What can be learned from studying Asian health problems?

The National Institutes of Health, owing to its broad mandate to pursue and support acquisition of knowledge in biomedicine, is very much concerned with any investigations leading to better understanding of the causes and control of human diseases. One approach is to study health and illness in special subsets of the United States population and of populations in foreign countries. In this paper, I shall touch briefly on a number of health problems and disease-oriented research topics looked at from the special perspective of Asian and Asian-American populations, hopefully to sensitize perceptions about the contributions that such studies can make to our total understanding of how best to achieve health and conquer disease. The new goal of the World Health Organization (WHO) is "Health for all by the year 2000." "The aim is to enable all people of the world to attain an acceptable level of health and to lead a socially and economically productive life". (1).