East and Central African Journal of Surgery: another Canadian connection
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* Massey Beveridge

The problems of delivering an acceptable standard of surgical care to African people will largely be solved by African health professionals working in Africa, for it is they who know the right questions to pose in order to find practicable solutions. In order to build the research capacity required to discover these solutions, it is essential to support autochthonous African scientific publication, so the new editorial linkage between the *Canadian Journal of Surgery* (*CJS*) and the *East and Central African Journal of Surgery* (*ECAJS*) is to be applauded, as is the work put into this project by the Canadian Network for International Surgery.1

The Ptolemy Project, run out of the Office of International Surgery2 at the University of Toronto, provides full-text access to the University of Toronto Library for 100 of our research partners in the Association of Surgeons of East Africa (ASEA), the professional association that owns the *ECAJS*. We have undertaken to provide electronic publishing of the *ECAJS* through Bioline/CITD Press at the University of Toronto and expect to have the first electronic issue of the journal up on the Web by December 2002. The *ECAJS* currently has a circulation of 500, mostly members of the ASEA, and as it is not presently indexed in PubMed, interesting papers presented in the journal go unrecognized in the rest of the world. Electronic publication of the journal will make it available to a larger readership and should help improve the impact of the journal. We believe this is an important adjunct to the editorial support of the *CJS*, and we share the goals of gaining international recognition for the *ECAJS* and eventually getting it indexed.

Injury is predominantly a surgical disease, and in terms of the burden of disease in Africa, it ranks between malaria and tuberculosis. Despite the magnitude of the burden of injury, it is unlikely that in the foreseeable future it will receive funding at the level currently given to communicable disease, so it is vital to look for innovative ways to help the African surgeons who daily combat the injury pandemic. There are about 500 surgeons in East Africa who deal with the surgical needs of some 200 million people, so there is considerable leverage to strategies designed to improve health by building surgical education and research capacity in Africa. The *ECAJS* is an important lever in this endeavour.

## References

1.  Lett RR. *East and Central African Journal of Surgery*: the Canadian connection. Can J Surg 2002;45:244–5.
    
    

2.  Web site of the Office of International Surgery. Available: [www.utoronto.ca/ois](http://www.utoronto.ca/ois) (accessed 28 Nov 2002).