News headlines in April 2011, page 8

Poverty, lack of access to education and taboos about sexuality have hampered campaigns for the prevention and control of HIV/AIDS among indigenous communities in Guatemala. These constraints have led to the development of new ways of communicating vital information, like theatre.

The accident could have served as a wake-up call to the whole of humanity. Twenty-five years ago, on Apr. 26 1986, disaster struck at the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear complex in the Ukrainian state of the former Soviet Union.

Elections for the governors of two states in Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north have been postponed because of violence, officials have announced.

A small army of volunteers from local non-governmental organisations has fanned out across Burma to inoculate 3.4 million children from a rare strain of the polio virus that has re-emerged three years after the country was declared polio free.

It was almost 6am on April 26, 1986, when Alexey Breus left his flat in Pripyat and headed towards Chernobyl’s infamous reactor number 4, unaware that it had been five hours since his workplace had witnessed the beginning of the world’s worst nuclear disaster: 'Only when I arrived with the bus I saw the destruction,' he told IPS. 'My hair stood up.'

When the massive 9.0 magnitude quake and tidal waves hit their little coastal village on March 11, Mariline Shoji and her husband lost everything they owned.

A raging insurgency in Thailand’s southernmost provinces has become a breeding ground for another potential killer — the malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquito — that is threatening to wipe out the gains Thailand has achieved in fighting the disease.

The accident could have served as a wake-up call to the whole of humanity. Twenty-five years ago, on Apr. 26 1986, disaster struck at the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear complex in the Ukrainian state of the former Soviet Union.

Amidst the political upheavals across the Arab world, a new U.N. study highlights the need for neurological health services to monitor brain disorders among displaced people.

Palestine experiences a boom in tourism, as herds of tourists storm the cities of Jerusalem, Jericho and Bethlehem. Meanwhile, the West Bank city of Nablus, rich in historic and religious sites, hardly attracts visitors.