This study aims to quantify the relationship between climate variations and cases of Salmonella infection in subtropical and tropical areas in Australia. Brisbane in a subtropical area and Townsville in a tropical area of Queensland were selected as the study regions. Local meteorological variables and notified cases of Salmonella infection from January 1990 to July 2005 were provided by local ...

The basidiomycetous yeast genus Cryptococcus contains two medically important pathogens, Cryptococcus neoformans and C. gattii [1-3]. C. neoformans is one of the common pathogens in acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), whereas the most cases of diseases due to C. gattii happened in the healthy individuals [2, 4]. C. gattii has a tendency to affect the respiratory and nervous systems of th...

Global awareness of the significance of the role that tropical forests play in the global carbon cycle has never been greater, but much uncertainty still exists as to the exact magnitude of this role. Here I review and attempt to synthesise the latest evidence of both the carbon source from tropical forest conversion, and the carbon sink in tropical vegetation. Tropical biome conversion is esti...

Received Jan 11, 2018 Revised Mar 8, 2018 Accepted Mar 22, 2018 Free-space optical (FSO) links provide high speed point-to-point wireless communication, but its availability can easily be affected by weather conditions. In heavy rainfall regions, FSO links are relatively sensitive to rain. Availability prediction of FSO is indispensable part, especially in tropical areas. In this paper, methods...

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher's alpha and an approximate pantropical stem total to estimate the mi...

Forests currently absorb billions of tons of CO2 globally every year, an economic subsidy worth hundreds of billions of dollars if an equivalent sink had to be created in other ways. Concerns about the permanency of forest carbon stocks, difficulties in quantifying stock changes, and the threat of environmental and socioeconomic impacts of large-scale reforestation programs have limited the upt...

[1] It is known that in deep and open oceans, the effect of sea surface sensible and evaporative heat fluxes on the tropical cyclone-induced sea surface cooling is small compared to that caused by turbulent mixing and cold water entrainment into the upper ocean mixed-layer. This study shows that tropical cyclone-induced surface heat fluxes dominate the surface cooling in near-coastal shallow oc...

Climate change is harming human health, and the magnitude of the harm is increasing. This is especially true in tropical and subtropical regions that are vulnerable to greater intensity, frequency, and duration of extreme weather, such as hurricanes, drought, and increases in heat, as a result of climate change. Nearly all countries situated in the geographic tropics are poor, and therefore hav...

Identifying leads and lags between high- and low-latitude abrupt climate shifts is needed to understand where and how such events were triggered. Vascular plant biomarkers preserved in Cariaco basin sediments reveal rapid vegetation changes in northern South America during the last deglaciation, 15,000 to 10,000 years ago. Comparing the biomarker records to climate proxies from the same sedimen...

BACKGROUND Chromobacterium violaceum is a proteobacterium found in soil and water in tropical regions. The organism rarely causes infection in humans, yet can cause a severe systemic infection by entering the bloodstream via an open wound. CASE PRESENTATION We recently identified a case of severe bacteremia caused by Chromobacterium violaceum at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases (HTD) in Ho ...