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UN discusses new global plan for children
Related to country: United States
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

UN discusses new global plan for children

THE United Nations is meeting today in New York to deliberate on efforts to better the lot of children across the world and review progress made in the past years.

Chief Communication Media and External Relations Director of UNICEF in Nigeria, Christine Jaulmes, said the parley will review progress made and develop a new plan of action for the next decade called "A world Fit for Children."

The statement reads in part: "Heads of State and other dignitaries have gathered at the United Nations Headquarters in New York today for a landmark conference to review progress towards "A World Fit for Children," a plan of action to improve the lives of children created by governments in 2002."

UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman said the forum would provide a platform for discussing an ideal world fit for children.

"Five years ago, world leaders pledged to promote healthy lives; to provide quality education; to combat HIV and AIDS; and to protect children against abuse, exploitation and violence. Now, we are taking stock to see where we need to push further and faster to build a world that is truly fit for children," she said. In 2006, for the first time since global data has been collected, deaths of children under age five fell below 10 million. More children are in school today than ever before, especially girls. More children are registered at birth and there is a greater focus on protecting children from violence, abuse and the worst forms of child labour, the organisation stated.

UNICEF observed that 9.7 million children under age five continue to die each year and, as the world prepares for the International Year of Sanitation, nearly 900 million children lack access to this most basic service.

The special General Assembly high-level meeting, known as A World Fit for Children +5 (WFFC+5), will examine advances and setbacks in child well-being since the 2002 Special Session on Children. The assembly is expected to adopt a declaration reaffirming global and national commitments to the goals set in 2002.

In addition to heads of state and government, some 130 high-level national delegations will be present, including more than 40 government ministers. Twenty children will participate in the conference as members of their national delegations. Hundreds of NGOs will also gather in New York for discussions and advocacy on children's issues.

To promote ownership of the occasion, more than 90 children from around the world have been meeting for two days in New York to prepare for "A World Fit for Children +5."

The highlight of the Forum was a live satellite link-up between seven of the children in New York, selected by their peers, and members of the new global entity called 'The Elders', including Graca Machel, Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson, who were gathered in Cape Town.

Nigeria will be represented at this Session by the Minister of Women Affairs. The President and the Speaker of the Children's Parliament will also attend the event.

Meanwhile, there is growing concern that close to one billion people will never receive a formal education because governments around the world are not living up to pledges to provide free primary schooling for all by 2015.

At a meeting in Senegal's capital Dakar in 2000, governments from 164 countries had agreed on goals including the provision of good quality, free primary education for all and a 50-percent improvement in adult literacy by the middle of next decade.

According to a report by Reuters, halfway to that deadline, the world's richest nations are failing to live up to pledges to help the poorest and the goals remain elusive, according to the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), a grouping of thousands of teachers' unions and civil society groups including Save the Children and Oxfam.

"At current performance rates, close to a billion people won't receive education in their lifetime, let alone in the next seven years as promised," said Nelida Cespedes, a GCE board member from Peru.

Universal primary education by 2015 is also one of the eight UN Millennium Development Goals agreed by world governments.

The campaign group said in a report that 72 million children were still not attending primary school and that 774 million adults - or one in five - were illiterate. Although many of them were in Africa, the study said several African governments had made marked improvements in providing schooling.

The report coincided with a meeting in Dakar of ministers and educational specialists from around the world, hosted by Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade and the Director General of U.N. cultural and education agency UNESCO, Koichiro Matsuura.

"More than 18 million new teachers will be needed by 2015, nearly four million in sub-Saharan Africa alone," Matsuura told the summit, attended by hundreds of school children.

UNESCO said in a report last month that good progress was being made, with primary school enrolment rising by 36 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and by 22 percent in South and West Asia between 1999 and 2005.

But it said external foreign aid for education was "far short of the $11 billion required annually" and was not targeted enough at Africa or at primary school education.


December 13, 2007 | 6:43 AM Comments  0 comments
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Govt may adopt single test for HIV
Related to country: Nigeria
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Govt may adopt single test for HIV


Published: Friday, 30 Nov 2007

Confronted by the 4.4 per cent prevalence rate of HIV/AIDS in the country and the desire to extend treatment to more infected persons, the Federal Government may adopt a (single) serial rapid testing against the present parallel (two) tests being used.
Informed sources said the move is aimed at reducing the cost of testing and the need to overcome dependence on cold chain to preserve testing kits.
At present, most advanced countries use Enzyme Immunoassays (EIA and Western Blot) technologies.
Although EIA and Western Blotting methods are available in Nigeria, they are more expensive and require refrigerator to be effective. These limit their applications.
However, the reasoning in government is that HIV rapid test, especially using the serial algorithm offers a cheaper and faster alternative. But there is the danger of false negative or false positive result as witnessed in the case of Baby Eniola at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Idi - Araba, a few years back.
With a parallel testing method - two kits are used simultaneously with the aim of achieving 100% sensitivity and specificity.
In other word, if Kit A says a sample is tested positive, the same test will be repeated using another kit (Kit B) to confirm before announcing the result.
The parallel testing removes doubt and the possibility of false negative or false positive result.
But with a serial algorithm, a single kit will be adopted and it is only where the test is positive that a confirmation may be required.
However, medical experts have criticised the single test, saying it does not eliminate the likelihood of a false negative or false positive result, especially where the testing kit is not foolproof.
A proposal on the new test procedure - Laboratory Based HIV Rapid Test Validation in Nigeria Phase 1 - put together by the Nigeria HIV Rapid Test Evaluation Working Group in April 2007 has favoured a serial testing because of its rapidity and cheapness.
The group consists of officials of the Federal Ministry of Health, National Agency for the Control of HIV and AIDS, National AIDS and STIs Control Programme, National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Development, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Global AIDS Programme and the World Health Organisation.
According to the group‘s report, although conventional wisdom suggests that parallel testing is more accurate than serial testing, the group‘s evaluations suggest otherwise.
The report reads, “Conventional wisdom suggests that parallel testing is more accurate than serial testing. This and other evaluations suggest otherwise.
“Several serial testing options provided the highest possible sensitivity and specificity (100%) at nearly half the cost of parallel algorithms.
“Using a serial Algorithm in Nigeria is consistent with WHO recommended strategies for resource-poor settings.
“A serial algorithm using Determine and Stat Park is cost effective; less than one US dollar. This is important when considering the size of the HIV conselling and testing (HCT) programme in Nigeria and the number of tests required to support it.”
Government official are not willing to offer any explanation when contacted on Thursday.
NACA Director-General, Prof. Babatunde Osotimehin, directed our enquiry on the issue to the Federal Ministry of Health.
According to him, it is the FMOH that is handling the issue.
However, the Personal Assistant to the Minister of Health, Dr. Alero Roberts, feigned ignorance of the matter. She promised to ask the NACA DG about it.
But the National Coordinator, National AIDS and STIs Control Programme, Dr. Annette Akinsote, had told our correspondent on the telephone on Wednesday that government had not adopted the serial testing.

December 6, 2007 | 10:20 AM Comments  0 comments
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Media Statement from the International AIDS Society
Related to country: Nigeria
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Media Statement from the International AIDS Society

New HIV estimates confirm that HIV/AIDS is still a leading
cause of death worldwide

New global HIV estimates, released this week by the Joint United
Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health
Organization
(WHO),underscore the continued severity of the HIV pandemic. An
estimated 33.2 million adults and children are living with HIV at the
end of 2007,including 2.5 million newly infected. More than two million

men, women and children died of AIDS-related complications over the
past
year, bringing the cumulative number of deaths to more than 20 million.

The new estimate of global HIV/AIDS prevalence is a reduction from the
2006 estimate of 39.5 million. While this is good news - there are less

people living with the life-threatening virus - these revised estimates

mostly reflect the better use of monitoring tools, new surveys and more
sophisticated modelling of the epidemic. HIV/AIDS is the subject of
some
of the most sophisticated measures of any disease tracked globally. New

measuring techniques in India alone account for 3 million fewer
infections
(down from 5.7 to 2.5 million). The data also reflect the positive
impact
of HIV prevention programmes in a small number of countries.

The epidemic is not homogeneous. Sub-Saharan Africa bears the brunt of
the
pandemic, accounting for more than two-thirds (68%) of persons living
with
HIV and more than three-quarters (76%) of deaths in this year. In other

parts of the world, the epidemic remains concentrated in key
populations,
including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users and sex
workers.
In these populations, infection rates are often as high as 50%.

In the Eastern European region, including Russia, infection rates have
increased by over 150% since 2001, and show no signs of abating. Half
of all infections worldwide are in women, particularly young women, who

in many parts of the world remain powerless to control their own sexual
lives in the face of violence and lack of lack of protection of basic
human rights.

A number of critics have accused the UNAIDS and WHO of distorting
figures
in the past to push for increased funding to fight AIDS. This seems an
unnecessary and petty position. The fact is, the evolution of HIV
prevention, treatment, and care over the past quarter century is one of

the great successes of medical science. Committed and sustained
research
efforts, combined with an increasing political and social mobilization,

have provided the evidence on which approaches to programming are
based.
These same scientific efforts are now resulting in new prevention
technologies and drugs, and new strategies to manage and deliver both.
They are also allowing us to see a clearer picture of the epidemic.

The new data also indicate that increased resources provided in the
past
five years through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief
(PEPFAR),the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and many other bilateral donors and
private foundations, with leadership from UNAIDS, its co-sponsoring
organizations, governments and civil society are beginning to show
positive results in some countries. Access to life-saving
antiretroviral
treatment has increased worldwide, saving millions of lives. Sadly,
still
less than 30% of those who need the medications have access. These
increased resources for fighting AIDS are also beginning to have a
positive impact on the health systems of the poorest countries.

Country-level programmes funded through the Global Fund and PEPFAR have

helped build systems and services that support not only millions of
people
living with HIV/AIDS, but also reach into communities burdened with
tuberculosis, malaria and a host of other preventable diseases.

The release of these new HIV estimates is an opportunity to examine
where
we are in the global response to HIV. Unfortunately, at the end of
2007,
lack of political will continues to hold back the response,
particularly
in the groups most vulnerable to HIV. In 2006, the governments of the
world came together at the United Nations General Assembly to review
progress on fighting the disease. Experts, including the International
AIDS Society, were shocked that the declaration resulting from this
meeting failed to name the marginalized communities most affected by
the
disease - gay men and other men who have sex with men, injecting drug
users and sex workers. Public health imperatives dictate that
religious,
ideological or moral attitudes must never be used as an excuse to
ignore
the realities of a preventable disease that has affected the entire
world.

No one working around the world on HIV/AIDS wants anything other than
to
see the global statistics on HIV/AIDS drop to zero. Unfortunately we
are a
long way from achieving that dream. The gap between what is urgently
needed and where we are today is nothing short of a crime against
humanity. The time for universal action is now

Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the International AIDS Society's 10,000
plus
members are professionals involved at all levels of the global response
to
HIV/AIDS.

For additional information:

Mallory Smuts (Switzerland)
Tel: +41 22 7100822
Email: Mallory.smuts@iasociety.org


Elile Johne
Youth Empowerment Foundation
Program Assitant
LEAP Africa Alumni
+234-805-9260-736
1-773-2201
gozzle2002@yahoo.com
www.johnelile.8k.com

December 6, 2007 | 10:13 AM Comments  0 comments
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