In mid-October, the Maldives became the first country globally to achieve ‘triple elimination’ of mother to child transmission of HIV, syphilis and hepatitis B. The island nation had already successfully eliminated transmission of HIV and syphilis in 2019. Since then it has expanded national healthcare provisions including universal antenatal screening, timely treatment, safe delivery practices and postnatal follow-up care to target hepatitis B. Thanks to this significant investment in maternal and child health, the World Health Organization is one step closer to its worldwide goal of ensuring that every child can be born free from these preventable diseases by 2030.
Alan Bates, a prominent campaigner for justice for workers impacted by the UK Post Office scandal, has been awarded a multi-million-pound settlement with the government. Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 Post Office managers – known as subpostmasters – were wrongly convicted of fraud, false accounting and theft, due to faults in the Post Office’s Horizon computer system. While all convictions were overturned last year, and Bates has finally been compensated after over two decades of activism, over 3,000 compensation claims remain outstanding.
