Supported projects

TBILISI - This article aims to map the thriving surrogacy business between Israel and Georgia, with a particular focus on the role of women in this increasingly global and more lucrative baby business.

BELGIUM - The share of the pharmaceutical sector in the Belgian economy is large. According to the organization pharma.be in 2017, the sector employed 35,711 people and our country exported for a total value of 40.5 billion euros of medicines and vaccines worldwide, which is about 10% of Belgian exports. 

BRUSSELS - Vulnerable Bulgarian women are coming to Belgium and the Netherlands to live with elderly people who prefer to stay at home rather than go to a nursing home. They will care for these elderly people during the last years or months of their lives. This research is a case study of the practices of Seniorcare24, a major provider of these services in the Low Countries, and the fate of the caregivers seconded by this company from Bulgaria.

You are what you eat, as the saying goes. But you're also what you smear. Through our skin, all kinds of things - creams, shampoos, make-up and other substances - partly penetrate our body. Yet not many people know what's in their daily dose of cosmetics.

BELGIUM - Fourteen years ago, Karen * gave birth to a daughter. A girl like other girls, but with a Y-chromosome, that's how Karen describes it herself. This Y-chromosome caused her daughter to develop testicles during pregnancy. Her body was insensitive to the testosterone that the testicles produce, so she developed as a girl. Coincidentally, Karen knew that something like that sometimes happens. Shortly before the delivery, she saw a documentary about children born with a variation in sex characteristics. She was already startled by the lack of specific support for parents of these children. After the birth of her own child, she experienced it herself.

ANTWERP - In a time of growing polarization, geo-political instability and a reduced confidence in institutions, there are people who want real change. Bottom-up seems to be a major shift in the political landscape. Citizens solve problems without waiting for decision-making. This can be the start of a new power structure and will thoroughly change our policy.

PORT MORESBY - Jimmy Hendrickx traveled to a remote tribe in Papua in the footsteps of the Belgian missionary Petrus Vertenten. He worked there about a hundred years ago and saved the tribe from extermination, for which he is still honored.

BRUSSELS - During his training to become a general practitioner, Egmont Ruelens met several bus and tram drivers with stress complaints and physical problems. They flirt with a burn-out. 

GHENT - Research by Apache shows how 'chronic fatigue specialist' Kenny De Meirleir sells his patients, through numerous small companies, often controversially expensive tests and medication that he prescribes himself.

TEHERAN - Sex before marriage is punishable by lashes and incarceration. Adultery even with the death penalty. And that is why promiscuous sexual behavior in Iran is the norm. Two journalists, with the support of the Pascal Decroos Fund, made a captivating undercover report from the underbelly of Tehran.

BRUSSELS - "You have cancer" is a diagnosis with a tremendous psychological impact. But not only for you, but also for your life partner.

KABUL - Each year, 115 tonnes of heroin from Afghan poppy fields is exported to Europe. Who wins? Who loses? And what is the impact of lucrative drug smuggling on people who live along this Balkan route?

BRUSSELS - The four-part series SPUL investigates what doping use does to an athlete. Instead of judging or condemning - which is usually the case - SPUL goes in search of what happens to people when they start doping.

MECHELEN - In April 2015 it will have been exactly five years since the start of the scandal involving Bruges bishop Roger Vangheluwe, who was accused of having sexually abused several children. In the book Through my fault Machteld Libert, journalist for Flemish public broadcaster VRT, investigates how sexual abuse in the Church could have happened.

THE HAGUE - More than 60,000 people in the Netherlands are infected with salmonella every year. The resistant ESBL bacterium has been found on three-quarters of the chicken meat there. Is our food as safe as manufacturers and ministers claim?

DE HAAN - Irem, Velten and Isabel. Photographer Yann Bertrand made portraits of them for a year in the preventorium in De Haan, at a pivotal moment in their lives. A thirty-year-old with cystic fibrosis, and two obese teenagers.

HANOI - Last year's publication of a scientific paper announcing Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier had succeeded in growing an airborne avian influenza virus in his lab in Rotterdam caused a big stir. Though inherently risky, such research was necessary, he argued, because it would teach us which naturally occuring viruses to look out for.

BRUSSELS - Antibiotics have long been a sort of wonder drug that allowed for a significant decrease in mortality from all kinds of infectious diseases. But there is one disadvantage to antibiotics: bacteria develop a resitance for them. In The End of Antibiotics journalist Rinke van den Brink puts these imperceptible bruisers under the microscope. He speaks with scores of international specialists and asks them for possible solutions, because antibiotic resistance is a worldwide problem.

NEW DELHI - According to The Times of India, the medical tourism sector in India adds up to at least a hundred thousand patients per year - and an amount of dollars many times higher. Consequently, the country was convulsed when in the Summer of 2010 British microbiologist Timothy Walsh announced he had discovered a new antibiotic-resistant gene in the capital New Delhi.

BRUSSELS - Can we expect pill manufacturers to provide objective information? This is the first in a series of articles on the influence of the pharmaceutical industry in Europe.

JOHANNESBURG - South Africa attracts a large number of migrants and refugees from across the African continent. However, the country lacks the institutions required to manage or accommodate this steady influx.

BRUSSELS/TARGIA - Asbestos is the perfect model of a substance mined, industrially exploited and widely marketed as a miracle material without proper research into its long-term effects on health. Indeed, it went on being promoted long after it was recognised as dangerous.

BRUSSELS – Drinking water is arguably one of the most strictly regulated foodstuffs. After all, it is vital for life and consumed in large quantities every day. The water that European water companies pump through their pipes is clean. But what about the water that comes out at the other end of the pipe?

BRUSSELS - The outgoing Belgian finance minister, Didier Reynders, has secured eight secret contracts with tobacco manufacturers to fund the Rodin Foundation's anti-smoking campaigns.

BRUSSELS – Marleen Teugels came face to face with the suffering of ailing Balkan veterans almost by chance. Shocked by their stories, she has delved ever deeper into the alien military world since the autumn of 1999. She has gradually come to realise that these complaints, obscure files and horrific facts form part of a single, larger narrative. It is about the insignificance of human life. Everything must give way to blind doctrine and economic and political interests. Soldiers and civilians are equally irrelevant.