The countries of Central Asia are still at the earliest stages of an HIV/AIDS epidemic. However, there is cause for serious concern due to: the steep growth of new HIV cases in the region; the established related epidemics of injecting drug use, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and...

Tuberculosis is the most important infectious cause of adult deaths after HIV/AIDS in low- and middle-income countries. This paper evaluates the economic benefits of extending the World Health Organization's DOTS Strategy (a multi-component approach that includes directly observed treatment,...

Although the number of reported cases of HIV in Central Asia is still very low, the growth rate of the epidemic (about 500 cases in 2000 to over 12,000 in 2004) is a cause for serious concern. Central Asia lies along the drug routes from Afghanistan to Russia and Western Europe, and it is...

In recent years, Europe and Central Asia (ECA) has seen the world's fastest growing HIV/AIDS epidemic. The Balkans countries and territories under study - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, and the UN-administered Kosovo -- have reported over 2,000 HIV/AIDS cases...

Stopping Tuberculosis in Central Asia reviews the epidemiological situation, control efforts, and financing of tuberculosis programs in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. It was based on a review of existing statistics and reports, and on consultation with key...

Hospital statistics of causes of death for developing countries may be biased when the utilization of hospital services is low or selective. Using Addis Ababa, Ethiopia as an example, we argue that hospital data can be useful for demonstrating general cause-specific mortality patterns. In...

To discriminate between breast cancer patients and controls, we used a three-step approach to obtain our decision rule. First, we ranked the mass/charge values using random forests, because it generates importance indices that take possible interactions into account. We observed that the top...

Measuring progress towards Millennium Development Goal 6, including estimates of, and time trends in, the number of malaria cases, has relied on risk maps constructed from surveys of parasite prevalence, and on routine case reports compiled by health ministries. A critique of both methods are...