Blogs

Subhan Khotoon is a 42 year old widow with eight children. She used to live on the banks of the Indus eking out a living from selling some vegetables and from what her eldest son could earn as a casual labourer. She had to flee her home as the Indus flooded, leaving everything behind. She now lives here in Kotri Girls High School in Kotri, near Hyderabad in Sindh province in southern Pakistan.

I left home in Maynooth at 4 am on Tuesday  morning and here I  am back again in Pakistan at 4am on Wednesday morning having travelled via England and Dubai.

Get into the festival spirit with Trócaire at Electric Picnic this weekend and join the céilí with the local Comhaltas group as they Trad for Trócaire or Spin the Wheel to see if you are 1 in 6 of the world’s population and help us highlight the outrageous scandal that is global hunger.

One of the partners Trocaire is working with in Haiti is the Sisters of the Order of St Joseph of Cluny.  The Sisters have been present in Haiti since 1984, they run schools and charitable projects and all are committed to working for the good of the Haitian people.

Cathy Ayer, Trocaire Programme Officer, Port au Prince, Haiti.

There are 20,000 people at the 18th International AIDS conference, moving  between 21 huge session rooms, exhibition halls and networking zones.  The enormity of it all is over powering but then so are the figures  that make up the pandemic itself - 33,4 million people currently living with HIV worldwide, 7,400 new infections every day, 5000 deaths every day.
The most heart wrenching figures are those that describe the situation of children: 2,4 million children already living with HIV every day,  1,200 new born babies infected with HIV  every day and more than 1

Summer at the seaside - what could be better?  Why not come and meet the Trócaire campaigns team during the Festival of World Cultures in the lovely coastal town of Dun Laoghaire this weekend!

Nicola Ndovi, Malawi Gender Programme Officer at the International AIDS Conference

The title of this blog isn’t meant to be misleading – to date there is no cure for HIV and AIDS!
During the 2010 AIDS Conference in Vienna however there has been much discussion of scientific progress towards a cure and even a vaccine for HIV and AIDS. Achieving this goal however remains challenging. HIV/ AIDS is a complex disease that requires complex solutions.

Your gut instinct and that rational part of your brain would tell you that laws are a good thing, that they are brought in to protect people’s rights, particularly the rights of the most vulnerable. However sometimes laws brought in with the best of intentions, do not always have the best of consequences.

AIDS 2010 should be the year that we are celebrating universal access to prevention, care and treatment for all– a target agreed by World Leaders in 2005 and reaffirmed at the UN High Level Meeting on HIV in 2006. Instead we are discussing flat lining of funding and pitching one disease against another.  Few would argue with Bill Clinton and Bill Gates as they call for greater efficiencies in the response to HIV and the assertion that every dollar wasted contributes to a life lost. But efficiencies alone will not solve the funding gap.