© 2004 Society of Rural Physicians of Canada 178 O n March 16, 1988, Saddam Hussein attacked his own people, blanketing them with deadly chemicals, cluster bombs and artillery fire. Five thousand Kurdish residents of Halabja, a rural community in northern Iraq, died that day, in the largest recorded chemical warfare incident in history. In November 2003, a 4-person rural medical education team ...

Hearing Loss (HL) represents high genetic heterogeneity with an incidence of almost 1 out of 500 newborns in most populations. Approximately half of the cases have a genetic basis that most of them are autosomal recessive non-syndromic (ARNSHL) with DFNB1-related defect in many worldwide populations. Given the heterogeneity of the trait together with the unique infrastructure of Iranian populat...

In Sorani Kurdish, one of the most useful orthographic features in named-entity recognition – capitalization – is absent, as the language’s Perso-Arabic script does not make a distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters. We describe a system for deriving an inferred capitalization value from closely related languages by phonological similarity, and illustrate the system using several re...

Drawn from focus groups composed of fifty-five Kurdish young people in Diyarbakır, Başer and Çelik’s article concerns the young Kurds’ description of the Kurdish issue in Turkey and their visions of peace. In recognition of their social and political agency, the article focuses on the Kurdish young people’s framing of both the conflict and peace, based on their individual everyday observations ...

beta-Thalassemia is a hereditary disease caused by any of 90 different point mutations in the beta-globin gene. Specific populations generally carry a small number of mutations, the most common of which are those that are widely distributed regionally. The present study constitutes an extensive molecular characterization of this disease in a small, highly inbred ethnic group with a high inciden...

STUDY OBJECTIVE This study hypothesises that the presumed increased risk of self reported longstanding psychiatric illness and intake of psychotropic drugs among Iranian, Chilean, Turkish, and Kurdish adults, when these groups are compared with Polish adults, can be explained by living alone, poor acculturation, unemployment, and low sense of coherence. DESIGN Data from a national sample of i...

INTRODUCTION A case of premature ovarian failure with concomitant findings of Robertsonian translocation between 15 and 21 chromosomes is reported here. The aforementioned karyotypic aberration has not been reported in the context of premature ovarian failure to date. CASE PRESENTATION We present a case of premature ovarian failure in a 27-year-old infertile Kurdish Iranian woman with a Rober...

the existence of passive makers in kurdish language, similar to that of ancient iranian languages can be very helpful in linguistic studies, language change and finding the nature of passive structures in modern iranian languages such as persian. the writers of this article have found a passive maker in kurdish language and its dialects such as sorani, ardalani, kalhori, ilami and horami that l...

This paper describes our construction of named-entity recognition (NER) systems in two Western Iranian languages, Sorani Kurdish and Tajik, as a part of a pilot study of Linguistic Rapid Response to potential emergency humanitarian relief situations. In the absence of large annotated corpora, parallel corpora, treebanks, bilingual lexica, etc., we found the following to be effective: exploiting...