Goal 6: combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases - Newsfeed

JOHANNESBURG Monday, March 30, 2009 (IRIN) - "Every trucker should know how to change a tyre and put on a condom," said Anisa Abdalla, a doctor in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, at the opening of a new "roadside wellness centre" offering HIV services to truck drivers and other transport workers.

BONDO Friday, March 27, 2009 (IRIN) - For the past year, Karen Awuor*, 15, has had a new daily ritual– taking antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. She discovered she was HIV positive during an unintended pregnancy that forced her to drop out of school; her baby died after just four months.

HARGEISA Friday, March 27, 2009 (IRIN) - When three attempts to cure Abdulhakim*, 42, of tuberculosis failed, the father of nine living in Hargeisa, capital of the self-declared republic of Somaliland in northwestern Somalia, took his doctor's advice and tested for HIV - the result came back positive.

DAKAR Thursday, March 26, 2009 (IRIN) - Over the past decade, scientists have intensified their efforts to create a tuberculosis vaccine that can prevent adult infections- which the currently administered Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine has largely been unable to do- and protects young HIV patients, for whom the current vaccine can be lethal. Dr. Jerald Sadoff is president of the US-based NGO Aeras TB Vaccine Foundation, which funds and researches tuberculosis vaccines.

JOHANNESBURG Thursday, March 26, 2009 (IRIN) - Findings from an ongoing South African study into preventative tuberculosis (TB) therapy suggest that prevention really may be the best medicine.

SITEKI Wednesday, March 25, 2009 (IRIN) - Siphiwe*, 14, has not been to school for two years but can still fit into her uniform. She has a strain of tuberculosis (TB) that is resistant to most first-line drugs and can take two years or more to treat, but she stopped taking her medication four months ago.

DAKAR Wednesday, March 25, 2009 (IRIN) - While welcoming the annual upsurge in international conferences, media stories and web traffic to tuberculosis portals for World TB Day on 24 March, scientists worldwide say every day is TB (tuberculosis) day for them as they race to find a vaccine that can stay head of growing drug resistance and boost a near century-old only partially-effective vaccine, according to World Health Organization (WHO).

SITEKI Tuesday, March 24, 2009 (IRIN) - Kwanele Dlamini's motorbike can carry him to most rural homesteads in the eastern Lubombo Region of Swaziland, but he has to get off and walk the final rocky stretch to Solomon Ndwandwe's property and then duck a barbed-wire fence.

NAIROBI Tuesday, March 24, 2009 (IRIN) - The last time Daniel Okado*, a tuberculosis (TB) patient, went to his local health centre in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, for his regular supply of medicine, he found the clinic had run out.

HARARE Tuesday, March 24, 2009 (IRIN) - By the time Tichaona Paraziva, 49, tested HIV positive at the end of 2006 he was already in need of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, but there was a waiting list for the free government programme and on a teacher's salary he could not afford to buy medicines in the private sector. He was still on the waiting list in March 2008 when he fell ill and was diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB).

HARGEISA Tuesday, March 24, 2009 (IRIN) - Despite rampant poverty, high levels of illiteracy and limited international support, the self-declared republic of Somaliland in the northwest of Somalia has become an unlikely TB success story.

KAMPALA Tuesday, March 24, 2009 (IRIN) - About half of Uganda's TB patients do not know that they could be infected, which has led to very low levels of diagnosis and treatment.

JOHANNESBURG Tuesday, March 24, 2009 (IRIN) - In April 2009 the South African government will start rolling out a new test to diagnose multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), of which 16,000 cases were reported in 2007 alone. Doctors are hoping that the new rapid tests will get more patients on treatment and faster.

JOHANNESBURG Tuesday, March 24, 2009 (IRIN) - One in four tuberculosis (TB) deaths in the world is HIV-related, twice as many as previously thought, according to a new report by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

DAKAR Friday, March 20, 2009 (IRIN) - In his first public statement on condoms and AIDS earlier this week, Pope Benedict XVI reignited an international debate between religious leaders working with AIDS patients and European governments that fund anti-HIV programmes in developing countries.

KISUMU Wednesday, March 18, 2009 (IRIN) - The music blaring through Nyahera village in Kenya's southwestern Nyanza Province comes from two large speakers strategically placed at Mzee Dishon Onyango's home. Youths, some as young as 12, gyrate to the beats of their favourite music and consume a local illicit brew; others smoke bhang [marijuana] with abandon.

MANILA Monday, March 16, 2009 (IRIN) - Rina was only 17 years old when she left her village in the central Philippines to work as a domestic helper in Qatar, joining tens of thousands of other migrant workers hoping to escape extreme poverty and find greater prosperity in the Middle East.

DAR ES SALAAM Monday, March 16, 2009 (IRIN) - Tanzania's HIV prevalence has dropped to 5.7 percent from a high of seven percent in 2004, according to the recently released Tanzania HIV/AIDS and Malaria Indicator Survey 2007/08.

JOHANNESBURG Monday, March 16, 2009 (IRIN) - AIDS activists in South Africa appear to have won the final round of a protracted battle to prevent vitamin salesman Matthias Rath from promoting his unproven remedies to patients living with HIV and AIDS.

LAGOS Friday, March 13, 2009 (IRIN) - Dutch customs officials have seized a consignment of generic antiretroviral (ARV) drugs bound for Nigeria, raising the health risk to HIV-positive people in need of the life-prolonging medication.