Globally, mediterranean-climate ecosystem vegetation has converged on an evergreen, sclerophyllous and shrubby growth form. The particular aspects of mediterranean-climate regions that contribute to this convergence include summer droughts and relatively nutrient-poor soils. We hypothesised that winter-precipitation implies stressful summer droughts and leaches soils due to greater water availa...

The prevalence of surgical trauma as a global public health hazard has been severely neglected. Trauma surgeons in Uganda and Canada have developed the Kampala Trauma Score (KTS), a trauma severity index specific to east African contexts. Hospitals in Tanzania have begun to use this tool to measure their own trauma management protocols in order to measure the validity of this index regionally. ...

BACKGROUND A five-year prospective study was conducted in North Iraq and Cambodia to test a model for rural prehospital trauma systems in low-income countries. RESULTS From 1997 to 2001, 135 local paramedics and 5,200 lay First Responders were trained to provide in-field trauma care. The study population comprised 1,061 trauma victims with mean evacuation time 5.7 hours. The trauma mortality ...

Bitmap indexes (BIs) allow fast access to individual attribute values that are needed to answer a query by storing a bit for each distinct value and tuple. A BI is defined for a single attribute and the encodings are based solely on data values; the property map (PMap) is a multidimensional indexing technique that precomputes attribute expressions for each tuple and stores the results as bit st...

The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the ‘lure and kill’ technique, commonly called Mass Trapping (MT), compared with the larvicidal technique in olive fruit fly control. Data from different agro-ecological and management conditions were collected in several mass trapping areas in the regions of Tuscany and Liguria during 1999, 2000 and 2001. Data were organized and stored ...

PURPOSE To propose an alternative and practical model to conceptualize clinical patterns of concomitant intermittent strabismus, heterophoria, and convergence and accommodation anomalies. METHODS Despite identical ratios, there can be a disparity- or blur-biased "style" in three hypothetical scenarios: normal; high ratio of accommodative convergence to accommodation (AC/A) and low ratio of co...

BACKGROUND Disease Management Programmes (DMPs) have been introduced in Germany ten years ago with the aim to improve effectiveness and equity of care, but little is known about the degree to which enrolment in the programme meets the principles of equity in health care. We aimed to analyse horizontal equity in DMP enrolment among patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). METHODS Cross-sect...

BACKGROUND The Prehospital Trauma Life Support (PHTLS) course has been widely implemented and approximately half a million prehospital caregivers in over 50 countries have taken this course. Still, the effect on injury outcome remains to be established. The objective of this study was to investigate the association between PHTLS training of ambulance crew members and the mortality in trauma pat...

background: this study aims at investigating the possible effects of different daily doses of green tea (gt) intake for eight weeks on certain anthropometric, metabolic, and oxidative stress biomarkers of diabetic patients. materials and methods: this randomized clinical trial included 63 patients with type 2 diabetes (30 males and 33 females). after a two-week run-in period without green tea, ...