background: to determine the prevalence and characteristics of birth defects in perinatal infants in hubei province during 200l-2008. methods: the prevalence of birth defects in perinatal infants delivered after 28 weeks or more was analyzed in hubei surveillance hospitals during 200l-2008. results: the incidence of birth defects in perinatal infants from 200l to 2008 was 120.0 per 10,000 birth...

with the tremendous expansion in the use of herbal medicine worldwide, safety and efficacy as well as quality control of herbal medicine have become important concerns for both health authority and public. in this paper, the analysis of two st. john's wort (hypericum perforatum) products and four liquorice (glycyrrhiza glabra) products by spectrophotometric and hplc methods, is explained. moreo...

hepatitis c virus (hcv) infection is a serious public health concern throughout the world. despite its public health prominence, however, how surveillance systems for hepatitis c should be designed is still a challenging issue especially in developing countries such as iran. establishing a surveillance system needs an ongoing process of case investigation, data collection, analysis of data and ...

The present paper examines the effectiveness of financial overcompensation as a means to enhance customer loyalty after a product failure. Overcompensation implies that customers are entitled to a refund that is larger than the purchase price. It is, however, still unclear whether large overcompensations entail saturation effects, or alternatively, result in an actual drop in customer loyalty. ...

BACKGROUND The European region, certified as polio free in 2002, had recent wild poliovirus (WPV) introductions, resulting in a major outbreak in Central Asian countries and Russia in 2010 and in current widespread WPV type 1 circulation in Israel, which endangered the polio-free status of the region. METHODS We assessed the data on the major determinants of poliovirus transmission risk (popu...

Globalization has led to an increase in the spread of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. International efforts are being launched to control their dissemination through global surveillance, a major hindrance to which is the failure of some countries to report outbreaks. Current guidelines and regulations on emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases do not sufficiently take into ac...

BACKGROUND The National Department of Health in South Africa (SA) routinely collects congenital disorder (CD) data for its national CD surveillance system. The current system has been implemented since 2006, but no reports on the data collected, methodology, achievements or challenges have been published to date. OBJECTIVES To ascertain the effectiveness of the current national CD surveillanc...

BACKGROUND Wildlife rehabilitation centers routinely gather health-related data from diverse species. Their capability to signal the occurrence of emerging pathogens and improve traditional surveillance remains largely unexplored. This paper assessed the utility for syndromic surveillance of raptors admitted to The Raptor Center (TRC) to signal circulation of West Nile Virus (WNV) in Minnesota ...