Adamson S. Muula
Editor-in-Chief, Malawi Medical Journal and Professor & Head, Department of Community and Environmental Health, Kamuzu University of Health Sciences, Blantyre, Malawi
Email address: amuula@kuhes.ac.mw
Introduction
In 1992, I interviewed for both medical school and the Malawi Army to join my country’s medical corps in preparation for a military hospital that was soon to be established. From that time many things changed. Although I graduated from medical school, I did not become a military doctor. I have fond images of what it would have been, had my dreams of joining the uniformed forces of my country come to fruition. Of course we will never know how things would have turned out. Instead, I worked briefly in the civil service and later joined the College of Medicine of the University of Malawi, which currently is the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences- the topic of my previous editorial. About a decade ago, having been impressed by the socioeconomic progress that the former Soviet state of Ukraine had achieved since the breakup of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), my colleagues and I conducted
a secondary analysis of the Global Youth Tobacco Survey 2005 of Ukraine. This work was eventually published.
Little did we know that this same country, for which we had immersed ourselves with its data, would one day face one of the most existential threats in my generation. Yet, this is so, and as I write this editorial, Ukraine is fighting for its
existence against one of the mightiest armies the world has ever seen.