By  Shamsydeen Badmus

The situation in Kadugli, capital of South Kordofan state, deteriorated further this week after intense fighting started two weeks ago. The North Sudan Army on June 16 vowed to continue fighting against the “armed rebellion” of the South Kordofan fighters. The UN pulled out its non-essential staff from South Kordogan in view of the situation even as additional peacekeepers were sent to the state. In the town of Abyei, adjacent to South Kordofan, Southern and Northern troops clashed despite an agreement earlier this week to demilitarize the area. Comment: 60,000 people are estimated to have been displaced from South Kordofan in the last two weeks, and roughly 100,000 people have fled southwards since northern troops entered Abyei in May. Southern Sudan is set to gain independence on July 9, although the current fighting points to the volatile situation in the region ahead of the impending split.

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Shamsydeen Badmus

A federal court jury in the United States has found two Liberian aid workers guilty of stealing funds donated to the African country by the US government. African Interest Online discovered that Joe Bondo and Morris Fahnbulleh were convicted on charges of conspiracy, fraud and making false claims. The men sold food aid worth more than one million US dollars in a scam that began in 2005, according to prosecutors. Fahnbulleh and Bondo were employed by the Christian relief group World Vision, which ran a programme funded by the US Agency for International Development to deliver surplus wheat and oil to Liberia. They could face up to 20 years in prison.

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Shamsydeen Badmus

Islamist militants from the Somali insurgent groups al-Shabab and Hizbul Islam have seized control of two radio stations in the capital Mogadishu. International media reported that al-Shabab rebels attacked staff and seized equipment at the Horn Afrik radio station on Saturday, while Hizbul Islam targeted the GBC radio station. A producer at GBC, Mohamed Ibrahim told reporters that the militants were still in control of the station on Sunday. International media rights groups regard Somalia as one of the most dangerous places for journalists in the world.

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Shamsydeen Badmus

UN research suggests Sub-Saharan Africa has seen a sharp decline in the number of new HIV cases. The United Nations Joint UN Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) UNAIDS said that newly-reported HIV incidence declined by over 25 per cent between 2001 and 2009 in 22 countries in the region. The number of people receiving HIV treatment had also improved, increasing 12 times in the past six years to a total of 5.2 million patients. On the other hand, UNAIDS found that HIV rates were increasing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The figures were released ahead of the UN Millennium Development Goals review summit, which opened in New York on Monday.

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By Shamsydeen Badmus

Researchers at a South African university have developed a tea bag that sucks up toxic contamination from highly polluted water to make it safe to drink. Science news website SciDev.Net reported on Thursday that the new filter has been successfully tested on river samples and could be on the market in the next few months if approved by the South African Bureau of Standards. The sachets developed at Stellenbosch University are made from the same material used in the popular rooibos tea bags. However, the bags contains ultra-thin nanoscale fibres that filter out contaminants and active carbon granules that kill bacteria. The disposable tea bags, which are cheap to make, can be fitted to the neck of water bottles and are capable of purifying one litre of polluted water.

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By Shamsydeen Badmus

The ruling party of South Sudan warned on Thursday that a vote on independence due in January will not be possible unless political issues within the country’s referendum commission are resolved in the next two weeks. The Secretary-General of the former southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), Pagan Amum, said the referendum commission has reached a deadlock in selecting its main executive position of secretary-general. The referendum will determine whether South Sudan should become an independent state. The vote is part of the 2005 peace deal that ended Sudan’s long civil war, in which an estimated two million people died.

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South African Police Investigates Baby Beggars Scam

By Shamsydeen Badmus

South African police are investigating the possibility that a syndicate in Pretoria is hiring out children from creches to beggars, African Interest Online has discovered. On Friday police took 20 children into care as part of a general crackdown on the use of children to beg in Pretoria, the capital. Since then 13 have been returned to their families. African Interest Online  source in South Africa says that beggars commonly carry babies or children to get sympathy and try to get larger sums of money from drivers and pedestrians. In May a local radio investigation in Johannesburg exposed a scheme in which parents and child-minders were renting out babies to beggars for about 3 US dollars a day. Police claim they are investigating whether the two syndicates in Pretoria and Johannesburg are linked.

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Humanitarian Crisis in South Sudan

By Shamsydeen Badmus

South Sudan should prepare to deal with a humanitarian crisis regardless of the outcome of an independence referendum set for January, a government official warned on Thursday. The south’s minister of humanitarian affairs and disaster management, James Kok Ruea, said that foreign aid agencies and the United Nations need to be ready to cope with the humanitarian demands of the potential massive displacement of the southern population. The vote could prompt around 1,5 million southerners currently in North Sudan and thousands of others living in neighbouring countries to return home, Ruea said. Meanwhile, a political deadlock within the commission responsible for organising the referendum threatens to delay the vote as the body’s secretary general has yet to be appointed.

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By Shamsydeen Badmus

The Sudanese government said on Saturday that it would monitor all travel by United Nations and African Union peacekeepers in the conflict-ridden region of Darfur. Senior information ministry official Rabie Abdelati made the announcement one day after the UN Security Council extended the mission’s mandate for a further year. The troops’ main priority will be to protect civilians and ensure free humanitarian access to refugees, according to the UN. Abdelati criticised the mission, known as UNAMID, for failing to curb violence in refugee camps and allegedly harbouring instigators of the conflict. The BBC reported a UNAMID spokesman saying he was unaware of any official requests from the Sudanese government to co-ordinate their movements with the security forces.

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PRESS RELEASE

The Vienna Declaration: A Global Call to Action for Science-based Drug Policy

Three leading scientific and health policy organizations have launched a global drive for signatories to the Vienna Declaration (www.viennadeclaration.com), a statement seeking to improve community health and safety by calling for the incorporation of scientific evidence into illicit drug policies. Among those supporting the declaration and urging others to sign is 2008 Nobel Laureate and International AIDS Society (IAS) Governing Council member Prof. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, co-discoverer of HIV.
The Vienna Declaration is the official declaration of the XVIII International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2010), the biennial meeting of more than 20,000 HIV professionals, taking place in Vienna, Austria from 18 to 23 July 2010 (www.aids2010.org).
“Many of us in AIDS research and care confront the devastating impacts of misguided drug policies every day,” said AIDS 2010 Chair Dr. Julio Montaner, President of the IAS and Director of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. “These policies fuel the AIDS epidemic and result in violence, increased crime rates and destabilization of entire states – yet there is no evidence they have reduced rates of drug use or drug supply. As scientists, we are committed to raising our collective voice to promote evidence-based approaches to illicit drug policy that start by recognizing that addiction is a medical condition, not a crime.”

The Vienna Declaration describes the known harms of conventional “war on drugs” approaches and states: “The criminalization of illicit drug users is fuelling the HIV epidemic and has resulted in overwhelmingly negative health and social consequences. A full policy reorientation is needed…Reorienting drug policies towards evidence-based approaches that respect, protect and fulfill human rights has the potential to reduce harms deriving from current policies and would allow for the redirection of the vast financial resources towards where they are needed most: implementing and evaluating evidence-based prevention, regulatory, treatment and harm reduction interventions.” Outside of sub-Saharan Africa, injecting drug use accounts for approximately one in three new cases of HIV. In some areas of rapid HIV spread, such as Eastern Europe and Central Asia, injecting drug use is the primary cause of new HIV infections. Legal barriers to scientifically proven prevention services such as needle programmes and opioid substitution therapy (OST) mean hundreds of thousands of people become infected with HIV and Hepatitis C (HCV) every year. The criminalization of people who inject drugs has also resulted in record incarceration rates placing a massive burden on the taxpayer. HIV outbreaks have also been reported in prisons in various settings internationally. This emphasis on criminalization produces a cycle of disease transmission, along with broken homes and livelihoods destroyed. Yet these costs, along with the more direct costs of the ‘war on drugs’, produce no measurable benefits.

“The current approach to drug policy is ineffective because it neglects proven and evidence-based interventions, while pouring a massive amount of public funds and human resources into expensive and futile enforcement measures,” said Dr. Evan Wood, founder of the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy (ICSDP) and Clinical Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. “It’s time to accept the war on drugs has failed and create drug policies that can meaningfully protect community health and safety using evidence, not ideology.”

The Vienna Declaration calls on governments and international organizations, including the United Nations, to take a number of steps, including: • undertake a transparent review the effectiveness of current drug policies;
• implement and evaluate a science-based public health approach to address the harms stemming from illicit drug use;
• scale up evidence-based drug dependence treatment options;
• abolish ineffective compulsory drug treatment centres that violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and unequivocally endorse and scale up funding for the drug treatment and harm reduction measures endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations. The declaration also calls for the meaningful involvement of people who use drugs in developing, monitoring and implementing services and policies that affect their lives. “As a scientist, I strongly support drug policies that are based on evidence of what actually works,” said Prof. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, Director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit at the Institute Pasteur, IAS Governing Council member and recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine. “I join with my colleagues around the world today to sign the Vienna Declaration in support of science-driven policies and human rights.”
The effectiveness of opioid substitution therapy (OST) and needles and syringe programmes is well-documented, though access to such interventions is often limited where HIV is spreading most rapidly. According to various scientific reviews conducted by WHO, the US Institutes of Medicine and others, these programmes reduce HIV rates without increasing rates of drug use. These cost-effective interventions also produce significant savings in future health care costs, and help people who use drugs access health care and drug treatment. No evidence exists demonstrating negative consequences of use of these programmes.

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“Reflecting the AIDS 2010 theme of Rights Here, Right Now, the Vienna Declaration is rooted in the belief that global drug policy must respect the human rights of people who use drugs if it is to be at all effective,” said AIDS 2010 Local Co-Chair Dr. Brigitte Schmied, President of the Austrian AIDS Society. “No one who is familiar with addiction would deny the negative impacts it has on individuals, families and entire communities, but those harms do not justify human rights violations. People addicted to illicit drugs have the right to evidence-based drug treatment, to interventions to prevent infection, and, if they are living with HIV, to antiretroviral treatment.”

The Vienna Declaration was drafted by an international team of scientists and other experts, many of whom will participate in AIDS 2010 next month. It was initiated by the IAS, the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy (ICSDP), and the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Those wishing to sign on may visit www.viennadeclaration.com, where the full text of the declaration, along with a list of authors, is available. The two-page declaration references 28 reports, describing the scientific evidence documenting the effectiveness of public health approaches to drug policy and the negative consequences of approaches that criminalize drug users.

About AIDS 2010
The XVIII International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2010) is the biennial meeting of researchers, implementers and diverse leaders involved in the global response to HIV. It is convened by the IAS in partnership with international, regional and local partners. Visit www.aids2010.org for more information and to register for the conference, which is taking place from 18 to 23 July 2010 in Vienna, Austria.

International AIDS Society
The International AIDS Society is the world’s leading independent association of HIV professionals, with 14,000 members from 190 countries working at all levels of the global response to AIDS. Our members include researchers from all disciplines, clinicians, public health and community practitioners on the frontlines of the epidemic, as well as policy and programme planners.

International Centre for Science in Drug Policy
ICSDP aims to be a primary source for rigorous scientific evidence on illicit drug policy in order to benefit policymakers, law enforcement, and affected communities. To this end, the ICSDP conducts original scientific research in the form of systematic reviews, evidence-based drug policy guidelines, and research collaborations with leading scientists and institutions across diverse continents and disciplines.
BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS
The BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE) is Canada’s largest HIV/AIDS research, treatment and education facility. The BC-CfE is based at St Paul’s Hospital, Providence Health Care, a teaching hospital of the University of British Columbia. The BC-CfE is dedicated to improving the health of British Columbians with HIV through developing, monitoring and disseminating comprehensive research and treatment programs for HIV and related diseases.

MEDIA CONTACTS: Mahafrine Petigara Edelman

Email:mahafrine.petigara@edelman.com
Tel: +1 604 623 3007, ext. 297

Michael Kessler
Media Consultant, AIDS 2010
Email: mkessler@ya.com
Tel: +34 655 792 699

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