The current crisis in Afghanistan has resulted in an influx of Western military personnel, peacekeepers, humanitarian workers, and journalists. At the same time, unprecedented numbers of internally displaced persons and refugees have overwhelmed much of the already fragile infrastructure, setting the stage for outbreaks of infectious diseases among both foreigners and local populations. This re...

South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is an economic and geopolitical organisation of eight countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) that are primarily located in South Asia. To promote the welfare of the people of South Asia and to improve their quality of life through accelerated economic growth, social progress and cultura...

Introduction Traveling to Afghanistan nowadays is truly health& and life&threatening (1, 2). Destroyed country infrastructure, low sanitary and epidemiologic conditions, low level of medical assistance (lack of medical personnel, shortage of basic medicines and hygienic means) – all contribute to the dissemination of many infectious and non&infectious diseases (3& 5). More than 70% of the healt...

Background: Avian infectious bronchitis (IB) is a highly contagious viral disease which affects the poultry industry. The virus exists in a wide variety of genotypes, and phylogenetic analysis has been used to classify infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) strains. Aims: The object of the study is a molecular characterization of circulating IBV in Afghanistan as a ...

BACKGROUND Pakistan and Afghanistan are two of the three remaining countries yet to interrupt wild-type poliovirus transmission. The increasing incidence of poliomyelitis in these countries during 2010-11 led the Executive Board of WHO in January, 2012, to declare polio eradication a "programmatic emergency for global public health". We aimed to establish why incidence is rising in these countr...

“The transformation of a traditional society could only be achieved extremely slowly, and certainly not by wrecking its existing structure and relationships. Even in the Soviet Union there had been the ‘great mistakes’ of the 1920s and 1930s. As a Soviet official in Moscow was also reported as saying [in 1981], ‘If there is one country in the world where we would not like to try scientific soci...