Miriam Mannak
CAPE TOWN, Mar 8 2008 (IPS) – The need for a global effort to address the shortage of anaesthesiologists in Africa was highlighted over the past week during the World Congress of Anaesthesiologists which took place in Cape Town, South Africa.
Bisola Najin Obembe of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital, Nigeria. Credit: Miriam Mannak/IPS
This event, which is held every four years, drew over 7,000 international delegates. It was organised by the World Federation of Societi…
David Cronin
BRUSSELS, Nov 13 2008 (IPS) – Funding from the European Union s Brussels headquarters for research into tuberculosis stands at about a fifth of what it should be given the EU s enormous wealth, a new study has found.
With TB killing 1.7 million people per year, health policy analysts estimate that 1.45 billion euros (2 billion dollars) needs to be devoted to research and development (R D) specifically targeting the disease every year. During 2007, however, the EU s executive arm, the European Commission, spent less than 19 million euros, according to the humanitarian group Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, MSF).
According to the organisation, the Commission should have given at least 101 million euros to TB research last year as its fai…
WASHINGTON, Oct 14 2011 (IPS) – When Jaydee Hanson, then-bioethics director for the United Methodist Church, spoke out publicly against gene patents over 15 years ago, some in the biotech industry compared his stance to the Catholic Church s persecution of Galileo, the 15th century astronomer who discovered the moons of Jupiter.
Hanson and 200 other religious leaders had released a statement that DNA in the human body and animals are natural objects and should not be subject to patenting.
Patent supporters in the biotech industry disagree, arguing that isolated copies of genes outside the human body should be patentable and that the prospect of intellectual property rights on genes serves as incentive for further research.
On Wednesday, the (ACLU) announced it woul…
Africa has committed to green recovery of COVID-19, now it needs to turn policy into action, analysts say.
Credit:
Dustan Woodhouse/Unsplash
Dustan Woodhouse
KIGALI, Apr 12 2022 (IPS) – Climate change activist Mithika Mwenda, the Executive Director of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), is not reluctant to engage African governments to do what’s necessary to commit to post-COVID-19 green growth strategies.
Through Africa s post-COVID-19 green recovery pathway, initiated in July last year, governments have committed to reaching the Paris Agreement s climate change targets and prosperity objectives by adopting eco-friend…