The political stand-off between Alassane Ouattara, certified by the United Nations as winner of Nov. 28 elections, and the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, who has refused to step down, is stretching into its eighth week.
South Africa’s recently-awarded tender for antiretroviral drugs halved drug costs for the world’s largest ARV programme. Driven by a better-prepared and more aggressive government, the deal may stand up to criticism better than initially thought.
Despite some progress, Nigeria is lagging behind its peers in reducing deaths among children under five. The mortality rate remains worryingly high for newborn infants - 700 children less than 28 days old die in the country every day.
Medical experts have warned that malaria and HIV have monopolised interventions geared towards curbing child mortality in Kenya, thus ignoring the equally deadly killer, diarrhoea. This disease has silently claimed the lives of hundreds of children every year.
After successfully suppressing scourges of fruit, tsetse and screwworm flies in the Americas, researchers are exploring whether the same sterilised insect technique can be used to control malaria, which kills some one million people every year, many of them in Africa.
Ntombikayise Mabelesa (36) is a recovering multi-drug-resistant (MDR) TB patient from Hoseya in the southern part of Swaziland.
More than 20 million people will be vaccinated between now and the end of the year in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger as a mass vaccination campaign using a new conjugate vaccine unfolds across West Africa. Manufactured in India, MenAfriVac offers health authorities a powerful weapon against a deadly disease.
Health officials' fears that insecurity and a lack of resources could lead to fresh outbreaks of preventable diseases are being proved painfully accurate in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Polio - thought to have been eradicated in DRC five years ago - has made a frightening reappearance in Central Africa.
Sex workers, among the populations most at risk of HIV infection in Uganda, say they are yet to realise their right to health.
In November, the Food and Agriculture Organisation was just one of many voices warning that food prices have risen to levels last seen at the start of the 2007-2008 crisis. A majority of the countries most exposed to a repeat of that problem are in Africa, where vulnerability to food security is exacerbated by AIDS.
A thousand babies are infected with HIV every day - in pregnancy, during birth and through breastfeeding. Close to 400,000 African children are infected with HIV every year.
Lucky for Osman Conteh that one of his aunts disagreed with the family consensus that he had been stricken by an evil spirit. She insisted the twitching, incoherently babbling child be taken to the hospital rather than a witch doctor.
Less than one in four Zambian children who should be on life-saving anti-retroviral drugs is receiving them. The country planned to increase the number of children on ARVs from the present 20,000 to 120,000, but inadequate facilities pose a major stumbling block.
There are 91,000 children living with HIV in Malawi. A shortage of resources means that many do not receive proper treatment and care.
Researchers are testing a new combination of tuberculosis drugs on patients in South Africa which they are hoping will shorten the treatment term of the disease to six months.
An emergency vaccination campaign against polio begins Nov. 12 in the Republic of Congo, where an epidemic centred on the southern city of Pointe-Noire has killed at least 100 people since the beginning of October.
As nearly 25 years of development of a malaria vaccine come to fruition, health authorities across Africa will need to come to grips with how to effectively introduce it.
Josephine Adongo's heart leapt when she heard that two doctors from Kampala were offering free medical exams in Soroti. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer at a regional hospital more than a year previously, but unable to afford to travel to the capital for treatment.
Mother-to-be Agnes Ncube budgets up to 100 dollars each month from her informal roadside business just so she can pay for the maternal services at her local government clinic.
Despite the availability of a vaccine, 1.3 million people worldwide died from tuberculosis (TB) in 2008, according to the World Health Organisation. Most of them lived in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Sibongile Mavimbela has been living with HIV for the past 12 years; she has been on antiretrovirals for the past seven. But the mother of two fears the supply of free ARVs could dry up in the near future if contributions to the Global Fund on HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria fall short of the $20 billion needed to meet development targets.