Cancer and related lifestyle diseases are on the increase across Asia and already account for over half the disease-associated mortality in the vast majority of the included countries. An understanding of the epidemiology is therefore of paramount importance. In addition, given the immensity of the problem, cooperation among all the interested parties is of the essence. The present series of re...

FOLLOWING the development of the globalized economy, it was inevitable that relevant private law rules would be harmonized and unified. This kind of harmonization and unification is both a global and a regional endeavor. In Asia (especially in East Asia) there is a private initiative by scholars trying to harmonize rules of contract law, and the aim is to create a model law called Principles of...

Social impact bonds (SIBs) have the potential to improve the efficiency of government health-care spending in South-East Asia. In a SIB, governments sign a pay-for-performance contract with one or several providers of health-care services, and the providers borrow up-front capital from investors. Governments outside South-East Asia have started to experiment with SIBs in criminal justice, homel...

This paper addresses the question of whether the relatively high status of women in pre-colonial South-east Asia is still evident among Malay women in twentieth century Peninsular Malaysia. Compared to patterns in East and South Asia, Malay family structure does not follow the typical patriarchal patterns of patrilineal descent, patrilocal residence of newly married couples, and preference for ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Because of the enormity of the burden of stroke globally, there is a real need to develop strategies to reduce its impact. With this in mind, the World Health Organization (Division of Mental Health and Prevention of Substance Abuse) together with the National Stroke Foundation (Australia) sponsored the Asia Pacific Consensus Forum on Stroke Management in Melbourne, Austr...

 The estimated number of people living with HIV in Asia and the Pacific is just under 5 million (4.883 million in 2011)  160,000 of these people are children younger than 15 years.  Approximately 300,000 people died from AIDS-related causes in 2009. This figure has remained stable in recent years.  HIV epidemics in Asia and the Pacific remain largely concentrated among people who inject dru...

The oriental fruit fly, Bactrocera dorsalis, was initially recorded in Taiwan Island in 1912, and has dispersed to many areas in the Pacific-Asia region over the last century. The area of origin of the species may be confidently placed in South-East China. However, routes of range expansion to new areas and underlying population processes remain partially unclear, despite having been the subjec...

BACKGROUND In Southern Europe, smoking among older women was more prevalent among the high educated than the lower educated, we call this a positive gradient. This is dominant in the early stages of the smoking epidemic model, later replaced by a negative gradient. The aim of this study is to assess if a positive gradient in smoking can also be observed in low and middle income countries in oth...

BACKGROUND There is little information on the detailed patterns of cervical screening uptake in older migrant women in Australia. This linkage study was performed to assess cervical screening participation in older migrants. METHODS We linked year 2000-2001 records for 14,228 Middle Eastern/Asian-born women 40-64 years of age, and an age and area matched random sample of 13,939 Australian-bor...