Vol 2 No 1 (1973)

Articles

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    Any form of industrialization leads to cultural changes which may be rapid and extensive, and provoke considerable stress. Such changes are particularly extensive when developing countries are rapidly industrialized. Agricultural workers who move to industrial areas may shift from barter to a monetary economy. All of this is to them an entirely new way of living and so they try to keep contact with their place of origin. As a result their new life in the city and at home is disrupted. The traditional Social Forces and moral values which formerly exercised a stabilizing influence in the peasant culture are weakened. The result may be social disorganization which can have far reaching effects on community health and lead to behavioral disorders such as delinquency, crime, drug addictions and alcoholism and contribute to an increase in incidence of mental illness. During the period of industrialization the increase of food production may not be of the same order as the increase in production of industry. With the transfer of the population from rural areas to the industrial centers some changes of diet may occur. The health problems of the workers will often be related not only the environment. The workers might be exposed to hazardous physical, chemical and biological factors.
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    A survey on the detection of scalp ringworm, its prevalence and etiological agents, was carried out in 12 different localities in the Bandar Abbas area, southern Iran, in February 1970. Two thousand one hundred fifty-three subjects consisting of 1,275 school children from 3 primary schools and one secondary school in the town and 689 rural school children from 6 different villages, together with 189 inhabitants of all age groups from 2 villages, were examined clinically and hair samples were collected from suspected cases. Form 165 specimens collected, 67 (3.1%) showed an ermatophyte responsible for the scalp lesion either by direct examination or in culture. T. violaceum was isolated from 80% of the positive cases, T. sudanensis from 15% and T. tonsurans and T. schoenleinii from 1.6% each.95.5% of the positive cases were children of 6-14 years of age. Three percent of the urban school children, 3.3% of the rural school children and 6.9% of theilliterate village children were infected. The remaining 4.5% were rural infants of 2-5 years of age and youngsters of the age. It was evident that higher economic status, transportation facilities and education had some influence in decreasing the disease.

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    Despite the care taken to ensure the quality of date collected by enumeration and sampling, the final tabulation will sometimes give obvious indication of errors in basic information. Evaluation of these errors furnishes those who use such a study and sampling. More general, the finding in these studies should be helpful to others that conduct surveys. In order to compare the age composition of the rural areas between two provinces of IRAN, i.e. AZARBAIJAN, and ISFAHAN, a sample of each has selected (8 and 23 counties respectively).The main idea was to evaluate the errors in age recording and the effect of digit preference on the age composition of the population. It became evident that, AZARBAIJAN has a smaller family size, lower median age, higher sex ratio and lower dependency ratio than ISFAHAN. More over, the age pyramid of ISFAHAN has a better shape and more regular than AZARBAIJAN and therefore the Myer’s Index which determines the degree of dispersion in age reporting is lower in ISFAHAN which may be the result of higher literacy in ISFAHAN. Generally men in both samples report their age more precisely than women.
  • XML | PDF | downloads: 65 | views: 102 | pages: 39-48
    Iran is a large country with a total area of 1,645,000 square kilometers. The country’s population is estimated at about 31 millions. There is an uneven distribution of the population, varying from 2 to 50 per square kilometer. Sixty per cent of the total population (18 millions) is living in nearly 66,000 small and large village’s scattered throughout the country. A total of 10,000 physicians provide the main source of medical manpower, however more than 40% of these physicians are located in the capital city of Teheran. The physician to population ratio for the country is about 1 per 3,000 and the figure reaches 100,000 in some rural areas. Each year a total of 600 graduates is added to the health manpower , but technical and socio-economic handicapping factors make the rural and low-income areas less attractive to the new graduates. In this paper the reconstruction of health services around the concept of Primary Medical Care has been reposed for the country’s health development. Taking into consideration the country’s special geographical and demographic features, two levels of primary care workers have been suggested; the first group with 4 year’s training in curative and preventive services, and the second group at grade 9 level in education. It is foreseen that the two afore-mentioned groups will form a network of auxiliaries to the physicians in extending health services to the remote areas of the country.