Stories: Health Care
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Lesotho taxi drivers help lead fight against HIV
Maseru, Lesotho - Tsitso Mokale drives down Moshoeshoe Road in his black taxi with a yellow stripe, scanning the pavement for potential passengers. The taxi driver in Lesotho's capital, Maseru, is on a mission not just to find new customers, but to start a conversation about the benefits of male circumcision and HIV prevention. It is a daunting task...
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Reporter’s Notebook: A Not-So-Grand Tour of Ethiopia’s Top Hospital
When you sign up for a reporting fellowship to learn about the health of newborns in Ethiopia, you expect things to be a little different from what you're used to in the U.S. To be perfectly honest, a little worse. But Ethiopia actually surprised me, even before I took off. I did my research, and it turns...
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Community Health Teams in Brazil Fill the Gaps
Sarah Kimani reported from Brazil on a fellowship with the International Reporting Project (IRP). Photo: Reuters
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Trading Wellness Tips, Brazil’s Community Workers Plug Primary Health Gaps
Marcia Cristina Bonfante and Adriana Siqueira Lima live in the same neighborhood in western São Paulo and have daughters around the same age. But when Ms. Bonfante drops by her neighbor's house, it's more than a simple social call. As a community health worker, Bonfante makes hundreds of such calls every month. Bonfante and four other...
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Medicine Men
Al-Hajji Mojeed thinks of himself as a reformer. After he welcomed me to the offices of his Olaiya Naturalist Hospital in Ibadan, Nigeria, he led me to a small, windowless room where a patient was shackled to a rusty engine block, recovering, as Mojeed put it, from “head surgery.” Three days earlier, Mojeed had used a razor blade...
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New Mobile App Streamlines Health Care Systems in Kenya
Do you know which countries have the highest cell phone usage? The list might not surprise you with China, India and the U.S. taking the top three spots. However, developing countries such as Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya all report between 50-75 percent of their overall population has access to a mobile phone. Smartphone ownership is skyrocketing in...
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When Free Universal Healthcare Isn’t Free or Universal
As the term of the current Millennium Development Goals reaches an end in 2015, healthcare workers and reporters worldwide are assessing the efficacy of different global health and development approaches over the last few years. The necessity of improving global health has been one of the highest priorities of development practitioners and activists, the touchstone being...
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Commercial Surrogacy: Choice and Health
Being pregnant comes with its advantages. One of these is that a healthy amount of pampering is expected and endured. Pregnant women can put their feet up more than usual, or at least that’s how it should be, how we want it to be. Because for most of us, this is supposed to be (at least ideally, at...
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Zambian Caregiver Driven by Love to Visit TB Patients
The government-run health clinic I visited this morning in Lusaka, Zambia, as a visiting International Reporting Project fellow was bustling. Dozens of women, babies, children, and men milled about the small, free-standing houses that make up the clinic, which was certainly bare-bones by Western standards. The accommodations for male circumcision, for example, was a stretcher bed with garbage bags...
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‘Safe Love Club’ for the Hearing Impaired in Zambia
In the Minali township of the Zambian capital, Lusaka, some 20 pupils join together at a local high school to talk about sex, relationships and HIV/AIDS. As part of a campaign called the "Safe Love Club", around 1,500 people between the ages of 18-49 meet at least once a week across the city to discuss the virus that has -...