Travel medicine is accepted as a unique subspecialty in medicine. With more persons travelling to tropical and subtropical destinations, travel medicine is becoming an increasing challenge for the health care systems in many countries. New trends in tourism, such as trekking in sub-Saharan Africa, expose tourist travellers to unusual parasitic diseases. The global public health community has been confronting the challenges of the emergence and rapid world-wide spreading of new influenza virus strains, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), chikungunya virus, drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and many other pathogens. The present book provides an epidemiological based country-to-country guide to disease prevention and treatment; information on endemic diseases; necessary prevention guidelines, public health indicators, and an update of recent disease outbreaks.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating condition with enormous financial, social and personal costs. SCI is the most expensive traumatic condition in the United States. Overall, most frequent aetiologies of injury are motor vehicle crashes and falls, followed by violence, sports-related injuries, and work-related accidents. Research on SCI prevention, regeneration and long term care has progressed steadily over the past decade making an introductory foray into the epidemiology of SCI and important undertaking. This book is designed as a general reference book reviewing the epidemiology of SCI throughout the world with potential insight to cause and effect as well as the difficulties and boundaries to minimise this unfortunate occurrence.