Editorial

Abstract

In view of the COVID-19 pandemic which unfortunately has hit the whole world and because ESPAI is keen to keep you all safe, our workshops and all our in-person meetings will be postponed till this threat comes to an end with God’s will. Please get the latest updates on ESPAI activities from http://www.espai-eg.org/scientific.htm and from our society’s Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/TheESPAI. Our 16th International Congress will hopefully be held on September 23-24, 2020 in Cairo Sheraton Hotel. The preliminary program will appear on the congress website later on .
This issue of the Egyptian Journal of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology contains many state-of-the- art articles. The review article is the Arabic version of the 2019 ARIA Care pathways (ICPs) for allergic rhinitis – Egypt. It is prepared by a group of esteemed international experts in allergy in collaboration with an Egyptian team from the Egyptian Society of Pediatric Allergy and immunology (ESPAI). ICPs are structured multi-disciplinary care plans detailing key steps of patient care. Airway ICPs (Integrated care pathways for airway diseases) were the first steps towards the development of ICPs for rhinitis and asthma multimorbidity. An executive summary is presented in this paper .
The review article of this issue contains important info about the hot topic of these days; namely COVID-19. It discusses the current data on the disease in the pediatric age groups and its future perspectives in a concise and comprehensive way. It is worth reading and will provide you with up-to-date info in a nutshell .
Three original articles were carefully selected after peer-reviewing by International and local experts in the field. The health-related quality of life in a group of Egyptian children with bronchial asthma is the title of the first article. The authors used the EQ-5D-Y questionnaire, which is a generic, youth-specific and age-appropriate measure of HRQoL. This questionnaire also comprises a visual analogue scale (VAS) which is judged by the patient. In the second article, the authors sought to investigate the sialylated glycoprotein Krebs von den Lungen-6 (KL-6), one of the lung epithelium-specific proteins, as a significant biomarker of alveolar injury in pediatric asthma. The third article investigated the value of interferon gamma as a co-player in the pathogenesis of idiopathic nephrotic syndrome. Its serum level was lowermost at time of diagnosis and increased with remission on corticosteroids .
An English/Arabic glossary that contains a list of allergy and immunology relevant terms and expressions is included as well as a collection of abstracts from recent international publications in allergy/immunology. I would like to remind you that the WAO e-letter (News & Notes) is displayed on our website both in English and Arabic on monthly basis. On our homepage, you will find links to the World Allergy Organization (WAO) website and the WAO online journal. I encourage you indeed to submit your articles to this very well peer-reviewed journal .
Please visit our journal’s website (https://www.jespai.org/) and we look forward to receiving some feedback about this issue. You may contact us through the “contact us” icon in our website on your left-hand side.
Yehia