testing, 17 of them were found to have a pure HIV strain that is common in the general public, while the rest had a combination of strains that are well local.

The study confirms findings in the latest Kenya Aids Indicator Survey (KAIS) published in 2007. According to the survey, 65 percent of gay men who were interviewed confessed to being involved in another affair with a woman somewhere. As a result, 15 percent of new HIV infections in Kenya was found among gays.

A commercial sex worker in Nairobi told IPS that she had a husband, yet she was involved in commercial sex.

I have been married for the past six months. But my husband knows that I work in a Casino. He married me when I was a commercial sex worker, and am not planning to stop until we are financially stable, said the 23-year-old who only wanted to be identified as Anita*. She works in a commercial sex outlet in Nairobi known as Modern Green .

But Mwangome says the findings have revealed worrying trends that cannot be ignored. The fact that there is a relationship between female sex workers, gays and the general public means that a bigger population in the country is at risk of contracting HIV. This is because such minority groups which unfortunately operate in top secret have little access to intervention, yet the chances of infection are higher, said Mwangome.

Intervention in such groups should be made a policy issue in order to attract more attention, she added.

According to Izulla, only one in 20 gays living with HIV has access to prevention, care and treatment services.

*Names have been changed.

 

GUATEMALA: Multi-Pronged Effort to Boost Food Security Still Falling Short

Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, Aug 13 2010 (IPS) – I used to work on the south coast, cutting sugar cane, and I would go all the way to Belize to pick oranges during the harvest. I went through a lot so we could get by, Héctor Pan, a Q eqchi Indian in Guatemala who has now abandoned farming to become a river rafting guide, told IPS.
The lives of Pan, his wife and their five children began to change four years ago when they and nearly two dozen other people from their native village of Saquijá, in the northern Guatemalan province of Alta Verapaz, decided to launch a whitewater river rafting service to take advantage of the rapids in the Cahabón river that runs through the area.

The Guaterafting whitewater rafting business has helped the one-time farmer and 23 other local residents boost their incomes in order to put nutritional meals on their tables every day, which many people in this impoverished Central American country plagued by an ongoing food crisis are still unable to do.

Pan belongs to the Asociación de Desarrollo de Turismo Ecológico Saquijá, the ecological tourism association in his village, which receives support from the Rural Development Programme for Las Verapaces (PRODEVER).

PRODEVER is financed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Guatemalan government s National Peace Fund (FONDAPAZ).

On top of being one of the most vulnerable countries in Latin America, with over 50 percent of the population living in poverty and 17 percent in extreme poverty, according to United Nations figures, Guatemala is still feeling the effects of tropical storms Agatha and Alex, which left more than 100,000 people homeless and devastated the country s crops of basic grains in May and June.
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According to the Agriculture Ministry, Agatha alone the more powerful of the two storms destroyed some 296,000 quintals (one quintal = 46 kg) of 69 different agricultural products. Of that total, 87,000 quintals were corn, the most widely consumed staple food in Guatemala.

The efforts of public agencies, non-governmental organisations, private entities and international agencies have become indispensable in addressing the food crisis.

Enrique Murguía, IFAD coordinator for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, told IPS that his specialised United Nations agency is committed to achieving food security, with a focus on boosting production and generating income, connected with increased access to markets.

One example of the agency s work is PRODEVER, which since 2001 has invested 16.3 million dollars in the northern provinces of Alta and Baja Verapaz to bolster agricultural production and food security.

In a six-year period, IFAD has invested 700 million dollars in Central America, which has been nearly matched by government funds, for a total of 1.3 billion dollars, Murguía said.

Numerous other organisations are also involved in the effort to improve food security in Guatemala, such as Acción Contra el Hambre, a local NGO.

The first aid we received were payments for fixing gutters in the streets, Francisco Pérez, a farmer from the town of San Pedro Pinula in the southeastern province of Jalapa, told IPS. After that they gave us seed corn, and thank God we will be harvesting soon.

Jalapa, located in the so-called dry corridor of Guatemala, an arid region stretching from the north to the east of the country, accounted for most of the 54 malnutrition-related deaths of children that made headlines in 2009, according to the government s office of epidemiology.

We are happy because with this support we have been able to help each other a bit, Pérez added. They (the NGO) also helped us with food for underweight children, and now we are waiting for them to distribute beans to plant.

According to José Luis Vivero, Acción Contra el Hambre s regional coordinator for Central America, the NGO s work is carried out along four lines: treatment and monitoring of acute malnutrition; the Mano de Obra Intensiva (labour-intensive) programme, which provides an income to the poorest families; distribution of drought-resistant seeds; and monitoring and early warnings on food security.

Although the support of NGOs and international agencies is seen as essential, Guatemalan activists believe a greater public effort is necessary.

Nadia Sandoval of the International Centre for Human Rights Research, a private local non-profit organisation, told IPS that although Guatemala has advanced legislation on food security, the laws do not guarantee that the institutions perform properly.

The Food Security Council created by the National Law on Food and Nutritional Security, which was passed in 2005, showed during the drought that hit the country in 2009 that it has failed to fulfill its role as a coordinating and decision-making body, she said.

Sandoval also called for oversight of compliance with the minimum monthly salary of 241 dollars which, we should point out, is lower than the cost of the basic food basket, estimated at 250 dollars a month.

Facilitating access to land, preventing forced evictions, and approval of a law on integral rural development, which is bogged down in the legislature, are other aspects of the pending agenda in the fight against hunger, she said.

Lisandro Guevara, technical secretary of the Mesa Nacional Alimentaria, a multi-sectoral body that was behind the drafting of the 2005 law, told IPS that the Food Security Council should play a more active role and that the budget for fighting hunger in the country should be expanded.

 

Mexico in Debt to the Disabled

Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Sep 9 2010 (IPS) – Ángel Valencia was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Mexico four years ago with a bipolar disorder. Today, after treatment, he is back in society and is an activist with the Washington-based organisation Disability Rights International.
But Valencia s success story is an exception in this country in terms of care for people with mental disorders, an issue that a broad coalition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) included in a harshly critical shadow report on Mexico s fulfilment of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The convention has not led to changes in Mexico. Laws should have been changed and access to services guaranteed, but that has not happened, Federico Fleischmann, the head of Libre Acceso, an NGO promoting rights and opportunities for people with disabilities, told IPS.

The convention came into effect in 2008, and in May this year the Mexican state should have sent its official report to the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which monitors implementation of this international instrument. It has not yet done so, although it is hoped that it will submit a report by the end of the year.

This Latin American country with a population of over 107 million has at least 10 million people with disabilities. Of these, 53 percent suffer from motor disorders, 20 percent have diminished intellectual capacity, 18 percent are hearing impaired and the rest are visually impaired, according to figures from the Mexican Confederation of Organisations for Persons with Intellectual Disability (CONFE).

Some four million people are exposed to discrimination because of disability, according to Mexico City s Human Rights Commission.
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Psychosocial disability has been added to the classification, as a category covering illnesses like schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar, obsessive-compulsive and borderline personality disorders.

At least 15 million people in Mexico have some kind of mental disorder, according to the Public Health Ministry, including 500,000 people who suffer from schizophrenia.

The 31 state psychiatric hospitals have an in-patient population of 7,000.

The civil society report provides a big picture perspective of the situation, pointing out the shortcomings, gaps and legal irregularities that contravene international human rights law, activist Ana Yeli Pérez, of the Mexican Commission for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights (CMDPDH), a local NGO, told IPS.

For the first time in Mexico, organisations of people with disabilities and human rights groups have joined forces to study and document the status of disabled people s rights. More than 100 NGOs worked on the drafting of the report, and will cooperate to distribute its results.

Laws related to work, education, and healthcare should have been reformed, but none of that has happened. We hope the state will fulfil its obligation to present an official report, said Fleischmann, who gets around in a motorised wheelchair.

The General Law on Persons with Disability has been in force since 2005, and last year the government presented its National Programme for the Development of Persons with Disability 2009-2012 (PRONADIS).

The programme consists of nine goals to harmonise public policies in regard to education, health and sport, as well as the legal framework related to disability; reduce discrimination; and guarantee access to places, goods and services.

To produce their alternative report, the civil society organisations carried out a nationwide survey on the state of the disabled population. In addition, the census taken by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography this May and June included four questions on the issue.

The appalling conditions at psychiatric hospitals have shocked Mexican and foreign NGOs. In 2000, Disability Rights International published a study titled Human Rights and Mental Health: Mexico , which describes the problems.

Physical restraint, dehumanising treatment, badly deteriorated infrastructure and lack of qualified staff summed up the findings of a 2008 study by the National Human Rights Commission in six of the seven federally administered hospitals.

No more psychiatric hospitals should be built in the country; psychiatric care should be decentralised so that it is given at every clinic and health centre, Valencia said.

In colonial times, Mexico was one of the first territories in Latin America to have a facility for the care of the mentally ill, the San Hipólito Hospital, founded by the Spaniard Bernardino Álvarez in 1556.

Putting people in psychiatric wards is a violation of all their rights, because they do not receive rehabilitation and have no access to healthcare, Pérez stressed.

Conditions in these hospitals were exposed in the 2007 book Los manicomios del poder: corrupción y tráfico de influencias en el sector salud (The Asylums of Power: Corruption and influence peddling in the health sector) by journalist Jaime Avilés.

In fact a Mexican, Carlos Ríos, was elected to the 17-member U.N. Committee on the Rights of People with Disabilities for 2011-2014, at the Third Conference of States Party to the Convention, held Sept. 1-3 at United Nations headquarters in New York.

 

Washington Debates PEPFAR Funding Ahead of Global Fund Meet

Peter Boaz

WASHINGTON, Oct 2 2010 (IPS) – Global health advocates are strongly urging the Barack Obama administration to remain financially supportive of the fight against HIV/AIDS, amidst fears that economic prudence from the U.S. will reverse encouraging gains.
On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs heard testimony from White House officials and NGO experts on the future of the President s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.

The hearing comes ahead of a meeting next week at U.N. headquarters in New York where country representatives are expected to announce their financial commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Following a joint-UN agency report on the state of HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention released earlier this week, which showed a 17 percent reduction in HIV infections over the last eight years, activists warned that a drop-off in funding under President Barack Obama could jeopardise progress.

In May of this year, Obama unveiled his comprehensive global health strategy, known as the Global Health Initiative (GHI).

Faced with the current financial crisis, the GHI extends the previous five-year, 48 billion dollar PEPFAR programme by one year but adds a mere 3 billion dollars.
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Advocates, like Paula Akugizibwe, Advocacy Coordinator for the AIDS and Rights Alliance in South Africa, are disappointed in the administration s apparent downgrading of HIV/AIDS as a health priority.

HIV is not over-funded; rather, health is under-funded, Akugizibwe told a committee hearing Wednesday in Washington.

Shifting funding from HIV will not fill the yawning gaps in resources for health this move is a cheap diversionary tactic that offers no genuine or long-lasting solutions for health systems, Akugizibwe said.

But administration officials stress that incorporating PEPFAR into the GHI is a beneficial development.

The metric that PEPFAR and all GHI programs use to measure success is not dollars spent, but lives saved, said Eric Goosby, U.S. global AIDS coordinator, on Wednesday. In order to save as many lives as possible, we have focused on making smart investments that maximize the human impact of each dollar.

Goosby also emphasised expanding country ownership and local capacity to build sustainable health care delivery systems and optimise resources.

PEPFAR s support for country ownership is demonstrated through Partnership Frameworks, 15 of which have been signed, he said. These are five-year, high-level agreements between the U.S. and partner governments that leverage our investments to obtain measurable financial, programmatic and policy commitments to HIV and health systems.

But Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, who also testified on Wednesday, took aim at some of what she called the myths and misunderstandings regarding PEPFAR [that] have gained surprising credibility.

As the Director of the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs at Columbia University, El-Sadr told the Committee that it would be unwise to stray from PEPFAR s original function.

PEPFAR supports tens of thousands of programs and sites embedded within antenatal care programs and primary care settings at health centers, district andreferral hospitals, she said. Rather than reinventing the wheel, or starting from zero, we can build on this platform.

At the heart of the PEPFAR controversy remains a reluctance of the Obama administration to commit billions of dollars in the midst of an economic recession.

Noting that the U.S. provided nearly 60 percent of donor government funding for HIV/AIDS last year, Goosby spoke of an approach that embraced working with partner governments, donor nations, the private sector, civil society, philanthropic organisations, and others.

Goosby continued that the U.S. is the largest donor to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria having contributed more than 5.1 billion dollars to date.

Like nearly all global health advocates, Akugizibwe recognises the ground- breaking achievements that U.S. support has enabled in international health, but says the current slackening of U.S. government financial commitment to HIV, rather than encouraging an invigorated response from other countries, is instead leading a regression back to the landscape where HIV was a death sentence.

Akugizibwe cited a letter that Goosby wrote to civil society organisations, which read, one country alone cannot respond to the unmet needs that are present, either globally or in any particular country Every country must take a leadership role, including providing resources to the extent of its ability.

The commitments that countries choose to make will be on display next week in New York.

 

Black Floridians Await Settlement on Toxic Contamination

Christiana Weidanz

NEW YORK, Oct 28 2010 (IPS) – It is safe to say that the candidates running in Florida for the Nov. 2 congressional elections do not have a campaign stop planned for Tallevast. Residents there believe that they have been abandoned by the government.
Most do not even know who their representative is because no one can remember the last time a representative came to speak with the community. Most do not plan to vote because they don t see the point.

For close to four decades, residents of Tallevast in southwest Florida lived side by side with the American Beryllium Company, which employed local men and women to manufacture parts for nuclear weapons. Each day, workers inhaled beryllium dust and brought it home on their clothing.

In an award-winning investigative journalism series for the Miami Herald titled Toxic Town , resident Charles Ziegler says, You came home, you brought that mess home. Along with his wife, Ziegler suffers from chronic beryllium disease, a fatal scarring of the lung tissue.

Adora Nweze, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for the state of Florida, says the Tallevast case is only the tip of the iceberg.

I can tell you this, she told IPS. This whole state is covered with stories similar to this town s. There are areas, in the Black community in particular, where people are dying of cancer. Companies are depositing their copper and all sorts of metals in their drinking water.
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Public health has been testing, she continued sceptically, but something needs to be done. This is very, very real.

Unbeknownst to Tallevast residents, toxic chemicals used in the plant, including dioxin and TCE, were seeping into the ground. By the time local regulators investigated, a poisonous plume had spread across 200 acres below the small historically Black town.

The plant was sold to defence contractor Lockheed Martin in 1996, and the leakage was discovered as the company prepared to sell the property in 2000. The state of Florida and Manatee County officials were notified but the problem was hidden from residents. State officials quietly began removing soil until a resident questioned their actions. In late 2003 information was finally released on the groundwater contamination.

Only then did the truth of this environmental nightmare begin to come to light.

By this time, nearly one person in every household had been diagnosed with a type of cancer, and many people were dying very young.

State officials later conceded that the notification provisions of our rules were not adequate and that residents should not have had to wait three years to hear about the contamination under their homes.

In 2004, the community filed four lawsuits against the multinational defence contractor to address their health and property damages. The first of these was scheduled to be heard this month but talks toward an out-of-court settlement are also underway.

I m angry, says Laura Ward, who with fellow Tallevast resident Wanda Washington leads a small community organisation called Family Oriented Community United and Strong (FOCUS). I made baby formula and cooked for my family with that water for years while people at Lockheed Martin and at the county regulatory agencies knew how harmful it was.

Ward, who has two children who have had bouts with cancer, says she is also upset because she had to learn about the contamination herself.

We ve been a community that s been overlooked for so long, observed Ward, and I think it s felt that if they continue to overlook us, we might go away.

Ward s husband, Dr. Clifford ( Billy ) Ward, the town dentist, traces his family s history on the land back to the 1890s, when the town began as a turp camp where freed slaves got jobs teasing the sap out of long-leaf slash pines and boiling it into turpentine for use in the nation s shipyards and harbours.

The first thing that went through my mind was, How could this happen? Why didn t anyone tell us? asked Cassandra Casey Brice whose grandfather, Thomas Bryant, and his brother, Eli, founded the Bryant Chapel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church a few blocks from her home.

I think about my neighbors next door, my cousin, my community, worried Beatrice Ziegler. None of us is living safe. None of us!

You just feel like you ve been robbed of your heritage and your legacy, said lifelong resident Beverly Bradley, whose hands and feet were attacked by a fungus she fears came from the plant s soil. Tallevast is us. It s like they are taking our whole lives away from us.

Reporter Ronnie Greene of the Miami Herald captured these voices of Tallevast in the groundbreaking two-part investigative story and video: Toxic Town . In August, Greene, received an award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation in recognition of his exceptional reporting. The Sidney recognises outstanding socially conscious journalism.

Today the village of Tallevast is little more than a giant environmental testing ground, Greene wrote. More than 200 wells monitor a plume that spread from an initial estimate of five acres to more than 200.

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin said through a representative that it has no plans to relocate any of the residents, claiming the source of the chemical leak has been capped.

While Lockheed Martin did not operate the facility, it remains responsible for the cleanup associated with the contamination from the site, the company states on a website.

The full remediation process is expected to take 50 years.

Many things were surprising, but perhaps none more than the fact that the town had been polluted with a cancer-causing chemical but no one told the residents, said Greene. Not the state, not the county, not industry.

Their struggles also brought about a change in the state laws of Florida. Now state officials must tell residents within 30 days if any sorts of health hazards are found in the community.