Harnessing their superlative sense of smell, a Tanzania-based organisation has trained the much-maligned rodents to detect landmines and diagnose TB — saving lives by a whisker
By Guy Kelly. Photographs by Mia Collis
In the pre-dawn glow of Morogoro, a town in eastern Tanzania, Peter Parker is preparing for a morning’s graft. It is quiet and crisp, the sunrise postponed by the height of the surrounding Uluguru Mountains, but Parker and his roommates — colleagues, really — have been restless in their dormitory for much of the night.
They are in training, and like all eager cadets, by the time…
Young women in Africa are up to 14 times more likely to contract HIV than boys of the same age. But, in Uganda, a complex economy built on transactional sex is hindering efforts to keep the virus at bay
By Paul Nuki. Photographs by Jason Florio
Bright and proper in a vivid print dress, Fauza has been offered the only lucky break she has ever had — and seems determined to make the most of it.
If it works out, her circumstances and those of her baby daughter will be lifted, perhaps transformed. …
More than 800 children in Pakistan face a potential death sentence after being infected with HIV. Now families are demanding answers
By Ben Farmer. Pictures by Saiyna Bashir
One-by-one Irshad Khatoon points out the children in her family who have tested positive.
In the cramped brick compound she shares with five related families, 22 people have been told they have HIV. Seventeen of those are children.
None had ever heard of the virus before April, or knew how it could be caught. …
Eight years on from the tsunami and nuclear meltdown, much of Japan’s Fukushima province remains derelict and deserted. But are the radiation fears stopping people returning misplaced?
By Rob Gilhooly. Pictures by Simon Townsley
There was a chilling silence in the town of Tomioka in the days after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Shoes were left in porches, half-read newspapers lay abandoned next to cups of tea, long gone cold. As night closed in on the seaside town, lights glared out from a few bare windows, while news of the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima №1 Nuclear Power Plant just six miles away drifted from a solitary radio.
Nobody was home.
Eight years on, little has changed. Before March 11, 2011 — the day the tsunami…
Up to one in 370 Indians suffers from XP, a genetic condition which causes skin to burn and take on a blistering, scaly appearance. But corneal transplants are bringing hope to those living in the shadows
By Joe Wallen. Photographs by Simon Townsley
A s the sun sets on the poor Muslim neighbourhood of Jeedimetla in the city of Hyderabad, life begins anew.
The faithful wander out to answer the call to prayer and so too do those cursed with Xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), a rare genetic condition that makes the sun’s rays lethal.
For Ameer Hamza it is the best and worst of times. …
During the 1980s AIDS crisis, misinformation and hysteria were rife. But Lord Fowler realised the only way to combat the disease was through prevention – even if that meant going against the advice of Number 10
By Anne Gulland
In the mid 1980s there was a mystery illness laying waste to young, gay men — there was no treatment or cure and doctors were unsure how to cope with a disease which carried a certain death sentence.
By the end of 1985, 275 patients had contracted what we now know as Aids, 144 of whom had died. And the Department…
Colombia’s great Amazon rainforest — a ‘vital lung’ of the planet — is being cleared for grazing cattle by an area bigger than Los Angeles every year
By Joe Shute. Photographs by David Rose
Calamar is the town that cocaine built. Until recently ruled by armed guerrillas in the heart of bandit country, this frontier outpost of 5,000 or so inhabitants is situated quite literally at the end of the road in Colombia’s remote Guaviare province, where the highway turns to dust and the Amazon rainforest looms all around.
First established as a settlement to harvest rubber, in the 1980s Calamar and its surrounds became a stronghold for cocaine production, overseen by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, otherwise known as FARC, Latin America’s oldest and largest…
Nearly one billion of the world’s population go hungry, while two billion eat too much, using up the planet’s precious resources
By Josh Wilson
Fixing the world’s “faulty food system” is increasingly being recognised as one of the key ways to fight climate change as well as tackle high rates of both malnutrition and obesity.
Each year 821 million people suffer from hunger — a figure that is rising despite an increase in global food production. And at the same time, around two billion people are eating too much of the wrong type of food.
The world is also facing an unprecedented climate emergency, with temperatures hurtling towards a dangerous tipping point.
The United Nations report concluded that eating less meat…
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