“US military offi cials are expecting that Iraq will use chemical and biological weapons against US and allied forces in the event of war”, wrote our American correspondent, Michael McCarthy, on Feb 22, 2003. He reported on preparations by US forces, which seem surreal now, to protect troops in Iraq from nerve agents, anthrax, botulinum toxin, and even smallpox. Just a few weeks earlier, 500 pu...

For the last three decades torture has been highly prevalent in Iraq. Surveys indicate that close to 50% of households have family members who have been tortured. The traumas of two subsequent wars further add to the traumatisation of the population as does the persistent violence. Re-traumatisation makes healing difficult. As a result trauma-related disorders are likely to be the number one pu...

T he Oil-For-Food program was established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 986 in 1995 as a means of providing humanitarian relief to Iraq, which had been under U.N. economic sanctions since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The Oil-For-Food program was divided into six-month phases and required renewal by the Security Council at each phase. The first phase lasted from December 1996 to...

OBJECTIVE To characterize hepatitis C virus (HCV) epidemiology in countries of the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), namely Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. METHODS We systematically reviewed and synthesized available records of HCV incidence and prevalence following PRISMA guidelines. Meta-analyses were implemented using a DerSimonian-Laird rando...

BACKGROUND In the United States, social burdens including war casualties are often distributed unequally across groups of individuals, communities, and states. The purpose of this report was to examine the association between war deaths and per capita income in the 50 states and District of Columbia during the Vietnam and Iraq wars. METHODS The numbers of deaths by the home state of record fo...

BACKGROUND Noncommunicable diseases have become the main causes of death in several developing countries. There is a severe shortage of information about the risk factors for these diseases in Iraq. OBJECTIVE To explore the eating habits, physical activity, and sedentary behaviors of adolescents in Mosul City, Iraq, as risk factors for noncommunicable diseases. METHODS A multistage stratifi...

OBJECTIVE The main objectives of the present study were to investigate the rock pigeon parasitic communities from Iraq as well as reporting on the prevalence and intensity of various infections from both sexes. METHODS An examination of 128 specimens of the live rock pigeon Columba livia from Iraq was undertaken. The samples were obtained from several localities of Iraq. Blood samples were ex...

Disease and nonbattle injury (DNBI) are the leading causes of morbidity during wars and military operations. However, adequate medical data were never before available to service public health centers to conduct DNBI surveillance during deployments. This article describes the process, results and lessons learned from centralized DNBI surveillance by the US Army Center for Health Promotion and P...

The recent war in Iraq presents significant challenges for the surveillance and control of communicable diseases. In early April 2003, the World Health Organization (WHO) sent a team of public health experts to Kuwait and a base was established in the southern Iraqi governorate of Basrah on May 3. We present the lessons learned from the communicable disease surveillance and control program impl...

Nada A. S. Al Alwan In addition to being the most important cancer, breast cancer is often associated with other features that threaten lives of women in Iraq. Studies have documented an exponential rise in the incidence rates of the disease, the prevalence of younger ages and advanced stages at the time of presentation. Mortality estimates displayed that breast cancer is responsible for the hi...