INTRODUCTION Smoke-free laws and the addition of graphic warning labels to cigarette packages represent public health policies that can potentially reduce smoking and smoking-related disease. The attitudes and beliefs relating to these policies were examined among residents of Ohio Appalachia, a mostly rural region with high smoking prevalence among its residents. METHODS Focus groups were co...

BACKGROUND Diabetes is highly prevalent in the Caribbean, associated with a high morbidity and mortality and is a recognised threat to economic and social development. Heads of Government in the Caribbean Community came together in 2007 and declared their commitment to reducing the burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including diabetes, by calling for a multi-sectoral, systemic response...

INTRODUCTION Trauma is a leading cause of death and disability in Mexico. Unintentional injuries, along with diabetes and heart disease, contribute to > 35% of the country's total mortality. Effective and efficient prehospital care of the conditions may improve outcomes. OBJECTIVE The objective of this paper was to determine if prehospital field experience (PFE) correlated with higher passing...

Three related articles in this issue addressing clinical and translational (C/T) research suggest four simple questions about such research that should be considered by policy makers at a national level, by academic institutions, and by individual scientists: What, who, how, and why. The author of this commentary posits that ambiguity in answering these questions means that policy makers are no...

Stochastic Shortest Path Problems (SSPs) are a common representation for probabilistic planning problems. Two approaches can be used to solve SSPs: (i) consider all probabilistically reachable states and (ii) plan only for a subset of these reachable states. Closed policies, the solutions obtained in the former approach, require significant computational effort, and they do not require replanni...

The 2008 crisis highlighted the linkages between the financial sector and the real economy, as well as between the corresponding stabilization policies: macroprudential and monetary (M&Ms). Our game-theoretic analysis focuses on the increasingly adopted separation setup, in which M&Ms are conducted by two different institutions (e.g. in Australia, Canada, Eurozone, Sweden, Switzerland and the U...

Malaria treatment policy has changed from presumptive treatment to targeted "test and treat" (T&T) with malaria rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) and artemisinin combination therapy (ACT). This transition involves changing behavior among health providers, meaning delays between introduction and full implementation are recorded in almost every instance. We investigated factors affecting successful t...

analysis of the transactions demand formoney. The commodity-demand elasticity withrespect to the real interest rate, b , , was set tounity because, of all (equally arbitrary) values,unity is the most straightforward choice. (Econo-metric evidence currently available does notprovide direct knowledge of this elasticity.) Therelative sizes of the disturbances give consi...

In the markdown case, the firm has to consecutively charge the sequence of decreasing prices p̄K , p̄K−1, ..., p̄0. Again, we aim at showing the optimality of a threshold policy τ = (τk n | k = 1, 2, ...,K, n = 1, 2, ..., N) ∈ (∆N )K . Under this policy, the firm should lower its price from p̄k to p̄k−1 when the threshold time τk n corresponding to its current inventory level n is about to be passed...

W consider a two-echelon inventory system with a capacitated centralized production facility and several distribution centers (DCs). Both production and transportation times are stochastic with general distributions. Demand arrives at each DC according to an independent Poisson process and is backlogged if the DC is out of stock. We allow different holding and backlog costs at the different DCs...