We examine the relationship between institutions, culture and cyclical fluctuations for a sample of 45 European, Middle Eastern and North African countries. Better governance is associated with shorter and less severe contractions and milder expansions. Certain cultural traits, such as lack of acceptance of power distance and individualism, are also linked business cycle features. Business cycl...

When I think of the recent enlargement of the EU in central banking terms I cannot do so without thinking of the contribution of the OeNB, which has been involved in enlargement issues from the very beginning. This was thanks to its long-standing expertise on central and eastern Europe. With this event, the OeNB clearly demonstrates once more that it is, inside the Eurosystem, at the forefront ...

BACKGROUND Geographic distribution of West Nile virus (WNV) is heterogeneous in Iran by a high circulation in the southern-western areas. The objective of our study was to determine environmental and climatic factors associated with the risk of WNV equine seropositivity in Iran. METHODS Serological data were obtained from a serosurvey conducted in equine population in 260 districts in Iran. T...

Body temperature and metabolic rate were recorded continuously in two groups of marmots either exposed to seasonally decreasing ambient temperature (15 to 0 degrees C) over the entire hibernation season or to short-duration temperature changes during midwinter. Hibernation bouts were characterized by an initial 95% reduction of metabolic rate facilitating the drop in body temperature and by rhy...

Dr Jim Yong Kim is Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. He was co-founder of the Boston-based advocacy group Partners In Health, which developed pioneering schemes to treat tuberculosis and HIV in resource poor settings. The group provides health services to men, women, and...

In their paper about progress towards universal health coverage in Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, China, South Africa (BRICS),1 Rao et al. report that in India in 2011, of total government expenditure, about 8% was expended on health. This estimate was from the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) global health observatory data respository,2 which is based on national health accounts. Fo...

The Multidimensional Inventory of Dissociation (MID; Dell, 2004b) has 168 dissociation items and 50 validity items. The MID assesses 14 major facets of dissociation, 23 symptoms of dissociation, and has 5 validity scales. The MID operationalizes (a) the subjective/ phenomenological domain of dissociation, and (b) 23 hypothesized symptoms of dissociative identity disorder (DID). This article des...

Reconstituted Venezulean equine encephalitis vaccine was found to retain significant titers of plaque-forming virus after storage at 4 or 22 C for 24 hr.

Compared with other African apes, eastern gorillas (Gorilla beringei) have been little studied genetically. We used analysis of autosomal DNA genotypes obtained from non-invasively collected faecal samples to estimate the evolutionary histories of the two extant mountain gorilla populations and the closely related eastern lowland gorillas. Our results suggest that eastern lowland gorillas and m...

Gastric carcinoma is the third commonest cause of cancer death in men, worldwide. The overall incidence of gastric cancer has declined rapidly over the recent few decades, yet there are marked geographic variations of this, with extremely high incidence in Eastern Asia, the Andean regions of South America, and Eastern Europe. Whilst it is not commonly seen throughout Africa, gastric carcinoma i...