On 28 January 2010 the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) launched their annual report on zoonoses and food-borne outbreaks for 2008. The report provides a comprehensive overview of zoonotic infections and disease outbreaks caused by consuming contaminated food. The number of reported human cases of the three most reported zoo...

BACKGROUND The National Health Policy 2000 - 2009 and Health sector strategic plans I & II emphasized that Primary Health Care (PHC) would be the main strategy for national development and would be operationalized through provision of the minimum health care package. Commitment was to spend an increasing proportion of the health budget for the provision of the basic minimum package of health se...

INTRODUCTION Despite its simplicity, efficiency and reliability, Sri Lanka has not used the Annual Risk of Tuberculosis Infection (ARTI) to assess the prevalence and efficiency of tuberculosis (TB) control. Hence, a national tuberculin survey was conducted to estimate the ARTI. MATERIALS AND METHODS A school-based, cross-sectional tuberculin survey of 4352 children aged 10 years irrespective ...

BACKGROUND School-age children are important drivers of annual influenza epidemics yet influenza vaccination coverage of this population is low despite universal publicly funded influenza vaccination in Alberta, Canada. Immunizing children at school may potentially increase vaccine uptake. As parents are a key stakeholder group for such a program, it is important to consider their concerns. P...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the costs of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) outpatient treatment for individuals with different CD4 cell counts in the Brazilian public health system, and to compare to costs in other national health systems. METHODS A retrospective survey was conducted in five public outpatient clinics of the Brazilian national HIV program in the city of São Paulo. Data on healthcare...

OBJECTIVE To assess the impact of a workplace leisure physical activity program on healthcare expenditures for type 2 diabetes and hypertension treatment. MATERIAL AND METHODS We assessed a workplace program's potential to reduce costs by multiplying the annual healthcare costs of patients with type 2 diabetes and hypertension by the population attributable risk fraction of non-recommended ph...

The Annual bioProcessUK Conference has acted as the key networking event for bioprocess scientists and engineers in the UK for the past 10 years. The following article is a report from the sessions that focused on continuous bioprocessing during the 10(th) Annual bioProcessUK Conference (London, December 2013). These sessions were organized by the 'EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in E...

Project Background The World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced that particulate matter (PM) now affects more people than any other pollutant. Here, we focus on PM less than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5) as they pose a greater risk to human health via respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. We focus on Delhi, India for three main reasons: 1) according to the WHO it is the most poll...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Workers in the transportation sector may be expose to environmental hazards resulting in adverse health outcomes. The present study aimed to assess environmental-hazard-related morbidity among transportation workers over an eight-year period MATERIAL AND METHOD Data were extracted from the registry database of a cohort of workers in the Expressway Authority of Thailan...

Opti-Money is a decision-support system for allocating assets that was developed at Bank Hapoalim, Israel’s largest bank. Based on customerand market-specific inputs, we solve a modified Markowitz-type nonlinear programming problem to produce optimal tailor-made investment portfolios in terms of asset classes. In its five years of operation, this mature system has provided excellent quantifiabl...