In low-incidence countries in the European Union (EU), tuberculosis (TB) is concentrated in big cities, especially among certain urban high-risk groups including immigrants from TB high-incidence countries, homeless people, and those with a history of drug and alcohol misuse. Elimination of TB in European big cities requires control measures focused on multiple layers of the urban population. T...

The patterns of biodiversity changes in cities are now fairly well established, although diversity changes in temperate cities are much better studied than cities in other climate zones. Generally, plant species richness often increases in cities due to importation of exotic species, whereas animal species richness declines. Abundances of some groups, especially birds and arthropods, often incr...

Clonorchiasis sinensis is a food-borne parasitic zoonosis caused by Clonorchis sinensis which infects fish-eating mammals including humans, dogs, cats and pigs. The disease is prevalent in East Asian and Southeast Asian countries. Boott in 1903 first proved the presence of the disease in China. In 1930s doctors from Europe and America,and Japanese carried out the occasional survey in coastal ci...

Cities are increasingly the fundamental socio-economic units of human societies worldwide, but we still lack a unified characterization of urbanization that captures the social processes realized by cities across time and space. This is especially important for understanding the role of cities in the history of human civilization and for determining whether studies of ancient cities are relevan...

Heatwaves (HWs) are one of the “natural” hazards with the greatest impact worldwide in terms of mortality and economic losses, and their effects may be exacerbated in large urban areas. For these reasons, more detailed analyses of urban HW trends represent a priority that cannot be neglected. In this study, HW trends were investigated during the warmest period of the year (May–September) by usi...

Urban sprawl has been at the center of current debate on urban structure. Compared to the rich literature on urban sprawl in Western cities, relatively little is known about whether Chinese urban expansion is excessive or inefficient. This paper provides an integrated analysis of two seemingly contradictory phenomena in China’s urban development in recent two decades, namely development zones a...

The European project PHASE aims to evaluate patterns of change in the temperature-mortality relationship and in the number of deaths attributable to heat in nine European cities in two periods, before and after summer 2003 (1996-2002 and 2004-2010). We performed age-specific Poisson regression models separately in the two periods, controlling for seasonality, air pollution and time trends. Dist...