Juan Convers

With five votes in favor and four against, Colombia's constitutional court issued a ruling yesterday decriminalizing abortion in this South American republic. Given that like many of its neighbors, Colombia is a Catholic country, where the church and right-wing parties exert a strong influence in the judicial decisions, this is undoubtedly a landmark ruling that continues a trend that has already set its pace in Mexico and Argentina.

I am aware that the issue of abortion is quite contentious and generates many conflicting opinions, but that a woman who wishes to have an abortion (and who is going to do it in any case), can do it in a safe way, is a huge achievement, Well done!

I saw an editorial piece last weekend on the guardian where the author asked the question: If condoms are OK for Zika, why not Aids, Pope Francis? and I thought it's true the HIV Virus / AIDS infection is rarely mentioned in the news nowadays. There have been a huge progress in the HIV / Aids treatments, since the times I was a medical student, but the prevalence of HIV (the percentage of a population that is affected with a the virus at a given time), is still bad, particularly in Subsaharian Africa:

The Statistical Office of Berlin-Brandenburg publish some very interesting reports including: Einwohnerinnen und Einwohner im Land Berlin (Residents in the State of Berlin, 31 December 2014). One of the remarkable sections of this document, is about the country of origin, of the foreign residents living in Berlin. It offers a break down per continents, regions and countries, so I was curious about the top countries in South America:

I'm not surprised to discover Brazil (3948 people) is the top #1 on the list but I wasn't expecting that Colombia (1527) was going to be second one in that region. Interesting.

I have to confess I have never heard about the Zika virus, until it started to read about it in some Colombian newspapers articles a couple of weeks ago. The outbreak of this virus in South America and the Caribbean has been in the international news lately because the infection in pregnant women is unfortunately associated to microcephaly cases.

The incidence of those malformations have increased substantially in Brazil and it's apparently related to the Zika, so there are now travel warnings in place to the countries affected by this virus: