An open hearing in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the Beatriz v. El Salvador case is raising hopes that this country and other Latin American nations might overturn or at least mitigate the severe laws that criminalize abortion.
Human life is sacred and every individual deserves an equal chance in life. We have a common desire, we all want to lead a free, fulfilling existence, with dignity, where our basic needs are met, with opportunities to advance and equal treatment under the law. These are fundamental human rights, protected by international law, which we all have a shared responsibility to protect.
Despite being both curable and preventable, the TB pandemic is a global health crisis and a leading cause of death worldwide. COVID-19 brought into sharp focus how women bear the brunt of pandemics. In 2021,
over three million women and girls fell ill with TB, resulting in
450,000 needless deaths.
Shockingly, the human suicidal war on Nature not only continues unabated but is also set to become even more virulent. Just to start with, please be reminded that groundwater accounts for 99% of all liquid freshwater on Earth, according to the 2022
UN World Water Development Report.
As we reach the midpoint of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it is an opportune moment to reflect on the Asia-Pacific region’s progress and accelerate efforts to achieve our goals.
On Mar. 9, more than half of Mexico reported maximum temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius, although spring has not even arrived yet in this Latin American country located in the northern hemisphere.
Up until 2019, nurses in three health facilities located in the semi-arid south-eastern Kenya region of Makueni County struggled to bring critical health services closer to a hard-to-reach population scattered across three remote, far-flung villages.
As countries recently gathered in Geneva for the
fourth round of negotiations on the WHO proposed pandemic treaty or accord, close examination of
the current text by civil society experts has revealed significant gaps.
It is two months since the World Health Organization declared Uganda free of the most recent Sudan ebolavirus, which killed 55 people.
Uganda employed public health measures to end the outbreak. In the absence of vaccines and therapeutics, the threat of the next outbreak looms.
With more than 600 million youth aged between 18 and 24 in the Asia and Pacific region, putting their issues front and center is crucial. Speakers at a recent forum, Youth Empowerment: Education, Employment and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, held in Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia, agreed that policy development and implementation should be youth-centered.
The answer is that there are alarming setbacks for maternal health care and, in many cases, even a total lack of maternity services, which threaten to further raise the number of these tragic preventable deaths one million or more a year by 2030.
Recent crises have pushed the gender inequality gap even wider and new technology has brought new threats to women’s autonomy and safety. This year’s International Women's Day celebrated under the
theme “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality” is an opportunity to strengthen efforts to uplift and empower women and girls’ digital participation to ultimately improve their lives.
While 100 million people worldwide are using the AI chatbot ChatGPT to get ahead on homework and try
out for top jobs at Google,
more than 370 million women in developing countries lack the services of a simple cell phone.
When global crises are interlinked, they overlap and compound each other. In such cases, the most effective solutions are those that work at the nexus of all these challenges.
Researchers have found that cheaper and more accessible blood testing methods can improve the care of patients with chronic hepatitis B in Africa.
A few days ago, I saw a
photo shared to Twitter of Sham, a young Syrian girl rescued from under the rubble in northwest Syria, sitting upright in her hospital bed, According to the Syrian Civil Defense, a volunteer humanitarian group also known as the White Helmets, Sham will lose both her legs because of injuries from the quake.
While its origins may be
rooted in the discrimination faced by people living with HIV, Zero Discrimination Day has evolved to celebrate commitments to the fundamental human right of being treated equally in law and in practice.
The post-COVID-19 period has been a crucial one for members of parliament who have their work cut out to ensure that issues that arose during the pandemic are addressed, especially concerning the ICPD25 commitments and programmes of action for universal access to sexual and reproductive rights, gender-based violence and building peaceful, just and inclusive societies. Across the world, progress toward achieving the SDGs by 2030 was impacted during the pandemic.
BRAC’s Empowerment and Livelihood Program (ELA) has benefitted tens of thousands of girls, and its recently released report shows an organization willing to adapt to the circumstances to continue to ensure adolescent girls and young women receive meaningful sexual and reproductive health rights support.
A free health insurance initiative started in Pakistan has benefited poor patients, especially women who have outnumbered men in using the cashless health services under the Sehat Card Plus programme.
"The initiative is in line with the ICPD25 Programme of Action, under which 4.5 million people have received free services, with 62 percent of them women. In the last three years, we have been able to cut down maternal mortality rate from 186 deaths per 100,000 live births to 172," Dr Muhammad Riaz Tanoli, CEO of the Sehat Card Plus (SCP), told IPS.
Fear of population ageing is all over the news media and in government offices of country capitals worldwide. Planet Earth is becoming “planet ageing”.