BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to reveal the association between airflow limitation (AL) severity and reduction with work productivity as well as use of sick leave among Japanese workers. METHODS This cross-sectional study included 1,378 workers who underwent a lung function test during a health checkup at the Japanese Red Cross Kumamoto Health Care Center. AL was defined as forced expi...

BACKGROUND A previous observational study detected a strong positive relationship between sick leave absences and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in office buildings in the Boston area. The authors speculated that the observed association was due to a causal effect associated with low dilution ventilation, perhaps increased airborne transmission of respiratory infections. This study was und...

Indoor microbial air flora is a cause of tremendous health concern in developing countries. A number of allergic and infective illnesses are linked to poor microbiological quality of indoor air in the hospital, like Bronchopulmonary aspergillosis, sick building syndrome and pneumonia. This air quality needs to be assessed by one or more of many standard methods available, old and new, and is ve...

To assess the cost of varicella in young children in France, a prospective study was done in day care centers. Children (1263), who were 3 months to 3 years old and attending day care, were followed over a varicella season. For every child who developed varicella (n = 200), detailed information was obtained by use of parental questionnaires. Questions concerned medical care, days missed from wo...

Modeling the entailment relation over sentences is one of the generic problems of natural language understanding. In order to account for this problem, we design a theorem prover for Natural Logic, a logic whose terms resemble natural language expressions. The prover is based on an analytic tableau method and employs syntactically and semantically motivated schematic rules. Pairing the prover w...

there have been few longitudinal studies on sick building syndrome (sbs), which include headache, fatigue, and runny nose. we considered effect of sick building syndrome with illnesses like headache, fatigue and runny nose. thus, we designed a questionnaire and asked from male of dormitory residence. questions of the questionnaire were more about known symptoms of buildings (headache, fatigue, ...