I read with interest the study by Seidahmed et al 1 on the epidemiology of neural tube defects (NTDs). It has inspired me to throw light on the continuously growing health problem of NTDs in Iraq, and compare it with the data from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). I would like to address the following 3 points. First, Seidahmed et al 1 mentioned that the prevalence of NTDs was 1.2/1000 live bi...

CONTEXT The effects of war-zone deployment on neuropsychological health remain poorly understood. Neuropsychological performance deficits serve as sensitive measures of neural dysfunction and are often associated with psychosocial and occupational problems. Previous studies have not conducted objective neuropsychological assessments both before and after a major war-zone deployment. OBJECTIVE...

Iraq is abundant with natural resources and its geographical location makes it strategically important. It is composed of a mountainous region in the northeast and the vast Syrian Desert, inhabited by a few nomadic shepherds. In the southwest lies the heart of the country which is a fertile lowland region watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Most of the population is Muslim Arabs, divide...

In this study we apply classification methods for detecting subdialectal differences in Sorani Kurdish texts produced in different regions, namely Iran and Iraq. As Sorani is a low-resource language, no corpus including texts from different regions was readily available. To this end, we identified data sources that could be leveraged for this task to create a dataset of 200,000 sentences. Using...

The promotion of an operational network between hospitals and medical schools in Iraq and in Western countries is a primary humanitarian objective of international collaboration. As a consequence of a collaborative project between the Al Mansour Hospital for Pediatrics in Baghdad and the Pediatric Unit of Hematology of "La Sapienza" University, in Rome, in October 2003 a specific all-trans-reti...

Since 2004, the Republic of Iraq has undertaken a concerted effort to comply with all of its international obligations to prevent the proliferation and the use of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons. A centerpiece of this effort is Iraq's development of a National Biorisk Management System. The Iraqi National Monitoring Authority (INMA), which is responsible for CBRN ...

On January 22, 2004, the President of the AFL-CIO, John J. Sweeney, issued a statement emphasizing the need for instituting a new labor code in Iraq.1 He noted that, in addition to constitutional reform, it was necessary to bring about a fresh labor regime in the country.2 The Code in place prior to the invasion of Iraq had been the 1987 Code enacted by Saddam Hussein.3 This Code, in addition t...

Combat-related injuries have been well documented for centuries. More recently, injuries suffered by US service members in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in a high number of survivable conditions. Polytrauma care in this setting must take into account both the physical and psychological injuries suffered by returning wounded warriors. Catastrophizing may occur when previously healthy indivi...

Conclusions The highest incidence of allergy was recorded among refinery patients. The present study revealed that the percentages of 80 and 42 pathogenic strains were isolated from 74 and 39 allergic patients with respiratory infections from refinery and nonrefinery hospitalized patients respectively. The high incidence of asthma and respiratory infections in the oil refinery plant could be du...

The aim of this study in Iraq was to determine the sensitivity and specificity of a commercial ELISA test for detection of Giardia lamblia antigen in stool. Of 84 stool samples from children in Duhok governorate, 42 were positive and 42 negative for G. lamblia or other parasites by direct and indirect microscopic examination. The sensitivity of the ELISA test for detection of G. lamblia versus ...