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About the East-West Center The East-West Center is an education and research organization established by the U.S. Congress in 1960 to strengthen relations and understanding among the peoples and nations of Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Center contributes to a peaceful, prosperous, and just Asia Pacific community by serving as a vigorous hub for cooperative research, education, a...

rapid economic and steady high rates of economic growth has drastically increased the need for imported oil in asia-pacific region; china -an oil exporting country in the region till 1993- is now the third oil importer of the world with the neighboring japan being in the second place. south korea as the world’s ninth oil importer consumes almost as much as the entire oil production of oil expor...

Allergic conjunctivitis (AC) represents a spectrum of disorders, comprising seasonal allergic conjunctivitis (SAC), perennial allergic conjunctivitis (PAC), atopic keratoconjunctivitis (AKC), vernal keratoconjunctivitis (VKC) and giant papillary conjunctivitis. Of these ocular allergy types, SAC and PAC are the most common.The most striking difference within this group of ocular diseases is tha...

The tuberculosis situation in 46 countries in Asia is reported. TB is still prevalent in Asia and more than 5 million or 60% of new TB patients in the world occur in Asia annually. Prevalence of TB is high in rural and urban areas, the young and the aged, female as well as males. Because of high prevalence of TB and delay in case-finding, annual risk of TB infection is still 1.5% or more in alm...

INTRODUCTION Asia and Pacific region is the largest region in the world with a vast geographic area of land and water, some 60 per cent of the world’s population and includes 55 countries as defined by the United Nations. The countries span a wide part of the globe from Iran and Armenia in the west to French Polynesia in the east, from the Russian Federation and Japan in the north to New Zealan...

In the recent past, myopia was considered to be entirely due to inheritance and there is no doubt that a family history of myopia in parents is a risk factor for myopia in children. The increasing prevalence of myopia, however, has affected populations with no previous history of the condition, such as the Inuit where previously a hypermetropic (long-sighted) population now demonstrates a signi...

APAMI 2009 was held in Hiroshima, Japan, on November 22-24, 2009. This issue includes two selected papers recommended by the programming committee co-chairs. They are "Lessons Learned from Data Mining of WHO Mortality Database" and "Survey on Medical Records and EHR in Asia-Pacific Region - Languages, Purposes, IDs and Regulations". The theme of APAMI 2009 was "What are the medical records for?...

BACKGROUND Leptospirosis is a worldwide zoonotic infection that has been recognized for decades, but the problem of the disease has not been fully addressed, particularly in resource-poor, developing countries, where the major burden of the disease occurs. This paper presents an overview of the current situation of leptospirosis in the region. It describes the current trends in the epidemiology...