While almost all Rwandan health care facilities offer services for sick children and about three-fourths offer antenatal care and family planning, the quality of care needs improvement, according to the newly released 2007 Rwanda Service Provision Assessment Survey (RSPA). Poor infection control, lack of client counseling, and frequent stock outs of essential drugs are the major concerns. These problems are found nationwide, according to the survey of 538 facilities.

Twenty-five percent of women and 32 percent of men have hypertension reports the 2007 Ukraine Demographic and Health Survey. The majority of these women and men are unaware of their hypertensive status. Hypertension increases dramatically as women and men age. Over half of women and men age 45 and older have some form of hypertension, indicating that high blood pressure is a serious public health problem in Ukraine.

Across the developing world, thousands of young adults do not know how to protect themselves from HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and unwanted pregnancies, according to a new global study on youth. Only about a third of young women in Egypt, Jordan, and Indonesia, for example, know that using condoms can reduce the risk of HIV infection. In most of the 33 countries studied, less than a third of young women know when they are fertile during their monthly cycles.   

A new Macro International/MEASURE DHS study challenges widely held beliefs about “slim disease,” as HIV was once called.  In a study of women in 12 sub-Saharan African countries, authors found that in 10 countries, HIV infection is higher among overweight women than among underweight women.  HIV prevalence is highest among underweight women only in Malawi. 

More Namibians are getting tested for HIV, young people are waiting longer to start sexual activity, and use of condoms has increased, according to the new 2006-07 Namibia Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) just released today. At the same time, the HIV epidemic continues to ravage the population. Adult mortality has increased, and one in four children is orphaned or sharing households with very ill adults.