Social Contacts and the Economic Performance of Immigrants: A Panel Study of Immigrants in Germany Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examined the impact of social contacts on immigrant occupational status and income. In addition to general social contacts, we also analyzed the effects of bonding (i.e., co-ethnic) and bridging (i.e., interethnic) ties on economic outcomes. Resu...

Globally there is a growing emphasis on efforts to identify and treat the “missed millions” of Tuberculosis (TB) cases. In India, 5% of the new TB cases are in the pediatric age group [1] and studies have reported that 3.2–16.2% of child contacts have TB disease [2]. In view of the susceptibility of younger children to developing TB of increased severity on contact with an active case of tuberc...

BACKGROUND Previous smallpox ring vaccination models based on contact tracing over a network suggest that ring vaccination would be effective, but have not explicitly included response logistics and limited numbers of vaccinators. METHODS We developed a continuous-time stochastic simulation of smallpox transmission, including network structure, post-exposure vaccination, vaccination of contac...

This special issue is dedicated to the 2007 International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Engineering (ISKE2007) held on October 15-16, 2007 in Chengdu, China. ISKE has become a major forum of contacts between research scientists, engineers and practitioners in the area of intelligent systems for knowledge engineering. ISKE2007 is the 2nd in a series of conferences on Intelligen...

Background This article looks at the long-term, structural determinants of environmental and public health performance in the world system.   Methods In multiple standard ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models, we tested the effects of 26 standard predictor variables, including the ‘four freedoms’ of goods, capital, labour and services, on the following indicators of sustainable develop...

In February 2012 a rabid puppy dog was imported into Amsterdam, the Netherlands from Morocco via Spain. In a joint action between the Netherlands’ Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, the Public Health Service of Amsterdam and the Centre for Infectious Disease Control all exposed human and animal contacts were traced and, when necessary, provided with post-exposure prophylaxis. During th...