BACKGROUND Ensuring women have access to good quality Emergency Obstetric Care (EOC) is a key strategy to reducing maternal and newborn deaths. Minimum coverage rates are expected to be 1 Comprehensive (CEOC) and 4 Basic EOC (BEOC) facilities per 500,000 population. METHODS AND FINDINGS A cross-sectional survey of 378 health facilities was conducted in Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ba...

Early environmental influences are increasingly of interest in understanding ADHD as a neurodevelopmental condition, particularly in light of recognition that gene by environment interplay are likely involved in this condition. Breastfeeding duration predicts cognitive development, as well as development of brain white matter connectivity, in areas similar to those seen in ADHD. Prior studies s...

BACKGROUND Fatigue driving is a leading cause of traffic fatalities and injuries in China, especially among heavy truck drivers. The present study tried to examine which and how factors within the human-vehicle-roadway-environment system contribute to the occurrence of crashes involving fatigued truck drivers. FINDINGS To reduce such risk on the road, a total of 9168 crashes which occurred in...

Evaluating interviewers based on their response rates is complicated in most surveys. By random chance, interviewers may call cases that are more or less difficult to interview. In addition, interviewer response rates can only imperfectly be computed because of the contributions of other interviewers’ prior contacts with those cases (calling a case after a contact from an expert interviewer may...

BACKGROUND Although, family history of cancer is an important risk factor for upper gastrointestinal cancers development, but limited information is available on the upper gastrointestinal cancers associated with family history in Iran. The purpose of this study was to define upper gastrointestinal cancers risk associated with family history of cancer. METHODS This study was conducted as a ca...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to validate the accuracy of an alternative cervical cancer test - visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) - by addressing possible imperfections in the gold standard through latent class analysis (LCA). The data were originally collected at peri-urban health clinics in Zimbabwe. METHODS Conventional accuracy (sensitivity/specificity) estimates for VIA...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to examine the epidemiology, phenomenology, and occupation-specific risk factors for suicide among regular-duty military personnel as a model for other professions at risk for workplace suicide. METHOD Suicide incidence and methods were determined in a retrospective military cohort comprising all deaths (N=732) of regular-duty military personnel in the ...

We compute the mean first passage time (MFPT) for a Brownian particle inside a two-dimensional disk with reflective boundaries and a small interior trap that is rotating at a constant angular velocity. The inherent symmetry of the problem allows for a detailed analytic study of the situation. For a given angular velocity, we determine the optimal radius of rotation that minimizes the average MF...

When interacting autonomous agents operate in open domains that contain novel objects, the agents may be unable to refer to the objects by using preassigned names. As an alternative, the agents might use de~criptions. When agents refer to domain objects by using de~riptions, referent ml.sidentifications (RM[s) will occur. ThLs paper formally models recovery from RMIs among such agents. We show ...