During a joint visit to Nigeria this week, UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe and Ambassador Eric Goosby, U.S. global AIDS coordinator, encouraged the country to ramp of its efforts to fight HIV/AIDS, Pana/Afrique en ligne reports. At a Monday gathering with Acting Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, Sidibe appealed for Nigeria to “use its position to influence African Union’s Declaration on prevention of Mother to Child transmission of HIV/AIDS,” according to the news service. Also during the gathering, Goosby emphasized the U.S. commitment to a partnership with the Nigerian government to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS (2/23).

Test-And-Treat Model For Tackling HIV Not ‘Common Sense’ In a Guardian opinion piece, columnist Elizabeth Pisani challenges the assumptions made by the “mathematical model that shows that if we test everyone in Africa for HIV once a year and give everyone who tests positive expensive drugs right away and for…

Since a major earthquake hit Haiti last month, “power has returned to nearly half” of the neighborhoods around Port-au-Prince, but the rebuilding of the country’s power system “is starting almost from scratch,” the Associated Press/New York Times write in an article examining the prospects for Haiti’s electric utility.

Rwandan Nurses To Give ART To Expedite Delivery Rwanda’s Ministry of Health will soon give nurses the authority to give antiretroviral therapy (ART) to HIV-positive patients, IRIN reports. Aimable Mbituyumuremyi, of the Centre for Treatment and Research on AIDS, Malaria, Tuberculosis and Other Epidemics, said, “Task-shifting will reduce the number…

U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday introduced a congressional resolution condemning an anti-gay bill before Uganda’s parliament, “calling it an attack on human rights and an obstacle to battling HIV/AIDS,” Agence France-Presse reports. “The symbolic measure asserts that ‘all people possess an intrinsic human dignity, regardless of sexual orientation, and share fundamental human rights,’ and warns the Ugandan bill, if enacted, ‘would set a troubling precedent,'” the news service writes.

“Forty percent of the 12 million people diagnosed with cancer worldwide each year could avert the killer disease by protecting themselves against infections and changing their lifestyles, experts said on Tuesday,” Reuters reports. Ahead of World Cancer Day on Thursday, officials at the International Union Against Cancer (UICC) released a report that demonstrates how scaling up immunization programs against the infections that cause some cancers and educating the public on prevention strategies could help drive down cancer rates (Kelland, 2/2).

The WHO is recommending the H1N1 (swine flu) virus be added to the regular flu vaccine for the Northern Hemisphere’s 2010-2011 regular flu season, the Associated Press reports (2/18).

The challenges associated with protecting the people of Africa from malaria took center stage Monday during the second day of the African Union (AU) Summit, the New Times/allAfrica.com reports (2/2).

GSK Head Discusses Company Interest In NTDs The Associated Press features a Q&A with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) CEO Andrew Witty, who “is pushing to sell more products in fast-growing ’emerging markets’ such as Brazil, Russia, India and China” while simultaneously “increasing efforts to bring medicines for tropical diseases to the poorest…

The New York Times examines the WHO’s role as “clearinghouse” for getting H1N1 (swine flu) vaccines to lower income nations. Though H1N1 has died down in North America and many wealthier nations “are trying to get rid of their [vaccine] surpluses,” the virus continues to circulate in regions of North Africa, Central Asia and Eastern Europe, according to the newspaper.