Support for HIV Patients

Translated by Atefeh Rezvan-Nia
Edited by Mohammad Reza
M. Karimi

Iran’s Social Welfare Organization (SWO) has spent 30 billion rials in the current Iranian year (ending March 20, 2013) to support HIV patients and prevent the spread of the virus.
Announcing this, Majid Rezazadeh, the head of HIV Committee affiliated to SWO, said the supportive program includes issuing insurance for HIV patients, giving free consultations to patients and their families, and reducing the impact of social vulnerabilities on HIV patients, IRNA reported.
Rezazadeh said the spread of HIV virus via unprotected sexual behavior is on the rise in the country.
“Sixty-five percent of HIV patients have been infected by using shared contaminated needles,” he said, adding that the pattern of HIV infection is changing in the country as more individuals are getting infected through risky sexual behavior.
The official said that uprooting addiction in the country will require a great deal of time, but SWO is trying to reduce its social vulnerabilities.
“With the launch of 10 new HIV Plus Clubs across the country, the number of such clubs has reached 24,” he said, explaining that patients and their families receive consultations at these clubs.
He added that these clubs help HIV patients find jobs.
Rezazadeh said about 300 million rials have been spent for the establishment of each club.
“Apart from the HIV Plus Clubs, 150 centers have been established to help HIV patients receive rehabilitation services,” he said, adding that 250 mobile medical teams are ready to support HIV patients round the clock.
Iran has nearly 20,000 HIV patients. Three waves of HIV infection have been detected in Iran.
The first HIV wave was witnessed in the 1980s during which a number of hospitalized patients received contaminated blood products from France.
The second wave of HIV pertained to drug addicts who shared needles.
Currently, experts have detected the third wave of HIV contamination among individuals indulging in risky sexual behavior.

Call for Boycotting Israeli Agro Products

Tawfiq Mandil, 45, stands among hundreds of Palestinian farmers, activists and international supporters in the Gaza Strip’s eastern Zeitoun district, about half a kilometer from the border with Israel. They are renewing a call for the boycott of Israeli goods.
“The Israeli army destroyed my house and my five dunums of land (a dunum is 1,000 square meters) on the last day of the attacks in 2009, as well as 20 other homes,” he was quoted as saying by IPS.
With signs reading “Boycott Israeli Agricultural Products” and “Support Palestinian Farmers”, Mandil and others protesting Israeli oppression of Palestinian farmers joined together on Saturday to plant olive trees on Israeli-razed farmland and to implore international supporters to join the boycott of Israeli agricultural produce.

Only Hope for Justice
Mandil believes that the boycott is his only hope for justice for Palestinian farmers being targeted by the Israeli army and oppressed by Israel.
“We hope that it will put pressure on Israel to stop targeting us and allow us to farm our land as we used to.”
With an Israeli surveillance blimp hovering above and within sight of a remotely-controlled machine gun tower, the significance of the rally’s location near the “buffer zone” was not lost.
Israeli authorities prohibit Palestinians from accessing the 300 meters flanking the Gaza-Israel border. In reality, the Israeli army regularly attacks Palestinians up to two kilometers from the border in some areas, rendering more than 35 percent of Gaza’s farmland off-limits.
“By engaging in the trade of settlement produce, states are failing to comply with their obligation to actively cooperate in order to put the Israeli settlement enterprise to an end. Therefore, a ban on settlement produce must be considered among those actions that third-party states should undertake in order to comply with their international law obligations.”
The Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq released a position paper last month condemning the Israeli settlement produce trade.
The paper, “Feasting on the Occupation: Illegality of Settlement Produce and the Responsibility of EU Member-States Under International Law” highlights the means by which Israeli settlements benefit from the oppression of Palestinian farmers.
“While the EU has been quite outspoken in condemning settlements and their expansion, they continue to import produce from these same settlements and in doing so, help to sustain their very existence,” Al-Haq, director general of Shawan Jabarin, notes.
Um Abed, 65, from Zeitoun is defiant. “Today we’re planting olive trees. God willing, next year, we’ll plant lemon, date and palm trees. We grow, they bulldoze, we replant.”
The boycott action follows a growing number of initiatives emerging in recent years from the Gaza Strip.

Support Increasing
Palestinian students in Gazan universities stepped up the boycott call in 2012, releasing YouTube videos calling for political action, not aid, from international supporters.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel has attracted international support, including the backing of numerous UK and North American universities and scholars.
Increasing numbers of cultural and religious associations, such as the Quakers’ Friends Fiduciary Corporation, are divesting from corporations that profit from or support Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands.
The United Church of Canada endorsed the boycott of goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements in August 2012.
In September 2012, Gaza’s Ministry of Agriculture decided to ban most Israeli fruits entering Gaza.

Horsemeat Scandal Widens Across EU

French consumer, agriculture and food ministers are to hold crisis talks with key players in the meat industry as the horsemeat scandal widens.
Six French supermarket chains have withdrawn frozen beef meals made by Findus and Comigel.
The move followed the discovery that foods sold in Europe and the UK labeled beef contained horsemeat, BBC reported.
The scandal has raised questions about the complexity of the food industry’s supply chains across the EU.
It has already had an impact on distributors in the UK, France, Sweden, Ireland and Romania.

More Products Contaminated
Horse meat could be found in even more British foods within days, ministers warned.
Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) said tests being held this weekend may well find more beef products contaminated with horsemeat.
Officials at the FSA admitted that there have been no tests for horsemeat content in British food for a decade, raising concerns that the scandal may have been hidden from the public for years, Telegraph reported.
Paterson said retailers should remove products from shelves as soon there was any indication they might contain horse. Burgers and ready meals have already been withdrawn by Tesco, Findus and Aldi.
In a series of developments, it emerged that:
• Horses in Romania--the source of the latest contamination--are ‘endemically’ infected by a disease known as horse AIDS, although it does not pose a risk to humans;
• A French plant, which handled horsemeat sold in Britain as beef, has previously been at the center of a major E.coli discovery;
The latest developments came after Findus was forced to recall 18,000 packets of its frozen ‘beef’ lasagne from supermarket shelves, and destroy another 200,000 held in storage, after it was discovered to be made up of between 60 and 100 percent horsemeat.
Meanwhile, tests are taking place for the present of the horse painkiller bute, and Patterson said that although no trace had yet been found, “we may discover that there may be other materials” in the horsemeat.
Amid fears in Downing Street that the ministerial team at the environment department is struggling to get a grip on the crisis, Paterson said “an international criminal conspiracy” may be behind the introduction of dangerous meat into processed food.
On BBC 1’s Sunday Politics, Paterson warned of bad news this week when the tests are completed.
“We do not know how far this incompetence or worse, criminal conspiracy, extends,” he said. “If we find there’s a product which could potentially be injurious to public health, then emphatically I would take necessary action.”

Chronic Stress Raises Diabetes Risk

As if a lowered immune system, shrunken brain and premature aging were not enough, a new study is showing another potential health effect of too much stress: a higher risk of diabetes for men.
The study, conducted by researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, showed an association between reporting permanent stress--as opposed to reporting no stress, or only periodic stress--and an increased risk of diabetes, CNN reported.
The research, published in the journal Diabetic Medicine, included around 7,000 men with no diabetes, heart disease or stroke history, who were born in Gothenburg, Sweden. Researchers tracked if the men went on to develop diabetes, based on their hospital and death records.
At the beginning of the study, 15.5 percent of the men reported having “permanent stress” at home or work, based on their responses to a six-point scale.
After 35 years, the researchers found that those who reported permanent stress were 45 percent more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes, compared with those only reporting periodic stress or no stress.
And this is even after the researchers took into account other known diabetes risk factors, such as high blood pressure, age and exercise level.

36 Dead in Indian Stampede

A stampede has killed at least 36 people and injured a dozen more in an Indian train station flooded with people during a Hindu festival that attracts millions.
Indian Railroad Minister Pawan Bansal said the stampede took place in the Allahabad train station on Sunday evening. News reports said tens of thousands of people were in the station when a section of a footbridge there collapsed, leading to the stampede, Guardian reported.
Television showed large crowds pushing and jostling at the train station, as policemen struggled to restore order.
“There was complete chaos. There was no doctor or ambulance for at least two hours after the accident,” an eyewitness told NDTV news channel.
An estimated 30 million Hindus were expected to take a dip at the Sangam, the confluence of the Ganges, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati rivers on Sunday, one of the holiest bathing days of the Kumbh Mela, or Pitcher Festival. The festival lasts 55 days and is one of the world’s largest religious gatherings.

Dutch Debate Lower Pay For Older Workers

A French multinational’s suggestion in the Netherlands to ask older workers to accept pay cuts as a cost-cutting measure has touched a raw nerve, as the Dutch economy faces a slowdown and rising unemployment.
Unions see the idea of doing away with the principle of paying older workers more for their experience as an attack on a fundamental right, while employers see it as a solution to avoid layoffs in a crisis-hit economy, AFP reported.
The debate has raged in the Netherlands since French IT giant Capgemini’s Dutch general manager, Jeroen Versteeg, said he was looking at ‘calibrating’ 5,000 Dutch-based employees to see if salaries matched current market value and productivity.
“Previously, this branch has always done well, with skyrocketing salaries to match,” Versteeg told the Financieele Dagblad (FD) daily last month.
“But the market has changed and we have to bring ourselves in line with it.”
The Capgemini official said the relentless economic crisis raging in Europe since 2008 has changed the situation in the sector dramatically.

China Smuggles Mozambique Timber

Mozambique’s forestry laws are constantly breached, environmentalists say.
Nearly half of the timber exported from Mozambique to China is illegal, a pressure group has said, Allvoices reported.
The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) said its investigation showed that Mozambican politicians and Chinese traders were systematically involved in timber smuggling and illegal logging.
This has caused Mozambique to lose tens of millions of dollars a year in tax revenues, it added.
Mozambique is one of the world’s poorest countries.
However, its economy has been growing rapidly since the civil war ended in 1992.
Many foreign companies, including Chinese-owned, are tapping into its natural resources, although critics say that most poor people are not benefiting from the surge in business.
The EIA said its undercover investigation showed that China’s demand for raw timber was having a devastating impact on Mozambique, and over the past six years there had been a clear pattern of illegal logging and timber smuggling.
High-level politicians, working with Chinese traders, were continuously breaching Mozambique’s export and forest laws, the EIA added.

Largest Croc Dies

The largest saltwater crocodile in captivity has died in the Philippines. The six-meter reptile weighed more than 1,000 kg.