JOHANNESBURG, 15 March 2010 (IRIN) - Tropical storm Hubert battered Madagascar on 10 March, cutting off entire communities in the southeast from emergency aid. A limited amount of relief - mainly food items - has been flown in because of damage to infrastructure, and aid agencies are trying to reach people in need of assistance via the river systems.

JOHANNESBURG, 15 March 2010 (IRIN) - Cholera has claimed the lives of over 40 people in Mozambique and ongoing flooding throughout the central and northern parts of the country could "aggravate" the problem, aid agencies say.

JOHANNESBURG, 15 March 2010 (IRIN) - Zimbabwe's food security has improved but is still "precarious" and "vulnerable to sudden shocks", according to the latest update by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

JOHANNESBURG, 15 March 2010 (IRIN) - New research suggests that the poor knowledge and attitudes of doctors and healthcare workers in South Africa are limiting access to preventative tuberculosis (TB) therapy.

DUBAI, 15 March 2010 (IRIN) - Floods have killed 34 people in Aksu District, Almaty Province, southeastern Kazakhstan, according to the government-run Kazinform news agency on 15 March. Hundreds have been displaced and a further 926 evacuated to the provincial capital of Taldykorgan, it said.

ADDIS ABABA, 15 March 2010 (IRIN) - Ethiopia has made some headway towards improving maternal and child health, but more needs to be done to reduce the high number of preventable deaths, says an official. “I know that we have gaps in effectively addressing maternal health, but previous assessments are showing us that if we [make a] concerted effort, we can achieve goal number five of the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals],” Kebede Worku, State Minister for Health, said.

NAIROBI, 15 March 2010 (IRIN) - Five days of fighting in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, have left residents without food, cut off from their homes and unable to bury their dead, civil society leaders in the city said.

DHAKA, 15 March 2010 (IRIN) - A new salt-resistant paddy - BRRI Dhan 47 - is offering hope to coastal farmers in southern Bangladesh whose crops are affected by climate change, say experts.

DAKAR, 15 March 2010 (IRIN) - IRIN has asked a range of experts over the past year why malnutrition is recurrent in Niger even after decades of donor support and government programmes. Two of the hardest-hit regions were focused on - Diffa, which has borders Chad, and Zinder, which borders Nigeria.

AWKA, 15 March 2010 (IRIN) - Interceptions and convictions of human traffickers and smugglers have risen year-on-year in Nigeria since the government passed legislation to ban the trade in 2005, but the volume of trafficking is still high and progress on convictions needs to speed up, say government officials.

KABUL, 14 March 2010 (IRIN) - At least 240 schools have reopened mostly in the volatile south and southeast of Afghanistan over the past 18 months, the Ministry of Education (MoE) has reported. The MoE said 18 schools have been reopened in Ghazni Province, central Afghanistan, over the past few months.

JOHANNESBURG, 12 March 2010 (IRIN) - As the level of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, we will probably see fewer but more intense storms, a group of the world's top experts on tropical cyclones and climate change have concluded.

DAKAR, 12 March 2010 (IRIN) - This year there are less than half the reported meningitis infections than in the same period in 2009, but more patients are dying - 13 percent in 2010 versus 8 percent in 2009 - according to the World Health Organization (WHO) Multi-Disease Surveillance Centre in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, which tracks 14 countries prone to meningitis outbreaks between Senegal and Ethiopia.

JOHANNESBURG, 12 March 2010 (IRIN) - The executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Michel Kazatchkine, sat down with IRIN/PlusNews at the launch of the organization's 2010 report, where he answered some hard questions on what may be a turning point in HIV/AIDS funding.

NAIROBI, 12 March 2010 (IRIN) - Government troops - the FARDC - in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are to blame for much of the epidemic of sexual violence in the east of the country, according to US and UN reports detailing war crimes and possible crimes against humanity by various groups there.

BOSASSO, 12 March 2010 (IRIN) - In an attempt to deal with a growing influx of migrants, authorities in Somalia's autonomous region of Puntland are adopting new measures to stop people from undertaking the hazardous journey to Yemen, officials said.

ADDIS ABABA, 12 March 2010 (IRIN) - On stage in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, Mestihet Temane, 27, enacts the story of how, after the death of her parents, a young woman winds up alone on the streets with no money, no confidence and no support.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, 12 March 2010 (IRIN) - Elderly people need more attention in the response to January's earthquake in Haiti and more appreciation of the role they can play in the relief effort, say aid workers.

NIAMEY/ZINDER, 11 March 2010 (IRIN) - A severe food and malnutrition crisis is looming in Niger, according to aid agencies. More than 20,000 under-five children are being treated for malnutrition nationwide and at least another 200,000 are at risk of severe malnutrition, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

JOHANNESBURG, 11 March 2010 (IRIN) - Most food crop cultivation in Africa is rain-fed, but climate change is affecting vital rainfall patterns and pushing up temperatures, diminishing yields that could halve in some countries by 2020. This warning has been widely quoted since it first appeared in a synthesis report for policy-makers in 2007 by the authoritative UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).