Hillary Anderson, a communications intern for Management Sciences for Health (MSH), writes in this post on MSH’s “Global Health Impact” blog about the organization’s Community-based Family Planning and HIV & AIDS Services (CFPHS) project, which “worked to address gender-based violence (GBV) in Malawi through behavior change communication (BCC) activities.” She…

The WHO “said on Monday it has received just one application for the U.N. health agency’s top post,” from China, which submitted Margaret Chan, the current WHO director-general and former Hong Kong health chief, Agence France-Presse reports. “An executive board meeting in Geneva between January 16 and 23 will decide whether to put the name forward to the World Health Assembly in May, which would make the final decision regarding the appointment,” the news agency writes (11/21).

IRIN profiles the establishment of a “‘fistula hotline,’ a free phone number for women who suffer from this debilitating condition that is seldom spoken about,” at the Aberdeen Women’s Centre, a clinic in Freetown, Sierra Leone. “The fistula hotline, which is run by the center, is the result of a public-private partnership between the Gloag Foundation, USAID, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and telecommunications company Airtel,” IRIN notes.

The world reached a population milestone in October, but “[i]n the many discussions that have sprung up around the seven billion benchmark — all of them important and illuminating — I don’t hear enough about our world’s most vulnerable: our youth,” Jill Sheffield, founder and president of Women Deliver, writes in this Huffington Post opinion piece. “Nearly half of the world’s seven billion inhabitants is under the age of 25,” she notes, adding “when it comes to sexual and reproductive health, young women and girls around the world face tremendous challenges — which demand tremendous solutions.”

An article published in the Journal of the International AIDS Society on Friday “reviews the evidence of what works to meet the sexual and reproductive health needs of women living with HIV in developing countries and includes 35 studies and evaluations of eight general interventions using various methods of implementation science…

In anticipation of the Sixteen Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, a campaign which starts on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on November 25, Daniela Ligiero, senior adviser for gender at the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator, reports on PEPFAR’s commitment to address gender-based…

In this paper published in the Journal of the International AIDS Society, researchers from South Africa, Namibia, Brazil, and the U.S. “explore the existing evidence related to global and country-specific barriers to safe abortion for all women, with an emphasis on research gaps around the right of women living with HIV…

In this post in the Huffington Post’s “Impact” blog, Charles Lyons, president and CEO of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, responds to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech at the NIH last week in which she called for an “AIDS-free generation,” writing, “As Secretary Clinton pointed out, we’ve never before had as many tools to get ahead of the disease as we do now,” such as male circumcision and treatment as prevention, “[b]ut one of the cornerstones of her strategy to create an AIDS-free generation is a tool we’ve actually had in our arsenal for a long time: the ability to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.”

“With the HIV prevalence rate higher among women than men in Zambia, experts say the epidemic now has a women’s face here and, therefore, requires more specialized intervention programs,” and “[w]omen living with HIV say that women must be taught how to live positively with it,” the Global Press Institute reports in a story examining the epidemic among women in Zambia. The article looks at factors influencing higher HIV rates among women and government efforts to provide treatment and prevention programs, and includes comments from Nkandu Luo, a Zambian HIV/AIDS advocate and researcher; Viola Morgan, U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) country director; and Clementine Mumba, executive secretary for the Network of ARV Users, a support and advocacy group for people living with HIV/AIDS (Katongo, 11/10).

“Using GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix vaccine to protect girls against the [human papillomavirus (HPV)] that causes cervical cancer is so effective that health authorities could reduce the need for later cervical screening,” according to two studies published Wednesday in the journal Lancet Oncology, Reuters reports. In a large efficacy trial involving 20,000 healthy women from 14 countries on four continents, researchers from the U.S. and Finland found the vaccine “‘offers excellent protection’ against two key strains of [HPV], particularly when given to young adolescent girls before they become sexually active” and “found the vaccine partially protects against several other cancer-causing HPV types that it is not specifically designed to target, giving protection against a group of strains that together cause about 85 percent of cervical cancer worldwide,” the news service writes.