Editor's Choice

Welcome to this Christmas 2008 edition of African Health Sciences in which we bring you a diverse but very interesting papers. We also welcome you to our online manuscript submission system launched in 2008, thanks to ScholarOne. More about that later!

In their seminal paper on multiplicity of malaria infection, Uganda researchers show that infection with multiple strains of P. falciparum that germ that cause malaria, reduces response to anti malarial medicines.

In another paper Nahirya and colleagues report an alarming situation: 1 in 5 of intravenous catheters had been colonized by bacteria. Yet intravenous catheters have become an essential component of clinical practice. However given that the use of intravenous catheters is on the rise in our region, where it is not uncommon to find patients walking on the street with intravenous catheters, there is urgent need to review their use and find means of preventing what is potentially a very serious situation.

Nigerian workers report that treatment naïve HIV infected patients have a defective blood flow and fibrinolytic system which might predispose to cardiovascular disease. This is problematic given the fact that some antiretroviral drugs predispose to cardiovascular disease themselves. Ugandan and Swedish researchers report an interesting study on access and use of medicine information sources in public hospitals in Uganda. They found that most physicians in public hospitals have limited access to unbiased drug information. A disturbing finding given that Uganda was at the fore front of giving essential drug information to health workers since the days of the Essential Drugs Programme.

The iodine story does not seem to go away in Africa despite widespread iodization of salt in many sub Saharan countries. It is not clear why in Cameroon there are still dangers of iodine deficiency. In their study of youth in west Cameroon, Taga and others have found that 17–29% of boys were iodine deficient, with a slightly lower prevalence in girls. The authors discuss the reasons and possible solutions.

The rest of the papers range from p53 expression in colorectal carcinoma in Ugandan patients, to factors associated with malnutrition among children in camps for the internally displace in northern Uganda. As the war against the Lord's resistance Army (LRA) intensifies, we need to keep in mind Olwedo et al's paper that reports a very high prevalence of malnutrition amongst these displace children. Over 50% of the children were stunted, with a high prevalence of acute malnutrition.

Finally I wanted to remind our readers, authors and reviewers about the online manuscript submission and editing.

Please visit the ScholarOne website on: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mums-ahs You should then register, and go through the process of either submitting or reviewing manuscripts. Remember that you can freely access published articles on PUBMED and BIOLINE. The contents and other details are also available on African Journals online (AJOL). MERA kindly publishes and circulates African Health Sciences in Africa.

Finally let me thank our editorial staff, the Principal and Deputy Principal of the Makerere University College of Health Sciences, the Deans of the new four schools of Medicine, Public Health, Biomedical Sciences, and Health Sciences for your enormous support to African Health Sciences. We also wish to thank ScholarOne, SPI Publishers, and the African Journals Project for support.

James K Tumwine
Editor in Chief