While global HIV funding has stayed flat in recent years, poorer countries have quietly been putting more of their own money into financing the HIV response. 'Something very interesting has been happening' in Africa, Bernhard Schwartländer, director of strategy at UNAIDS told a plenary session at the 19th International AIDS Conference in Washington DC. Treatment numbers are rising despite stagnant funding. 'A lot of very clever and dedicated people are working very hard in making sure that services are delivered more efficiently, and...more people receive HIV services with the same amount of money.'

An estimated one million people in Madagascar are diabetic, but only about half of them know it. Finding the other half presents a major challenge for this large, island nation in which 80 per cent of the population live in rural areas where few people have ever heard of this chronic and potentially deadly disease. With the country’s underfunded public health sector barely functioning, this task has mainly fallen to the Madagascan Diabetes Association which dispatches its doctors and nurses to the provinces to conduct blood sugar tests and raise awareness at fairs, schools and health centres.

In 2008, Egypt reached an agreement with the US-based Monsanto Corporation to import, grow and sell the company's genetically-modified maize. The first shipment of 70 tons arrived in Egypt in December 2010 and was planted in ten governorates without restriction on planting. The second and most recent shipment of 40 tons arrived in January 2012, but was seized by the Ministry of Agriculture because it was not properly approved. 'The January shipment has been imported without the formal approval from the Ministry of Environment, the agency that should approve imported genetically-modified organisms (GMOs),' said Osama El Tayeb, a microbiology and immunology professor.

An independent, global medical and humanitarian organization says African nations are not receiving adequate international funding to fight HIV/AIDS, leaving them to face catastrophic consequences without enough medication. Experts at Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, said Congo is only able to supply anti-retroviral drugs to 15 per cent of the people needing them and 'patients are literally dying on our doorstep'. In a statement released in Johannesburg ahead of the United Nations world AIDS conference in Washington starting 22 July, the organization said countries worst affected by the pandemic were the least able to provide 'the best science' available to fight it.