World Health Day 2004 on 7 April had the theme of road safety with the slogan Road safety is no accident. A week later, the UN General Assembly held a plenary session devoted to road safety, which resulted in resolution 58/9 inviting WHO to act as coordinator on road safety issues within the UN system. At the 57th World Health Assembly held from 17 to 23 May 2004, in resolution WHA57.10, WHO accepted the invitation and recommended that Member States took the necessary actions to tackle this important issue and requested the Director-General to collaborate with them in their endeavours. Thus, included in this issue is an editorial on road safety from the Regional perspective, which highlights the problems in the Region and the steps needed to address them.

Another important resolution passed at the WHA addressed the health conditions of, and assistance to, the Arab population in the occupied Arab territories, including Palestine (WHA57.3), and called on Israel to halt all its practices, policies and plans which seriously affect the health conditions of civilians under occupation. It also requested the Director- General, among other things, to dispatch a fact-finding committee on the deterioration of the health and economic situation in these territories and to take urgent steps to support the Palestinian Ministry of Health and other medical service-providers in their efforts to overcome the current difficulties. Regrettably, we do not receive many submissions from Palestine and so we are pleased to include here an Arabic paper on the causes of drinking-water contamination in Ramallah and Al-Bireh.

The WHA also endorsed WHO’s first strategy for reproductive health to accelerate progress towards the attainment of international development goals and targets (WHA57.12). The strategy targets 5 priority areas of reproductive health: improving antenatal, delivery, postpartum and newborn care; providing high-quality services for family planning, including infertility services; preventing abortion particulary when it happens in unsafe conditions; combating sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, reproductive tract infections, cervical cancer and other gynaecological morbidities; and promoting sexual health. In this issue of EMHJ we present several papers related to this prominent issue. Our readers will find much else this issue with papers from 8 countries of the Region on very varied topics, such as nutrition, health services, zoonoses, child health, to name but a few.