Dr Asel Sartbaeva, one of Central Asia’s first internationally-recognised female scientists, is busy developing a technology through which life-saving vaccines can be transported at minimal cost. (© WFS)

As she mixes several chemical compounds in a test tube, she meticulously takes notes to make sure she is tracking each stage of the experiment. After all, at this early stage in her research on silica nano-coating, each trial counts.

Every week we choose the best user comments on our posts in the social media. This week’s comments are mostly given to articles about women’s rights. Read the readers’ names and the articles’ titles here. Don’t forget to comment on our posts in Facebook and Twitter, and you might find your name in next week’s Comments of the Week!

© picture-alliance/ZUMAPRESS.com

“The nation as been split,” said one of Paraguay’s leading churchmen over the case of a pregnant 10-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather and denied an abortion. The argument over the girl has drawn unusually strong attention to the issues of child abuse and abortion, which is banned in the country. Read more here.

Mental health continues to remain a taboo topic in India despite the high suicide rates in the country. Roma Rajpal-Weiß, WTO Reporter spoke to Dr. Vikram Patel, renowned psychiatrist and the co-founder of NGO Sangath and the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine about the stigma attached to mental health in India and the measures that can be undertaken to give rich and the poor equal access to mental healthcare.

© AFP/Getty Images/M. Uz Zaman

Policemen in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, have been in the news this week after officers brutally beat and kicked a girl taking part in a protest against sexual harassment. The incident has been condemned in social media.

© Fotolia/lassedesignen

“The United Nations, the US, and countless other countries all know about what is happening to us. Everyone has acknowledged [the atrocities] publicly. We are peaceful people and we are being killed mercilessly,” Ameena Sawwan states.

A raging war in Syria has exposed countless women to mind-numbing violence. (© Russell Watkins/Department for International Development)

For Ameena Sawwan, the survivor of a chemical weapons attack in Syria, it was the Arab Spring that turned out to be the beginning of a nightmare in which she is trapped even today. What started off as peaceful protests against a repressive regime soon gave way to a series of retaliatory attacks by government forces. These days, a civil war rages in her country, a war  which has exposed countless citizens, particularly vulnerable women and children like Ameena and her little nieces and nephews, to mind-numbing violence.