A historic campaign was launched on Thursday. Thousands of aid groups from around the world came together to press world leaders on the upcoming post-2015 planning and discussions. From Euractiv:
Together, they are calling on local and world leaders to take urgent action to halt man-made climate change, eradicate poverty and address inequality, and to fight, with concrete measures, for a just and sustainable world.
Politicians and celebrities ranging from Queen Rania of Jordan and Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway, to Bill Gates, Bono, Sting, Ben Affleck and 25 more famous names, published today an ‘Open letter’ to world leaders, reminding them that the actions they will take in 2015 will decide the way the world turns for decades to come.
If leaders fail to deliver and build on the growing momentum for ambitious universal deals at the UN Special Summit on Sustainable Development in September in New York and the UN Climate talks in Paris in December, and scale back their efforts, the number of people living in extreme poverty could actually increase to 1.2 billion by 2030, the organizers of action/2015 believe.
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Global Health and Development Beat
Two men were killed and their bodies burned by an angry mob in Guinea convinced that the victims infected a local with Ebola, in the latest violence spurred by the deadly disease, police said.
The international Red Cross says a local employee has died of Ebola in Sierra Leone, becoming the first Red Cross worker or volunteer to succumb to the disease there.
A cholera outbreak in southern Nigeria’s Rivers State has killed 20 people and infected scores more, the state health commissioner, Sampson Parker, said.
There are concerns in Malawi that recent floods could lead to a cholera outbreak, reports Reuters.
All three countries hit hardest by the Ebola epidemic have recorded their lowest weekly number of new cases for months, the World Health Organization said, as the global death toll reached 8,429 out of 21,296 cases reported so far.
Thailand’s constitution will include the term “third gender” for the first time, a member of a panel drafting a new charter said on Thursday, in a move to empower transgender and gay communities and ensure them fairer legal treatment.
Doctors Without Borders announced it will start the second phase of the largest-ever mass distribution of antimalarials in Sierra Leone.
Cuba has met the United Nations goal of reducing hunger. But anemia caused by malnutrition is still a problem among infants, small children and pregnant women in this Caribbean island nation, which has been in the grip of an economic crisis for over two decades.
Brazil for the first time approved the use of a marijuana derivative to treat people suffering from severe seizures and other conditions.
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Buzzing in the Blogs
The under-discussion plan on HIV in the sex work industry in South Africa is a big deal for the nation’s sex workers. From the Daily Maverick:
After a meeting this week to discuss HIV in the industry, the issue of sex workers, and legalisation, is back on the agenda. On Monday, 140 sex workers, NGOs and government met to discuss details of the Global Fund, an initiative supporting community efforts to combat HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, which two years ago started funding interventions against the illnesses in the industry with an $8.5 million grant.
That intervention is led by the South African National Aids Council (Sanac). In 2013 it commissioned a study to estimate the size of the industry in South Africa. The study was carried out by the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Task Force (Sweat). After visiting hot spots across the country and extrapolating the number of sex workers in a specific region to the population figures, the report estimated there were 153,000 sex workers in the country, including 7,000 male and 6,000 transgender workers.
The highest number of sex workers are in Gauteng, and according to the report almost 60 percent of female sex workers have HIV.
Initially, Ngcobo says she has a nice job. Wearing floral tights, a stretched top with orange, brown and camel stripes, and red lipstick, she says she gets money every day and can buy whatever she wants. Later, she says she wants a new job. She’s ageing and has to sleep with clients inside the building. It’s dirty, with no electricity, and the mattresses lie on the floor. Then there are the cops.
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Capital Events
Happy Friday!
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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