Arsenic contamination of groundwater is a problem worldwide, and the Terai Basin in the southern plains of Nepal is no exception. The Department of Water Supply and Sanitation of Nepal, with assistance from the World Health Organization (WHO), surveyed three districts of eastern Terai for the first time in 1999, and found that arsenic concentration exceeded the 10 ppb guideline recommended by W...

BACKGROUND Health literacy has been linked to health outcomes across population groups around the world. Nepal, a low income country, experiences the double burden of highly prevalent communicable as well as non-communicable diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO) has positioned health literacy as a key mechanism to meet the health-related Sustainable Development Goal (SDG3). However, the...

BACKGROUND Gastric cancer is the second commonest cause of cancer related mortality worldwide. Though its incidence is more in Eastern Asia, it is increasing in the South Asian subcontinent. The diagnosis of early gastric cancer (EGC) confined to the mucosa or submucosa, is an important concern due to a better outcome at this stage where five year survival rates could increase by 90 percent. Th...

Introduction The number of people travelling to high altitude regions, especially in South America, Nepal and India, has risen enormously in the past 10 years. Alongside this increasing popularity of altitude trekking there has been an increase in the number of service expeditions. In October 2000, a Joint Service Expedition spent a month in Nepal attempting to scale Lobuche East, one of the tr...

The article reviews information on the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS and behavioural networking to examine the role of population mobility in spreading HIV across the Indo-Nepal border. Documents were collected through a systematic search of electronic databases and web-based information resources, and the review focuses on studies about types of the virus, prevalence of HIV, and sexual and injectin...

BACKGROUND Tobacco consumption (TC) among youths poses significant public health problem in developing countries. This study utilized the data of Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS), 2007 to examine and compare youth TC behavior in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. METHODS The GYTS covered a total of 2,242 Bangladeshi, 1,444 Nepalese and 1,377 Sri-Lankan youths aged 13-15 years. They represente...

BACKGROUND To identify potential environmental drivers of Japanese Encephalitis virus (JE) transmission in Nepal, we conducted an ecological study to determine the spatial association between 2005 Nepal JE incidence, and climate, agricultural, and land-cover variables at district level. METHODS District-level data on JE cases were examined using Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA) ...

Large Himalayan earthquakes expose rapidly growing populations of millions of people to high levels of seismic hazards, in particular in northeast India and Nepal. Calibrating vulnerability models specific to this region of the world is therefore crucial to the development of reliable mitigation measures. Here, we reevaluate the >15,700 casualties (8500 in Nepal and 7200 in India) from the Mw ~...

BACKGROUND Rapidly increasing temperatures in the mountain region of Nepal and recent reports of dengue fever and lymphatic filariasis cases from mountainous areas of central Nepal prompted us to study the spatio-temporal distribution of the vectors of these two diseases along an altitudinal transect in central Nepal. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We conducted a longitudinal study in four di...

nonfarm activities play an important role in the determination of rural household income, consumption expenditure, and household food security. however, much less studies have been devoted to the factors that influence nonfarm income diversification by farm household in developing countries. using cross-sectional data and a probit model, this study attempts to determine the factors influencing ...