The European Journal of Public Health Advance Access originally published online on February 26, 2008
The European Journal of Public Health 2008 18(3):348; doi:10.1093/eurpub/ckn006
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Book Reviews |
Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Health in the Americas, 2007.
Peter AllebeckPan American Health Organization (PAHO), Health in the Americas, 2007. Washington, DC: PAHO, 2007, 425 + 744 pp. (two volumes), $95,00. ISBN 978 92 75 11622 9
From the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the journal has obtained for review the latest edition of the Health in the Americas. For a European observer, it is of course of interest to look at how the PAHO has chosen to describe and monitor the public health situation of the Americas, and to compare the overall monitoring systems that the European and American WHO regions have available on the web and in publications. This encyclopaedic publication in two volumes, in total over 1100 pages, gives an impressive overview of the classical health indicators in the region overall as well as in individual countries. Volume I gives the regional perspective, and volume II consists of country profiles.
A new feature of this edition is that the opening chapters present indicators related to the Millenium Development Goals. These chapters are reader friendly and easy to access. Other parts of volume I are somewhat heavy in the core texts and the overall good graphs are not sufficiently integrated in the text to make the volume as reader friendly as one would expect from a publication of this type. The country profiles are in this sense better, since they are structured in a common format and it is easy to find what one is looking for. However, as the country profiles have substantial amount of text, they are by necessity coloured by ideological values of the countries. Nevertheless, readers like myself like text, and country profiles are interesting to read, provided you can read with discernment.
The two volumes form an impressive and comprehensive public health report of classical type, with its advantages and disadvantages. For an older generation, and book freaks like myself, this type of products are most welcome to put on a bookshelf, for browsing and reference data whenever needed. For a younger generation, including public health policy makers and scientists in most countries, the web is now the place to find information on public health data. The WHO Regional Office for Europe has invested more on the web, with the classical WHO database as an important and well known source of information. The PAHO has a health data table generator, which hopefully will be developed into a user friendly data base.
Any monitoring system also needs a periodic scrutiny with three to five year intervals as a common format to enable observation of trends and patterns in a broader sense. The European Health Report is presently issued in three year intervals. It is more condensed and reader friendly than the PAHO's, with examples and "success stories" and the latest one from 2005 has a special focus on children. Again, for those who prefer a classical encyclopaedic tabulatory publication, the Health in the Americas does fulfil its function as an informative report on the health situation in a large part of the world.
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