Health: June 2004 Archives

Crisis in western Sudan

Press release 22 June 2004

Polio experts issued a stark warning that west and central Africa is on the brink of the largest polio epidemic in recent years. The warning follows confirmation today that a child was paralysed on 20 May in the conflict affected Darfur region of Sudan - a country which had not seen the disease in more than three years. The virus is closely linked genetically to poliovirus endemic in northern Nigeria which has spread through Chad in recent months.

Twelve Greenpeace volunteers have been arrested after they halted a giant cargo vessel laden with GM grain off the coast of Wales.
The 125,000 tonne MV Etoile was bound for Bristol, its GM cargo destined to be used as animal feed for the dairy farms which supply milk to Britain's biggest supermarkets.

Get active: tell the supermarkets to get GM out of our milk!

Four climbers boarded the Panamanian registered vessel from a jet boat using climbing hooks. Hanging by ropes from the ship's sides and foremast, they unfurled banners reading saying 'STOP GM IMPORTS.' The Etoile was unable to continue safely and was forced to go to anchor of the Welsh coast at Rhoose.

Surajit Talukdar
Source: OneWorld South Asia
18 June 2004

KARIMGANJ (Assam), June 18 (OneWorld) - Amid governmental apathy, arsenic poisoning remains a slow killer in the Karimganj district of India's northeastern state of Assam bordering Bangladesh, where some 236,302 impoverished villagers are afflicted by serious skin and kidney ailments.

One of India's leading arsenic researchers Dr Dipankar Chakraborty, has drawn attention to the impending health disaster here, through letters to the Indian President, government of Assam, Unicef, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank.

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

By David Suzuki

While concerns over body-image obsessions are certainly legitimate, obesity has become a real health crisis in North America, and we aren't alone.

As American-style fast-food chains, snack foods, and soft drinks spread, so do waistlines. According to the World Health Organization, almost 1 billion of the world's people are now overweight and some 300 million are obese. We're not talking about just a bit of extra weight that makes it hard to put on the clothes we once wore; we're talking about added pounds that create potential medical problems like diabetes and heart disease.

Prolonged shutdown of about 26 community clinics in Chandina Upazila of Comilla for lack of government co-operation has been depriving thousands of people of treatment facilities.

by Ranjita Biswas

Access to and availability of health care is extremely poor in the islands of West Bengal's Sunderbans, but a group of 70 women from five villages are now in the process of bringing in positive change. With the help from a Kolkata-based NGO, these women are cultivating, looking after, and distributing medicinal plants used in curing common ailments.

To the outside world, the Sunderbans – situated in the great delta of the Ganges where it meets the Bay of Bengal – is a wonderland in biodiversity. It is also a world heritage site, a national park, and the site of a tiger project albeit with a fragile ecosystem.