Introduction Female circumcision (the partial or complete removal of the external female genitalia) is widely practised in the Sudan. It has persisted for centuries because of lack of awareness and knowledge about its adverse physical and psycho-social consequences and because of a firm belief in its supposed benefits of ensuring female chastity and securing marriage and subsequent harmonious f...

For more information/comments, please contact: [email protected] INTRODUCTION The Agro-meteorology bulletin is a report produced monthly to report on the agricultural season in Southern Sudan. The emphasis of the report is mainly on rainfall performance and its implication on crops and rangeland. The impact of agricultural season has huge implications on food security situation of household...

Madhu Sudan is the recipient of the 2002 Nevanlinna Prize. Sudan has made fundamental contributions to two major areas of research, the connections between them, and their applications. The first area is coding theory. Established by Shannon and Hamming over fifty years ago, it is the mathematical study of the possibility of, and the limits on, reliable communication over noisy media. The secon...

BACKGROUND There is a substantial body of literature on the principles of good partnerships and the rationale for such partnerships in research capacity strengthening. This paper illustrates the long term effects of a multi-country (8 countries) global partnership for health systems research capacity development (Connecting health Research in Africa and Ireland Consortium - ChRAIC) in relation ...

Using a unique dataset we are able to examine the determinants of identities in Sudan. We find that identification in Sudan is high and that there is little evidence that such identities compete with one another. In terms of socio-economic variables, poorer people tend to have greater identification. Tribal identification declines with the level of education, as does identity with religion and ...

BACKGROUND For effective control of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) in East Africa, new rapid diagnostic tests are required to replace current tests with low sensitivity. The aim of this study is to improve diagnosis of VL in East Africa by testing a new antigen from an autochthonous L. donovani strain in Sudan. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPLE FINDINGS We cloned, expressed and purified a novel recombin...

The genetic diversity of Schistosoma haematobium remains largely unstudied in comparison to that of Schistosoma mansoni. To characterize the extent of genetic diversity in S. haematobium among its definitive host (humans), we collected S. haematobium eggs from the urine of 73 infected schoolchildren at 5 primary schools in White Nile State, Sudan, and then performed a randomly amplified polymor...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the repeatability and reproducibility of the serological direct agglutination test (DAT) for visceral leishmaniasis (VL) with aqueous antigen in a multi-centre study in VL-endemic areas in Sudan, Kenya and Nepal. METHODS Repeatability within each centre and reproducibility between the centres' results and an external reference laboratory (Belgium) was assessed on 1596 tr...

UNLABELLED Aristolochic acid I (AAI) is a natural plant alkaloid causing aristolochic acid nephropathy, Balkan endemic nephropathy and their associated urothelial malignancies. One of the most efficient enzymes reductively activating AAI to species forming AAI-DNA adducts is cytosolic NAD(P)H quinone oxidoreductase 1. AAI is also either reductively activated or oxidatively detoxified to 8-hyd...

arly diagnosis and effective treatment with appropriate drug is the main component of the World Health Organization (WHO) strategy to reduce malaria-related mortality.1 For many years the treatment of malaria in Africa has relied on chloroquine, sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP), and quinine, with the latter being used mainly to treat severe cases. Chloroquine and SP are failing and leading to an...