French lessons

French lessons: leadership in Alzheimer's disease.

It is impossible to forecast anything at the beginning of 2009 about health policy in general, or Alzheimer’s disease (AD) specifically, that is not both optimistic and cautionary. Our new President, Barack Obama, who spent the campaign energizing the nation about prospects for change, is hunkered down with advisors tackling our financial and economic crises and remapping the nation’s foreign a...

French lessons on surveillance of communicable diseases.

Coronary disease THE FRENCH PARADOX: LESSONS FOR OTHER COUNTRIES

T he French paradox is the observation of low coronary heart disease (CHD) death rates despite high intake of dietary cholesterol and saturated fat. 2 The French paradox concept was formulated by French epidemiologists in the 1980s. France is actually a country with low CHD incidence and mortality (table 1). The mean energy supplied by fat was 38% in Belfast and 36% in Toulouse in 1985–86. More...

Warning about drinking during pregnancy: lessons from the French experience

BACKGROUND In France, since 2007, there is a compulsory warning recommending abstinence during pregnancy on every container of alcohol. Awareness of this warning, which consists of a small pictogram, is unknown. The aim of this study was to assess awareness of the warning and risk perceptions about prenatal drinking in pregnant and postpartum women. METHODS A cross-sectional survey was carrie...

Outbreak of chikungunya in the French Territories, 2006: lessons learned.