For almost three decades, the banker, journalist—and occasional poet—Michel Chiha (1891-1951) constructed, through pages of his newspaper, Le Jour, a possibilist approach to Lebanese nationhood that was directly influential in configuration National Pact and, ultimately, independence. However, and despite prominent role thought played construction ‘Lebanese formula’, work has been sorely overse...

OBJECTIVES To measure the preference regarding disclosure of a serious diagnosis, and its determinants, of the Lebanese public. DESIGN AND SETTING Non-random sample survey of 400 persons interviewed in health care facilities in Beirut in 1995. RESULTS Forty-two per cent of respondents generally preferred truth not to be disclosed directly to patients. Preference for disclosure was associate...

The role of confessionalism in the Lebanese healthcare sector, especially since the resolution of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), has yet to discussed at length in reproductive health research. Using biopolitical and structural violence models to describe how community leaders in two low-income neighbourhoods in Beirut describe reproductive healthcare - specifically through judgments of per...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the association of the 2 intracellular adhesion molecules-1 (ICAM-1) gene polymorphisms [thymidine/cytidine (T/C) 469 and guanosine/adenosine (G/A) 241] in Behçets disease in Lebanon. METHODS We initiated the study in July 2003, and carried out the work in the research laboratory of Beirut Arab University, Beirut, Lebanon. We extracted the DNA by glass fiber matrix mi...

In order to evaluate for the first time, the serological prevalence of Schmallenberg virus (SBV) and other Simbu group viruses in Lebanon, sheep originating from 15 Lebanese regions were sampled in September 2016. A total number of 750 serum samples from Awassi sheep were tested by ELISA for viral nucleoprotein antibodies. From the sampled animals, 122 animals were seropositive to SBV/Simbu gro...

This paper studies the structure of foreign-accented read English speech. A system for accent identification is constructed by combining linguistic theory with statistical analysis. Results demonstrate that the linguistic theory is reflected in real speech data and its application improves accent identification. The work discussed here combines and applies previous research in language identifi...

This paper investigates the role of temporal and non-temporal cues in the distinction between singleton and geminate medial consonants in Lebanese Arabic. Twenty male and female speakers were recorded producing a word-list with medial singleton and geminate voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives. Vowels preceding and following the medial consonant were /a/ or /aː/. A range of acoustic measur...

Obesity-associated diabetes in adolescents is increasing throughout the world. In this study, body mass index and capillary blood glucose were measured in a randomly selected sample of adolescents from 3 Lebanese private schools. Obesity was evaluated according to International Obesity Task Force cut-offs. Out of 300 students, 18.7% were at risk of obesity and 3.0% were obese. Random glycaemia ...

The last survey of the characteristics of the Lebanese physician workforce, in 1998, raised concerns about the oversupply of physicians and gaps in capacity building. This telephone survey in 2007 of a stratified random sample of physicians describes the demographic, educational and practice characteristics of 546 physicians practising in Lebanon. A majority of the physicians had graduated from...

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of multiple populations with distinctive genetic and lifestyle backgrounds are crucial to the understanding of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) pathophysiology. We report a GWAS on the genetic basis of T2DM in a 3,286 Lebanese participants. More than 5,000,000 SNPs were directly genotyped or imputed using the 1000 Genomes Project reference panels. We identi...