From the Editors Desk

QScience, in conjunction with Qatar Foundation, is pleased to launch a new journal with a focus on global health: the Journal of Local and Global Health Perspectives. We view health as a shared responsibility. Local and global health programs, which promote collaboration at all levels and encourage community participation, yield long-lasting, positive results. The concept of global health is transcendent, and involves problems that are often overlooked in the content of traditional journals. This new journal will feature manuscripts that explore perplexing, unsolved problems that affect the health and welfare of the general population, as well as the health of groups of individuals. The focus will be to present manuscripts covering new ideas or new methods that can be applied to select populations, including the underserved, in a cost-effective manner leading to measurable improvements in health.We welcome comparative studies that point out similarities or differences in approaches to health care in various regions because looking at a problem from multiple viewpoints can lead to innovative ideas and open new pathways around existing roadblocks that are currently impeding progress.The journal also is interested in fresh ideas that do not conform to existing paradigms. All authors are aware how difficult it can be to publish results that seem to depart from conventional theory. An outstanding example of such a discovery was the idea that an infection by a hitherto unknown bacterium, H pylori, was the cause of ulcers of the stomach and duodenum. Reviewers and editors initially scoffed at this, now widely-accepted, idea even though millions of people suffered from these common gastric disorders for which treatment was so often unsuccessful. The authors had difficulty in publishing the manuscript, yet Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, the proponents of this unorthodox idea, eventually received the Nobel Prize.Another area of interest consistent with the journal’s title concerns how individuals or groups have solved specific local problems with creative approaches. The discovery of the cause of Burkitt’s lymphoma is an inspiring example. One alert individual, Dennis Burkitt, a missionary surgeon in Uganda, noticed a few children in his area with an unusual jaw tumor, originally thought to be a sarcoma. By collecting additional similar patients throughout the region it soon became apparent that this was a previously undetected type of lymphoma related to the Epstein- Barr virus.