Currently, in the 23 countries of the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMRO), over 400 medical journals are published. The first regional conference on medical journalism in the WHO EMRO was held in 7-9 October 2003 in Cairo, Egypt. The meeting was preceded by a one-day workshop at which some aspects of journal dissemination, editorship craft, and peer review process were discussed. During this conference, the participants—mainly editors—tried to outline the current status of biomedical journalism and to declare their problems with running a journal in this region.

Almost all of the problems mentioned were similar for different countries, regardless of their social, cultural, political, and economic status. The problems of these small journals were, as was expected, far different from those facing many mainstream journals. The mainstream journals primarily have problems with authorship vs contributorship, conflict of interests, ethical issues in conducting research and publication, redundant publication, etc. Most of these small journals, however, have more fundamental problems including lack of an infrastructure for running a journal, insufficient funding, lack of expertise in desktop publishing, editors having little knowledge of their craft, difficulties in dissemination of publications, low visibility, problems with absorbing high-quality research articles, etc.

The solutions proposed included establishment of training courses for editors, as was stated earlier by WAME; the creation of an association, the so-called the Eastern Mediterranean Association of Medical Editors (EMAME), to act as a sister association to WAME; emphasis on electronic journalism and online dissemination of data using the Internet; exchange of experience by the formation of regional committees; and running of such conferences regularly. So far, some activities have been done; the EMAME Discussion Group has been working since a couple of months ago and the second conference of this kind will be held in 10-12 October 2004, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

In my opinion, an important consequence of this gathering was that most participants learned that editors working in other countries in this region face problems very similar to the obstacles they had thought were unique to themselves. Because this region has different climates, religious beliefs, cultural habits, and level of health standards, it has a somewhat different disease epidemiology and spectrum of medical practices than other regions of the world. Therefore, empowering biomedical journalism here can be beneficial to the promotion of health in this region in particular, and also to global health at large.

Farrokh Habibzadeh, MD
Deputy Editor
Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences