BOOK REVIEW
A REVIEW OF DISEASES IN MALAYSIA, 2nd Edition
Author: Lim Kean Ghee
Publisher: Self
Price: RM80
Year of publication: 2001
ISBN: 983-40800-0-X
Contact: Dr Lim Kean Ghee. 5, Upper Museum Road, 34000 Taiping, Perak, Malaysia.
Email: lknghee@pop.jaring.my
Reviewed by: CL Teng
As the author wrote in his Preface, this collection “captures a snapshot of diseases in Malaysia at the end of the second millennium”. Within the 30 Chapters, the author provided brief description of Malaysian diseases that have been reported in the medical literature. The first 17 Chapters were classified based on aetiology while the remainder were based on body systems. All in all, 659 diseases or clinical problems were described, citing a total of 2372 references, most of them came from indexed journals. In this second edition, the author has updated the references up to the year 2000 by including recently published papers, e.g. Nipah virus encephalitis and EV71 encephalomyelitis in children. One of the most useful aspects of this book is the large number of Malaysian references which the author took great pain to find by tracking the reference sections of cited papers. As the content in this book is focused on diseases, coverage of publications pertains to certain specialties (e.g. family medicine and public health) is somewhat inadequate. For the medical students and clinicians, this book gives a good idea of diseases likely to be found in Malaysia. Want something on jering nephropathy, Hb Tak, de Clerambault syndrome? You can find these and many other peculiar conditions and rare syndromes in there. It is not surprising to find that some diseases have large literature base (e.g. worm infestations has 50 references, “kwashiorkor” has 25 references) while others are hardly mentioned (obesity and lifestyle factors has only 7 references and acute respiratory infections has 6 references) – no doubt, the number of citations reflect the changing epidemiology of diseases in Malaysia and the proclivity of certain disciplines to indulge in scientific publication. Some of you may wonder why I decide to review this book now. Well, I hate to see this book – a great historical record of Malaysian published research – slip into oblivion.