In order to successfully control and eliminate vaccine-preventable infectious diseases, an appropriate vaccine coverage has to be achieved and maintained. This task requires a high level of effort as it may be compromised by a number of barriers. Public health agencies have issued specific recommendations to address these barriers and therefore improve immunization programs. In the present revi...

Recent years have seen an increase in the number of new vaccines available on the Canadian market, and increasing divergence in provincial and territorial immunization programs as jurisdictions must choose among available health interventions with limited funding. We present an analytical framework, which we have developed to assist in the analysis and comparison of potential immunization progr...

BACKGROUND Both syringe exchange programs (SEPs) and pharmacy sales of syringes are available in Estonia, though the current high incidence and high prevalence of HIV among injection drug users (IDUs) in Tallinn, Estonia requires large-scale implementation of additional harm reduction programs as a matter of great urgency. The aims of this report were to compare risk behavior and HIV infection ...

BACKGROUND Our objective was to examine factors associated with distributive injection equipment sharing and how needle exchange programs (NEPs) can help reduce distributive sharing among injection drug users (IDUs). METHODS 145 English speaking Canadian IDUs ages 16 years and over who had injected in the past 30 days were recruited for a cross-sectional survey. Participants were asked about ...

Needle exchange is one of the most effective public health interventions to prevent the transmission of infectious disease by injecting drug users. Despite the preponderance of scientific evidence, US federal funding for needle exchange programmes has been banned since 1988. This prohibition has resulted in the lack of a centralised policy on needle exchange and has given birth to a patchwork o...

We provide a dynamic model to study how the presence of the option to "buy" the incumbent local exchange carrier’s (ILEC) facilities via local loop unbundling affects the competitive local exchange carriers’ (CLECs) incentives to "build" alternative infrastructures. We show that an unregulated incumbent sets a rental path for its local loop which delays technology adoption compared to the case ...

Thirty-four edematous cardiac patients who were being treated with cation exchange resin were studied for its long term effectiveness and for clinical and chemical complications. In 23 of 27 patients the resin was effective in terms of mobilizing edema fluid previously refractory to other forms of treatment, of partial or complete substitution for mercurial diuretics, and of permitting a slight...

The recent development in Cloud computing has enabled the realization of delivering computing as utility. A number of companies have started building Cloud and Grid computing environments, and offering access to the resources as a “Pay as you go” basis. This has created a need for a market exchange (ME) that brings providers and consumers together and facilitates their trading. Such market envi...