WHO and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) annually review data on immunization coverage to estimate national coverage with routine service delivery of the following vaccines: bacille Calmette-Guérin; diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, first and third doses; either oral polio vaccine or inactivated polio vaccine, third dose of either; hepatitis B, third dose; Haemophilus influenzae type b, ...

This report updates the risk assessment by Crump and Allen for benzene-induced leukemia that was based on a cohort exposed to benzene in the manufacture of Pliofilm. The present study derives new risk estimates using data from follow-up through 1987 (whereas the earlier assessment only had follow-up available through 1978) and uses new exposure information for this cohort developed by Paustenba...

Evidence from laboratory animals suggests that certain rates of deposition of dust can slow the normal clearance of the lungs by macrophages. If this occurs in humans, then estimates of exposure or dose for epidemiologic models may be improved by explicity incorporating this "overload" phenomenon into lung dose estimates. Using a model of dust overload, the authors estimated the lung dust dose ...

Computed tomography (CT) has had a massive impact on diagnostic radiology over the past few decades. Serious concerns exist because of increase in effective radiation dose associated with CT scans, which could pose significant health risks. In CT, can be estimated by Monte Carlo simulations. The aim study was to estimate and compare doses for from organ dose-based calculations using tissue weig...

Current pesticide health risk assessments in the United States require the characterization of aggregate exposure and cumulative risk in the setting of food tolerances. Biologic monitoring can aggregate exposures from all sources and routes, and can integrate exposures for chemicals with a common mechanism of action. Its value was demonstrated in a recent study of organophosphorus (OP) pesticid...

Direct calculation of delivered dose in the species of interest potentially affects the magnitude of an uncertainty factor needed to address extrapolation of laboratory animal data to equivalent human exposure scenarios, thereby improving the accuracy of human health risk estimates. Development of an inhalation reference concentration (RfC) typically involves extrapolation of an effect level ob...

The large amounts of tritium produced at the Savannah River Site (SRS) coupled with the current dose reconstruction study at the facility emphasize the importance of ensuring accurate and efficient prediction of tritium doses to the public. Presently, dose estimates to the general population in the site vicinity are calculated annually using a five year meteorological database. Determining whet...

We describe a novel spatially and temporally detailed approach for determining the cause or causes of a population decline, using the western Alaskan population of Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus) as an example. Existing methods are mostly based on regression, which limits their utility when there are multiple hypotheses to consider and the data are sparse and noisy. Our likelihood-based ...

The behavior of maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) and the likelihood ratio statistic in a family of problems involving pointwise nonparametric estimation of a monotone function is studied. This class of problems differs radically from the usual parametric or semiparametric situations in that the MLE of the monotone function at a point converges to the truth at rate n (slower than the usual √ ...

Mixed Poisson regression models, a class of generalized linear mixed models, are commonly used to analyze count data that exhibit overdispersion. Because inference for these models can be computationally difficult, simplifying distributional assumptions are often made. We consider an influence function representing effects of infinitesimal perturbations of the mixing distribution. This function...