Health

Strangers in the Land: A Congolese Murder Case

By Jan Lundius
I thought about this song by Paul Simon while I in 2011 spent a few weeks in Kinshasa. I was a foreign man in a strange world, surrounded by sights and sounds, completely dependent on my new-found Congolese friends. When our taxi got stuck in a traffic jam and we had to walk to our destination I was stopped by a group of heavily armed youngsters, lead by a man who claimed to be a policeman, charging me with an exaggerated high fine for taking photos within a restricted area.

A New Spectre is Haunting Europe

By Roberto Savio
After Theresa May’s defeat in the British parliament it is clear that a new spectre is haunting Europe. It is no longer the spectre of communism, which opens Marx’s Manifesto of 1848; it is the spectre of the failure of neoliberal globalisation, which reigned uncontested following the fall of the Berlin Wall, until the financial crisis of 2009.

Why We Should Care about Vulnerable Coastal Communities

By Nigel Brett
According to UN statistics, approximately 40 per cent of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast, and overall the world’s coastal population is increasing faster than the total global population. At the same time, global warming is causing sea levels to rise and increasing extreme weather incidents on coastlines.

Shedding Light on Forced Child Pregnancy and Motherhood in Latin America

By Mariela Jara
Research and campaigns by women’s rights advocates are beginning to focus on the problem of Latin American girls under the age of 14 who are forced to bear the children of their rapists, with the lifelong implications that entails and without the protection of public policies guaranteeing their human rights.

Time for a new Paradigm

By Roberto Savio
The person most qualified to write the foreword for the latest work by Riccardo Petrella, In the Name of Humanity, would actually be Pope Francis, who, using other words but speaking of values and making denouncements, has often argued what the reader will find in its pages.

The Adolescent Girl Holds the Key to Kenya’s Economic Transformation and Prosperity

By Siddharth Chatterjee
Teenage pregnancy in Kenya is a crisis of hope, education and opportunity.The countdown to a New Year has begun. Can 2019 be a year of affirmative action to ensure hope and opportunity for Kenya’s adolescent girl?

Italy Has the ‘Greenest Agriculture’ in Europe, But it’s Not Sustainable

By Maged Srour
While Italian agriculture is in a leading position in terms of organic farming, sustainable agriculture and being at the forefront of biodiversity conservation; water scarcity, illegal workers and the role of women and combined ageing of its workforce remain pressing concerns.

Human Trafficking – Hidden in Plain Sight

By Romy Hawatt
The media globally tends to have a bias to negative, sensational and headline grabbing stories and events and this certainly applies to reporting related to human trafficking in the third world. With the abundance of stories around sweat shops, massage parlours and organ trafficking networks happening ‘somewhere else’, the West is generally desensitised, lacks empathy and fails to fully appreciate the scale of the problem which sits right under their noses and in plain sight.

Mercury Contamination Threat Gravitates into Outer Space

By Thalif Deen
The dangers of mercury contamination have escalated from the dental chair to the realm of outer space.First, it was the hazardous use of mercury in dentistry, then in cosmetics, particularly skin-lightening creams, and now it is threatening to make its way into satellite propulsion systems.

Global Anti-Human Trafficking Coalition

By Vladimir Bozovic
Entire human history is one great struggle for freedom. To many, slavery is a synonym for something in the past, for transatlantic slave trade, but, unfortunately, slavery still exists in many different forms.

United Towards Achieving Health For All in Kenya

By Sicily Kariuki and Siddharth Chatterjee
According to Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, the implementation of UHC is “more a political than an economic challenge”.

Political Commitment Key to Health for All

By Ban Ki-moon
One of my proudest accomplishments as the former UN secretary-general was playing a part in the ambitious global agenda for sustainable development (SDGs), including the goal of universal health coverage (UHC) by 2030.

‘Antimicrobial Resistance Knows No Boundaries’

By Ed Holt
European Union officials and global health bodies have called for help for poorer countries as growing resistance to antibiotics threatens to become a ‘global health tragedy’ and jeopardises Sustainable Development Goals in some parts of the world.

Asia-Pacific Takes Stock of Ambitious Development Targets

By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana and Natalia Kanem
Ministers and senior policymakers across Asia and the Pacific are gathered in Bangkok this week to focus on population dynamics at a crucial time for the region. Their goal: to keep people and rights at the heart of the region’s push for sustainable development. They will be considering how successful we have been in balancing economic growth with social imperatives, underpinned by rights and choices for all as enshrined in the landmark Programme of Action stemming from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, or ICPD.

Thailand First Asian Nation to Join Global Efforts to Control Tobacco

By Wendell C Balderas
Thailand is set to become the first Asian country to introduce standardized packaging of tobacco. On 14 November 2018, the Thai National Committee on Tobacco Control approved the Ministry of Health Regulation that requires cigarettes in Thailand to be sold in packaging stripped of the fancy, colorful and unique cigarette branding.

Teenage Pregnancy in Kenya: A Crisis of Health, Education and Opportunity

By Siddharth Chatterjee
That almost one in five Kenyan teenage girls is a mother represents not only a huge cost to the health sector, but also a betrayal of potential on a shocking scale.

E-Commerce Giants Under Fire for Retailing Hazardous Mercury-Based Cosmetics

By Thalif Deen
A coalition of over 50 civil society organizations (CSOs), from more than 20 countries, have urged two of the world’s largest multi-billion dollar E-commerce retailers – Amazon and eBay – to stop marketing “dangerous and illegal mercury-based skin lightening creams.”

Northeast Nigeria: Urgent Need to Combat Deadly Cholera Outbreaks

By Janet Cherono
The number of people who have been affected by cholera in northeast Nigeria has increased to 10,000. The disease is spreading quickly in congested displacement camps with limited access to proper sanitation facilities.

Ambitious Agenda, Ambitious Financing? UNGA Shows a Long Way Still to Go for SDGs

By John Garrett and Kathryn Tobin
There was a much-needed focus on financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the September 2018 opening of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

Cholera Threatens a Comeback Worldwide

By Anna Kucirkova
Cholera outbreaks across history regularly killed a hundred thousand or more. It isn’t well known today because it was essentially eliminated in the Western world.

“Governments are Starting to See that Organic Food Policy Works”

By Maged Srour
Many countries and farmers around the world are not readily making the switch to organic farming. But the small Himalayan mountain state of Sikkim, which borders Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan, is the first 100 percent organic farming state in the world. 
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