Editorial: African Health Sciences in Medline and “on-line full text publishing”

This August 2003 issue comes as we celebrate African Health Sciences being on the Medline since April 2003.
It features six original articles and one special article on the participatory planning process for transforming the Faculty of Medicine at Makerere University into a College of Health Sciences.

Your contributions as authors, readers and reviewers are helping to promote this journal as an icon for the Makerere University and the Africa region. By the time you read the next issue of African Health Sciences we hope to have started producing an online full text publishing version of the journal. Just watch the space.

Detrimental effects of diarrhea are not only due to dehydration per se but deficiency of micronutrients such as zinc are a part of the cascade.  The article by Bitarakwate and colleagues alerts us to the seriousness of zinc deficiency among children with persistent diarrhea attending Mulago hospital.

The integrated management approach to childhood diarrhea illness should consider incorporating zinc supplements within its package. As the world scientists continue looking for a cure for HIV/AIDS, several observations on old medicines continue being made. Such interesting observations have been made by United States and Uganda scientists.

Chloroquine (CQ) largely a main stay in treatment of malaria may decrease vertical transmission of HIV when given to expectant mothers. Neely and colleagues report on the effect of CQ in lowering HIV prevalence in mothers and propose a role for this affordable drug in enhancing currently used therapy

Nonetheless, more work needs to be done with chloroquine as the current study does not come up with conclusive result