Familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) is an autosomal recessive disease characterized by recurrent episodes of fever and serosal, synovial, or cutaneous inflammation, caused by a dysfunction of pyrin as a result of mutation within the MEFV gene. It occurs mainly among Mediterranean and Middle Eastern populations, including Jews, Arabs, and Turks. However, FMF cases have been reported outside the M...

Help is needed to close the gaps in knowledge dissemination and access One of the current barriers to international knowledge-sharing is the assortment of obstacles to publication that non-native users of English from resource-limited settings must overcome. 1 In some countries, efforts to build research capacity are hampered by limited access to English-language resources for the professional ...

BACKGROUND Local and regional scientific journals are important factors in bridging gaps in health knowledge translation in low-and middle-income countries. We assessed indexing, citations and publishing standards of journals from the Eastern Mediterranean region. METHODS For journals from 22 countries in the collection of the Index Medicus for the Eastern Mediterranean Region (IMEMR), we ana...

Our aim was to systematically identify and compare how generic medications, as defined by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), World Health Organization (WHO), and European Medicines Agency (EMA), are classified and defined by regulatory agencies around the world. We focused on emerging markets and selected the most populated countries in each of the WHO regions: Africa, the Americas, Eas...

Global measures to eradicate polio began in 1988; as of 2014, four of six World Health Organization (WHO) regions have been certified polio-free. Within the two endemic regions (African and Eastern Mediterranean), Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have never interrupted transmission of wild poliovirus (WPV) (1). The primary means of detecting poliovirus transmission is surveillance for acute f...

Why is physical activity important? Physical activity is critical for population health. There is overwhelming evidence that physical inactivity is a risk factor for noncommunicable diseases, premature death and disability. It is responsible for 3.2 million deaths globally each year and is estimated to be the main cause of around 27% of diabetes, 30% of ischaemic heart disease and 21–25% of bre...

An analysis of suicide and homicide rates was made for countries of the Eastern Mediterranean Region using global burden disease data for 2000. The suicide/homicide ratio by age, sex and country level of income was calculated by dividing the suicide rate by the sum of the suicide and homicide rate. Males were more often victims of homicide whilst females were more often victims of suicide. For ...

This paper reviews global data on caesarean section (CS) focusing on Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) countries for which data could be obtained. CS rates in the EMR tend to average around 10%. The data, however, are often not representative of the whole country, being mostly hospital rather than community based. Global and regional CS trends, determinants, and outcomes are presented. Controv...