It is hoped that the Neurology Atlas will serve as a useful reference guide to both health professionals and policy-makers and assist them in planning, developing and providing better health care and services to people suffering from neurological disorders throughout the world. All the information and data contained in the Neu-rology Atlas have been collected in a large international study which was carried out in the period 2001–2003 and included more than 100 countries spanning all WHO regions and con-tinents. The Neurology Atlas is based on the information and data collected by WHO and WFN. At WHO, the work was led by headquarters in close collaboration with the regional offices. The first step in the development of the Neurology Atlas was to identify specific areas where information related to neuro-logical resources and services was lacking. In order to obtain this information, a questionnaire was drafted in English in consultation with a group of WHO and WFN consultants. A glossary of terms used in the questionnaire was also prepared in order to ensure that the questions were understood in the same way by different respondents. Subsequently, the draft questionnaire and glossary were reviewed by selected experts. The questionnaire was piloted in one developed and one developing country and some necessary changes were made. The questionnaire and the glossary were then translated into some of the other official languages of WHO – Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish. The questionnaire and glossary were sent to the official del-egates of all the 90 member societies of WFN. In addition, WHO regional offices were also asked to identify a key per-son working in the field of neurology in those countries where the WFN liaison person was not available or not responsive. The key persons were requested to complete the question-naire based on all possible sources of information available to them. All respondents were asked to follow closely the glossa-ry definitions, in order to maintain uniformity and comparabil-ity of received information. The Neurology Atlas project team responded to questions and requests for clarification. Repeat requests were sent to the key persons in cases where there was delay in procuring the completed questionnaire. In the case of incomplete or internally inconsistent information, the respondents were contacted to provide further information or clarification; where appropriate, documents were requested to support completed questionnaires. Received data were entered into an electronic database sys-tem using suitable codes and analysed using Stata (special edition) version 8 software. Values for continuous variables were grouped into categories based on distribution. Fre-quency distributions and measures of central tendency (mean, medians and standard deviations) were calculated as appro-priate. Countries were grouped into the six WHO regions (Africa, the Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, Europe, South-East Asia and Western Pacific) and four World Bank income categories according to 2002 gross national income (GNI) per capita according to the World Bank list of economies, July 2003. The GNI groups were as follows: low-income (US$ 735 or less), lower middle-income (US$ 736–2935), upper mid-dle-income (US$ 2936–9075) and high-income (US$ 9076 or more) (5). The countries were also categorized according to the population figures published in The World Health Report 2003 (population data 2002) as: Category I (0–1 million), Category II (1–10 million), Category III (10–100 million) and Category IV (>100 million) (6). The published literature regarding some of the themes was also reviewed and the evi-dence summarized. The results of the analysis were presented in a draft report which was reviewed by leading experts in the field of neurology and regional advisers of the six WHO regions, and their comments were incorporated.Completed questionnaires were received from various WHO Member States, areas and territories: 106 Member States, one Associate Member (Puerto Rico), one Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong, China) and one territory (West Bank and Gaza Strip), which are henceforth referred to as countries for the sake of convenience. The data were collected from 16 countries in the African Region (34.8%), 14 countries in the Region of the Americas (40%), 18 countries in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (85.7%), 43 countries in the European Region (82.7%), 6 countries in the South-East Asia Region (54.5%) and 9 countries in the Western Pacific Region (33.3%). In terms of population covered, the data pertain to 90.1% of the world population; 52.3% of the population in Africa, 89.3% in the Americas, 84.1% in the Eastern Medi-terranean, 97.2% in Europe, 96.8% in South-East Asia and 97.1% in the Western Pacific. Limitations The most important limitation of the dataset is that only one key person in each country was the source of all information. Although the respondent was a WFN liaison officer and had access to numerous official and unofficical sources of information and was able to consult other neu-rologists within the country, the received data should still be considered as reasonably and not completly reliable and accurate. In some instances the data are the best esti-mates by the respondents. In spite of this limitation, the Neurology Atlas is the most comprehensive compilation of neurological resources in the world ever attempted. Because the sources of information in most countries were the key persons working in the field of neurology, the dataset mainly covers countries where there are neu-rologists or other experts with an interest in neurology. It is therefore likely that the Neurology Atlas gives an overly positive view of neurological resources in the world. While attempts have been made to obtain all the required information from all countries, in some countries it was not available. Hence, the denominator for various themes is different and this has been indicated with each theme. The most common reason for missing data was the nona-vailability of the information in the country.Epilepsy is one of the most common serious disorders of the brain, affecting some 50 million people worldwide. It is unique among these disorders in that its symptoms can be completely controlled in the majority of affected individuals by inexpensive medications or cost-effective surgical procedures, and many forms of epilepsy can be prevented by appropriate public health interven-tions. Epilepsy accounts for 1% of the global burden of disease, determined by the number of productive life-years lost as a result of disability or premature death (50). Among primary disorders of the brain, this burden ranks with depression and other affective disorders, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, and substance abuse; among all medical conditions, it ranks with breast cancer in women and lung cancer in men.