MER Article Women, Medicine and Health Amira is explaining to some village women how to use herbal medicines that grow in their neighborhood. “I learned the skill from my grandmother when I used to help her harvest the wild plants,” she says. Amira describes the plants, carefully differentiating those for colds: babounij (chamomile), kha May Haddad • 5 min read
MER Article Appropriate Health Technology in Egypt Over the past two decades, public health workers have successfully developed primary health care: basic preventive and curative services that address critical health problems and are available close to people’s homes. Primary health care includes immunizations; maternal care; education for health, h Norbert Hirschhorn • 8 min read
MER Article Arab Governments Wake Up to AIDS Threat In the summer, when thousands of young Gulf Arab men flee heat and boredom in their native land, airport posters warn them of a life-threatening danger lurking abroad, symbolized by a skeleton and four red letters: AIDS. Radio talk shows urge Gulf tourists to be chaste when they visit foreign cities Christian Huxley • 5 min read
MER Article Occupational Health and Safety in Turkey Kandir Baysu has been hospitalized twice over the past eight years, both times for more than two months and requiring dozens of blood transfusions. Baysu, a worker at a battery manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Istanbul, thinks he is about due for another hospital stay. As in the past, he expe Aliza Marcus • 8 min read
MER Article Enduring Intifada Injuries The nightmare started when 24-year-old Ahlam, from the village of Ya’bud in the Israeli-occupied territories, joined a march to commemorate the martyrdom of a fellow villager. “The situation was so tense that the Israeli army could not enter the village,” she recalled from her hospital bed in Amman Rania Atalla • 2 min read
MER Article Health as a Social Construction Three basic theoretical formulations frame the state of the health debate among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The biomedical/clinical framework is generally espoused by the majority of the medical and allied health care establishment, most of whom have been trained in the Western medical t Rita Giacaman • 12 min read
MER Article Medical Education: The Struggle for Relevance A recent World Health Organization report on the state of health practitioners in the Middle East suggests that the region now has a satisfactory number of physicians; some countries even have an excess. Yet health, as measured by standard indicators such as infant mortality, is hardly satisfactory. Cynthia Myntti • 11 min read
MER Article Political Aspects of Health Health, along with food and shelter, is a fundamental element of every person's life. If we are in good health we may take it for granted, but when our health is bad -- when we are ill or injured -- it becomes central to our lives. Joe Stork • 14 min read
MER Article From the Editors (November/December 1989) When the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met in Washington in September, President Husni Mubarak was on hand to speak about the Third World debt crisis. For more than a year, Cairo has been negotiating a new $500 million agreement with the IMF that would allow Egypt to reschedule $10 The Editors • 4 min read
MER Article Letters (September/October 1989) New Jewish Agenda Expels NAP (Author not identified) • 3 min read
MER Article Editor's Bookshelf (September/October 1989) Television may be the best demarcator of the limits of speech that can actually be heard and understood in the US today. The Palestinian intifada has broadened public tolerance for critical presentation of Middle Eastern issues on the tube. But the extent and duration of this change remain subject t Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article Recent Books on Turkey Mehmet Ali Birand, The Generals’ Coup in Turkey: An Inside Story of September 12, 1980 (London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1987). Irvin Cemil Schick and Ahmet Ertuğrul Tonak, eds., Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Turkey suffers more than its share Ömer Karasapan • 4 min read
