The INFO Project Blog

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Stephanie Sinclair, one of global health’s most powerful lenswomen, has photographed children forced into marriage as young as eight. Her intimate portraits of girls in Nepal, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, first published in the the New York Times Magazine, have won accolades from UNICEF. Now, combined with priceless audio recordings of these girls’ stories, the images become yet more powerful in a The Bride Price: Consequences of Child Marriage Worldwide, a 6 minute video that you can watch on the International Center for Research on Women’s YouTube channel.

Experimenting with the Clusty.com search features (it searches blogs, wikipedia, and images as well as the Web) I stumbled upon an NPR broadcast on pending PEPFAR legislation in Congress.

A global health aid package worth tens of billions of dollars is being debated in the House of Representatives this week. Among the items under consideration is whether to integrate money for family planning into AIDS prevention efforts.

NPR’s Brenda Wilson reports that the proposal to integrate reproductive health services such as family planning into HIV prevention efforts is sometimes controversial with faith-based aid organizations such as the Catholic Relief Services.

Studies have shown that integrating these kind of services with HIV prevention and treatment takes careful strategy and execution. Intregration can save money and it can save lives, for example, by averting missed opportunities to counsel women about family planning.

The INFO Project culls the latest resources on integrating sexual and reproductive health services with HIV and puts everything online here. Stay tuned for the quarterly newsletter, with the latest on male circumcision, female-controlled FP methods such as microbicides, and other hot topics.

Thanks to 16 year-old television star Jamie Lynn Spears’s pregnancy, and the new movie Juno, teen sex has been appearing in chastising headlines of late. In many less developed countries, teen pregnancy is often the rule, not the exception. However the vast majority of sexual activity takes place within marriage-girls can´t Just Say No.

Early marriage–also referred to as child marriage, because the brides in countries like India and Ethiopia are as young as 5 years old–is a harmful traditional practice that can be emotionally devastating. In unstable and impoverished Afghanistan child brides are married to much older men. In the photo at right by Stephanie Sinclair, which was the UNICEF photo of 2007, a 40 year-old man sits next to his 11 year-old bride. Read the rest of this entry »

On this week’s BBC World Service Health Check, Nivedita Pathak reports on a new method to promote breast feeding:

The milk bank at JJ Hospital in Mumbai opened for business in April this year and has already collected 175 litres of milk. Every day, about ten women donate milk once or twice, using an electronic breast pump. Then it’s checked in the lab for infection, pasteurised and given to the babies who need it.

Also in this broadcast, Cambodian soap operas, billboards and interpersonal health worker training boosts breastfeeding.

For more resources on breastfeeding see the INFO Reports issue on the topic here.