BACKGROUND: The UN Millennium Development Goals call for substantial reductions in maternal and child mortality, to be achieved through reductions in morbidity and mortality during pregnancy, delivery, postpartum and early childhood. The MaiMwana Project aims to test community-based interventions that tackle maternal and child health problems through increasing awareness and local action.METHODS/DESIGN: This study uses a two-by-two factorial cluster-randomised controlled trial design to test the impact of two interventions.

In the last two decades we have been confronted with new countries and altered maps in Europe with border changes, resettlements, ethnic cleansing, and migration. This migration has profoundly coloured the life of past European generations in the Danube region and beyond, it has affected our own lives, and will be part of the experience of our children.

In Turkey, the large scale of internal displacement is caused by armed conflict that occurs because of the struggle of Kurds to obtain political recognition and rights in Turkey. As a result, many asylum requests were conducted in Europe and a massive wave of internal displacement took place in Turkey. Forced migration is known to influence mental health. This empirical study conducted with migrated Kurdish women (N = 1,127) both in the European Union (EU) and in Turkey aimed to explore the relationships between posttraumatic stress reactions, forced migration, and mental health status.

This article reviews the literature on mental health of volunteers after working in disasters. When mobilized they often are a community's major source for rescue and recovery. PsychINFO, PubMED, and Web of Science were searched for relevant articles published until October 2009. Of 448 articles screened, only 9 articles fulfilled our inclusion criteria. They examined the aftermath of earthquakes (4 articles), terrorist bombings (1), explosions (1), aviation disasters (1), tsunami (1), and a bus accident (1).