A professor of gynecology at Menya University, Dr. Mahmoud Fathallah, has won the 2009 UN Population Award along with the NGO Movimiento Comunal Nicaraguense. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) made the announcement yesterday and said the two winners had been awarded for their efforts to raise people's awareness about demographic issues. The professor said he was extremely happy to have won, adding the award was very important for him as it was won by President Mubarak in 1994 for the International Population Conference, held in Cairo at the time. Dr. Fathallah told Al-Masry Al-Youm that, according to the UN statement, he won the prize for his works in the fields of population and development and especially for the book of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) - which has been translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese, and his introduction to the book "Reproductive Health and Human Rights", published by Oxford University. Oxford University said this was the first book on medicine in Arabic issued in cooperation with professors of law. He added he founded in 1974 the Egyptian fertility Care Society, one of the first organizations concerned with family planning in Egypt. Since then, he has been advising the Egyptian government on issues related to health and population. He said he won the World Health Organization Award in 2000 and was honored last year by President Mubarak as one of Egypt's five most creative people at the Population Conference. He has been awarded three honorary doctorates from the universities of Toronto (Canada), Helsinki (Finland) and Uppsala (Sweden), he added. Gina Shokri, the person in charge of the UNFPA's regional office in Cairo, said Dr. Fathallah and the organization would receive the award on June 1 at the UN headquarters in New York. She explained the two winners were chosen by a committee formed by the representatives of ten countries and the UNFPA
