Search Results for: South Africa

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A USA biotechnology company has created an intelligent network of human scent honey-traps that lure mosquitoes into a vacuum-device that suffocates them. American Biophysics (AmBio) is selling a ‘Mosquito Magnet’ system that emits a humanlike scent, including carbon dioxide and moisture, which attracts bloodsucking insects.…

BY MONICA DOBIE

A NEW genetic test that can detect devastating clam disease QPX has been developed by American scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), in Cape Cod Massachusetts. They claim the test is sensitive enough to detect the QPX organism not only in clams, but also in seawater and sediment.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE WORLD Trade Organisation’s (WTO) general council has permanently amended the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement to make permanent a 2003 waiver helping poor countries obtain generic medicines during health emergencies. The TRIPS amendment enables any WTO member country to export generic pharmaceuticals made under a compulsory licence to assist countries lacking their own manufacturing capacity and whose nurses and doctors would otherwise be unable to deal with a serious disease problem.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

AUTO manufacturing firms will be closely monitoring next week’s World Trade Organisation (WTO) summit in Hong Kong for signs that the WTO’s long-running Doha Development Round talks are about to crack open national automobile markets. Key auto industry countries – the US, the European Union, Canada, Japan, South Korea, India and Brazil – have been making steady progress this year in identifying non-tariff barriers to trade they would like to remove, such as burdensome customs procedures, technical engineering rules and licences.…

BY STEVEN SWINDELLS in Johannesburg

DROUGHT-HIT and AIDS-ravaged southern Africa is faced with a looming humanitarian crisis with almost 12 million people in need of food aid. But genetically modified (GM) crops remain off the menu for most African governments who remain reluctant to allow their farmers to do business with GM giants Monsanto and Syngenta.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

ONLY comparatively recently have the world’s anti money laundering agencies come to grips with alternative remittance systems (ARS) and even today the scale of the systems and the degree of infiltration by criminals is still not fully known.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A COMPREHENSIVE reform process has been launched by the African Union (AU) to make Africa’s governments raise their performance in fighting HIV/AIDS. Noting that "Africa bears the heaviest burden and yet, is least prepared to contain (the disease)", a detailed action plan has been adopted by an AU

Continental Forum ‘on human rights and people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS’, staged in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE LATEST World Health Organisation (WHO) figures on HIV/AIDS indicate some heavily afflicted countries are seeing infection rates fall. Kenya and Zimbabwe are among those with declining infections: amongst all adults in Kenya, from 10% in the late 1990s to 7% in 2003; and among pregnant women in Zimbabwe falling, from 26% in 2003 to 21% in 2004.…

BY RAGHAVENDRA VERMA, in New Delhi

INDIA’S opening-up as a free market economy, along with the adoption of new technology, reformed laws, and the presence of vigilant media are curbing many commercial crimes in the world’s largest democracy, but criminals still find ways to make a dishonest Rupee.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Union and Norway have divided up common stocks within the North Sea for 2006, overcoming difficult conservation problems, especially regarding cod. Brussels and Oslo have agreed on a long-term management plan for cod, to come into effect when the stock has returned to safe biological levels.…