Household air pollution from traditional cook stoves presents a greater health hazard than any other environmental factor. Despite government e orts to support clean-burning cooking fuels, over 700 million people in South Asia could still rely on traditional stoves in 2030. This number could rise if climate change mitigation e orts increase energy costs. Here we quantify the costs of support po...

Tobacco is being used in various forms including cigarette, shisha, cigar and bidi smoking and smokeless tobacco. Smokeless tobacco constitutes various forms of tobacco i-e paan/ betel quid, tobacco with lime, naswar, gutka, qiwam, tobacco tooth powder, minpuri, areca nut (supari) [1,2]. Qiwam consists of thick paste of boiled tobacco mixed with powdered spices such as saffron, cardamom, anisee...

(Note : This paper is based primarily on the perception of the relationship between education and women’s status by the authors of papers prepared for the Mount Holyoke college, International Conference on Worldwide Education for Women : Progress, Prospects and Agenda for the Future; November 1987. References to statistical data are made only to substantiate an argument. The statistics appended...

This paper presents a brief overview of the extant fiscal situation in South Asian countries. In particular, I emphasize low tax/GDP ratios and inelastic expenditure/GDP ratios which then lead to structurally entrenched fiscal deficits. The paper also reports on the sustainability of fiscal and current account deficits in the South Asian countries. Finally, the paper reports on some important i...

this study analyse governance indicators (based on world bank definition) and some of variables of health performance, educational, social and economic development during 1996 - 2006 for 35 countries selected from south east asia, west asia, latin america and africa. generally, results of this study showes the governance improvement such as transparency, accountability, democracy, free speech, ...

The concept of the ‘‘Asian monsoon’’ masks the existence of two separate summer rainfall régimes: convective storms over India, Bangladesh, and Nepal (the South Asian monsoon) and frontal rainfall over China, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula (the East Asian monsoon). In addition, the Himalayas and other orography, including the Arakan Mountains, Ghats, and Yunnan Plateau, create smaller precipit...

Background Tuberculosis (TB) remains the most common cause of infectious disease deaths worldwide. What is perhaps less appreciated is that the caseload of tuberculosis patients in South Asia is staggering.South Asia has almost 40% of the global TB burden with 4,028,165 cases in 2015. This region also has a disproportionate share of TB deaths (681,975 deaths, 38% of the global burden). Worldwid...

1Clinical Research Directorate/Clinical Monitoring Research Program, Leidos Biomedical Research, NCI Campus at Frederick, Frederick, Maryland 21702, USA; 2Collaborative Clinical Research Branch, Division of Clinical Research, National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, USA; 3Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University/Mahidol Oxford Research Unit, Th...

The global geography of poverty has changed over the last two decades. More than 70 percent of the world’s poor at US$1.25 a day now live not in low-income countries, but in middle-income countries (Kanbur and Sumner 2011). This raises a number of big questions. Is economic growth not sufficient to pull everybody out of poverty? Can middle-income countries or parts thereof suffer from poverty t...

The author analyses a rare case of mirror-outrage that followed the destruction of the Buddhasof Bamiyan. This event brought the Taliban and the international community into opposition in2001. The article first stresses the intriguing paradigmatic similarities between the destruction ofthe Buddhas and the destruction of Artemis Temple in 356 BC, when the eradication of amonument...