By Amanda Klasing Women’s Rights Division, Human Rights Watch Sixteen-year-old Florence was an orphan doing domestic work when the January 2010 earthquake hit Haiti. She moved with the family she worked for to a displacement camp, where her employer raped her. The rapist threatened to harm her even more if she told anyone, so she didn’t see a doctor. Besides, she didn’t have the money, the means, or the information…
Continue reading “Ending violence against women: A public health imperative”
By Evan Lieberman Associate Professor, Department of Politics, Princeton University http://evanlieberman.org/ People in South Africa overwhelmingly believe that addressing HIV/AIDS is firstly the responsibility of national government, in contrast with the current governance arrangements that put provincial government as the lead for governing health matters. Although foreign donors and civil society play very large roles in governing infectious disease, less than 20 percent of Eastern Cape residents identified them as…
Continue reading “How should infectious disease be governed to promote efficacy and accountability?”
Ernest Drucker The New Press, September 2011 ISBN 978-1-59558-497-7 240 pages $26.95 Reviwed by HHR editorial assistant Judith Fitzpatrick Ernest Drucker’s A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America analyzes a pressing social issue through an epidemiologic lens. Applying public health theory to “a different kind of epidemic,” Drucker frames mass incarceration as a chronic and self-sustaining plague that is damaging American families and communities. The author…
By Karyn Kaplan Policy and Development Director, Thai AIDS Treatment Action Group, Bangkok This post is excerpted from a plenary speech given at the International Conference on AIDS in Asia/Pacific (ICAAP), Busan, South Korea, August 27, 2011 Here in Asia, home to more than half the world’s opiate users, more than 16 million drug users and at least 6.5 million injectors, where HIV prevalence among injectors is among the highest…
IRIN, the humanitarian news service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, cites a preliminary Nepal Demographic Health Survey finding that gender discrimination and neglect are fueling malnutrition in the isolated mid-western region of Nepal. The survey estimates that 29 percent of Nepalese children under the age of five are malnourished and that the burden is not distributed equally between genders. Boys and men, for example, traditionally…
Continue reading “Survey: Gender discrimination fuels malnutrition in Nepal’s women and children”
Children in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia suffer from chronic zinc deficiency, says Dr. Fernando Sempértegui, leader of several landmark studies on the effects of zinc deficiency. He tells IPS that the deficiency “is related to chronic infections like pneumonia, the main cause of death among that population group.” Zinc is essential to childhood development; without it, cartilage growth in bone metabolism is stunted. Dr. Sempértegui’s study demonstrates that a daily…
Continue reading “Chronic zinc deficiency among children in Andean region”
One hundred and forty million women around the world are presently living with the effects of female genital mutilation, a practice that has proven difficult to abolish. In Senegal, however, intervention strategies are in place that are proving successful. PBS NewsHour’s Fred de Sam Lazaro interviews Molly Melching, founder of the organization Tostan, which uses a human rights-based education approach in working with Senegalese communities. According to Melching, “Tostan found…
Continue reading “PBS NewsHour: Senegal’s FGM intervention strategies”
In an August 4 article, Trustlaw’s Lisa Anderson exposes the “silent health emergency” faced by child brides around the globe. According to Plan UK, a children’s rights organization, the marriage of a girl under 18 occurs every three seconds. This means that each year, largely in Africa and South Asia, 10 million girls become brides. Beyond issues of consent and individual choice, early marriage poses grave health threats for young…
Continue reading “Child brides face ‘silent health emergency’”
Over at Global Pulse, Human Rights Watch researcher Katherine Todrys guest blogs on the HIV epidemic in Uganda’s penitentiaries. Uganda, she explains, has often been presented as a success story in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, and has received over $1 billion from the US for AIDS programs. Many HIV-positive Ugandans have been excluded from these efforts, though, including gay men, drug users, sex workers, and prisoners. In sub-Saharan African…
Continue reading “A rights-based approach to fighting HIV/AIDS in Ugandan prisons”
Lily Boisson of CBC News writes that Somali women fleeing drought and famine in their home country face sexual and gender-based violence as they journey to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. Women traveling to the camps with only their children and few possessions are vulnerable to rape and robbery, and once in Dadaab, these dangers remain. The UNHCR reports that sexual and gender-based violence has increased by four times…
Continue reading “Somali women attacked on journey to refugee camp”
