The 26th Annual Meeting of the Food Crisis Prevention Network , “which serves as the platform for deliberation on food production and food security in Africa,” opened on Tuesday in Accra, Ghana, the Ghana News Agency reports. The three-day forum will examine “the agricultural and food situation for the 2010/2011 cropping season and come out with measures on tackling food crises,” according to the news service. Food security officials from the Sahel and West Africa are attending the forum, in addition to representatives from international groups, including the Economic Community Of West African States, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, Oxfam, UNICEF and the World Food Program.

“Africa is struggling to turn local discoveries into drugs and other health care inventions,” according to studies published in Science and BMC International Health and Human Rights, Nature News reports (Nordling, 12/12).

Haiti’s Water Needs: Though “cholera epidemics of the 19th century forged the way for the revolution in sanitation and the provision of safe sources of public water, … more than 1 billion people … have little access to safe sources of water,” write the authors of a Lancet Comment that reflects…

A three-day meeting of the WHO African Program for Onchocerciasis (River blindness) Control (WHO/APOC) opened in Abuja, Nigeria, on Tuesday, PANA/Afrique en ligne reports (12/8).

“Tanzania, Mozambique and Niger spend the most on child wellbeing in Africa – with Sudan, Angola and Burundi at the bottom of the table,” according to an African Child Policy Forum (ACPF) report, which was launched in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Tuesday at the opening of the Fourth International Policy Conference on the African Child, Deutsche Presse-Agentur/M&C reports (12/7).

A report from the U.N.’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) found that approximately 350 million people living in rural areas have escaped extreme poverty over the past decade, but most of the world’s poorest citizens continue to live in rural regions, the BBC reports (Melik, 12/6).

“Some 80 health professionals and telecom operators [met last week for the mHealth Africa Summit] in the Ghanaian capital Accra to explore ways to use mobile phones for better healthcare delivery,” IRIN reports in an article that details a variety of successful projects relaying health information through cell phones in Africa. The article describes how mobile phones are being used in Africa to educate populations about HIV/AIDS, TB and improve maternal health, as well as means to track medicines and other health supplies, including mosquito nets.

On Monday, a campaign started in Burkina Faso to “inoculate tens of millions of West Africans with a new vaccine in what scientists hope will be the beginning of the end of ravaging meningitis epidemics” across the continent, the New York Times reports. Burkina Faso marks the first country in a drive aimed at “bringing the disease under control and saving an estimated 150,000 lives by 2015 in a belt of 25 nations that girds the continent,” according to the newspaper (Dugger, 12/4).

An online survey of men who have sex with men (MSM) and their health service providers shows that the majority of respondents said most “gay men worldwide don’t have access to HIV testing, counseling or free condoms and lubricant, a new study finds,” according to the Global Forum on MSM & HIV (MSMGF), HealthDay/Businessweek reports.

Leaders from the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group on nations and the European Union launched “wide-ranging talks” in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, on Thursday, Agence France-Presse reports. Approximately 450 lawmakers from 110 countries attended the opening.