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DOI: 10.1055/s-0043-1768740
Middle East and North African Health Informatics Association (MENAHIA): Technological initiatives for ‘One Health’
Summary
MENAHIA (Middle East and North African Health Informatics Association) is the International Medical Informatics Association chapter dedicated to the Middle East and North Africa region. This region is rapidly growing in terms of the use of health informatics or what has been recently coined “digital health”. Human health is highly affected by the health of the environment, animal health, food, nutrition, climate change, and many other factors that are beyond the biological or genetic structure of human beings. The impact of animal health and the health of the environment on people's health is an old phenomenon but recent reemerging and appearance of diseases have clearly demonstrated the link between these. The Novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that almost all of us have been suffering from is an example of this.
A number of countries in the region have already shown the depth and the work that they do to integrate the concept of ‘One Health’ in the public health surveillance system as they have described the work that has been done to capture data from databases other than those dealing with human beings. The examples that were provided to monitor the health of animals, agriculture, environmental health, climate change, and man-made and natural disasters are just examples of what countries have been registering in their databases and informing the health authorities of these changes and emerging trends.
Keywords
‘One Health’ - ‘One Health’ informatics - Digital Health - Health Informatics - Zoonitic Diseases - Climate Change - Middle East and North Africa - MENAHIA - International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) - Algeria - Egypt - Iran - Jordan - Kuwait - Morocco - Pakistan - Palestine - Qatar - Saudi Arabia - United Arab Emirates - Health Information Technologies - Artificial IntelligencePublication History
Article published online:
26 December 2023
© 2023. IMIA and Thieme. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
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