BACKGROUND The impacts of optimal infant feeding practices on diarrhoea have been documented in some developing countries, but not in countries with high diarrhoea mortality as reported by the World Health Organisation/United Nations Children's Fund. We aimed to investigate the association between infant feeding practices and diarrhoea in sub-Saharan African countries with high diarrhoea mortal...

Editorials 387 With a rapidly expanding consumer market , African countries have new opportunities to strengthen their manufacturing sectors. The current climate of rising foreign investment will boost national economies and has the potential to benefit the health sector too. African countries now have a historic opportunity to free themselves from a vicious cycle of poverty, disease and depend...

Background: Over 50% of people diagnosed with breast cancer in most African countries present late and report to the hospital with advanced stage III and IV disease, a major reason for the poor survival rate. This study reviewed studies focusing on patient-related factors or reasons contributing to the late presentation or delayed diagnosis of breast cancer in Africa. Method: A rigorous literat...

AIM This study reviewed grey literature to assess clinical nursing and midwifery research conducted in southern and eastern African countries over the past decade. BACKGROUND The shortage of published nursing research from African countries severely limits the ability of practicing nurses and midwives to base clinical decisions on solid evidence. However, little is known regarding unpublished...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to assess whether randomized controlled trials conducted in Africa with collaborators from outside Africa were more closely associated with health conditions that have a burden of disease that is of specific importance to Africa than with conditions of more general global importance or with conditions important to developed countries. We also assessed whether the sour...

There is limited information on national health expenditures, services, and outcomes in African countries during the 1990s. We intend to make statistical information available for national level comparisons. National level data were collected from numerous international databases, and supplemented by national household surveys and World Bank expenditure reviews. The results were tabulated and a...

It remains unclear why there is such marked variation in the severity of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic between African countries. The prevalence of HIV infection has reached high levels in many parts of southern Africa but in most countries of West Africa the levels are much lower. Although there is good evidence that sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and genital ulcers i...

A major purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of poor governance or ‘state fragility’ in African countries on their overall economic and agrarian performance. The results of our econometric analysis show that a higher level of public security is conducive to lower levels of conflict, whether of an ethnic, religious and regional nature. It also corresponds with greater agricultural val...

female genital mutilation in different parts of the african continent isconsidered as one of the vast territory’s social problems. this social problem whichis accounted as an old tradition in different countries of the african continent hashad so many unpleasant physical and mental effects on urban and rural africanwomen during recent centuries. throughout recent decades, considerable effortsha...

BACKGROUND Transthyretin (TTR) pV142I (rs76992529-A) is one of the 113 variants in the human TTR gene associated with systemic amyloidosis. It results from a G to A transition at a CG dinucleotide in the codon for amino acid 122 of the mature protein (TTR V122I). The allele frequency is 0.0173 in African Americans. METHODS PCR-based assays to genotype 2767 DNA samples obtained from participan...