Contemporary Issues in Public Health in North Africa and the Middle East

The papers in this book answer the call by scholars in the fields of Public Health, Community Health, Environmental Health and Safety, Medicine, Bio-Statistics, and Decision Science, as well as the call by political actors, policy experts, and various world bodies dealing with health and safety in North Africa and the Middle East, to address the intellectual lacuna left by the dearth of scholarship on contemporary health, environmental, and safety issues in the above-mentioned regions of the world. What is unique about this edited volume is the extent to which the authors have been careful in incorporating the general public''s opinions about the various public health and environmental health issues as well as the unique views of the different genders. The topics covered are broad and the depth is indisputably outstanding. Important topics dealt with include HIV and AIDS, diabetes, hepatitis B and C, as well as water and it''s associated environmental, agricultural, and health impact. Even more important and innovative about this volume is the attempt by the authors to examine real and/or actual views of the research populations on environmental and public health issues based on participants'' their religion; that is, whether the Islamic religion plays any significant role, for example, in determining the main characteristics of the diabetes epidemic in Islamic countries world-wide in general, and in the Arabian Peninsula in particular. There is no doubt that this volume is a pathfinder in its geographic breath of covering two politically important sub-regions of the world -- North Africa and the Middle East. Even more important is the detailed attention the volume devotes to Hepatitis B and C, especially, its impact on migration. Most of the contributors are distinguished in the subject area thereby making the volume authentic and most highly respectable.