The Office for Promotion of Equality (OPE), which comes under the Office of the Prime Minister, with UNICEF, officially launched the Marta Communication Initiative on 10 November 2006. This is a multimedia edutainment package of radio melodramas, stickers, posters, brochures and, in the future comic books and cartoon films, about a girl Marta, her brother Atoy, their pet parrot Kakatua and their adventures.
The Government of Japan has contributed US$1.604 million to UNICEF to support life-saving child immunization coverage and provide almost 150,000 insecticide treated bed nets to protect infants and pregnant women from malaria. The grant will also be used to provide 780,000 doses of Artesunate and Amodiaquine (ACT) to care for children who contract malaria, Africa?s leading cause of under-five mortality.
UNICEF today called on governments and others committed to universal education and gender equality to remember that the earliest years are the most critical for children?s development. If many of the Millennium Development Goals are to be reached, the children?s agency warned, the cycle of negative gender stereotypes must be broken earlier in a child’s life rather than later.
The California Department of Education (CDE) and California County Superintendents Educational Services Association (CCSESA) announced today a $15.5 million investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to increase the number of students who graduate ready for college and work by strengthening the state?s district improvement plan and offering more support to struggling districts across the state.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and more than 20 international partners are today launching a comprehensive package of measures to help national authorities safeguard their populations from the dangers of counterfeit medicines.
For chocolates lover this is going to be a treat as researchers found through a study that a few bits of dark chocolate a day can have the same benefit as aspirin in reducing blood clots and preventing heart attacks.
Sickness due to infections affects some 1.4 million people worldwide despite one of the most powerful approaches to fighting the scourge also being the simplest that is cleaning hands every time a doctor or nurse sees a patient.
Obese patients are more likely to have a recurrence of colon cancer than their normal-weight counterparts and face an increased risk of dying from the disease, while it’s not clear that losing weight would improve their prognosis.
Several charities have accused rich countries of undermining a WTO agreement to improve access for the world’s poorest people to cheaper drugs against diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
Although children born to mothers who smoked during pregnancy are known to be at increased risk of developing asthma, ?few studies have investigated the role of active cigarette smoking on asthma onset during adolescence?, the researchers explain in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.