BACKGROUND The effectiveness of malaria control programs is determined by an array of complex factors, including the acceptability and sustained use of preventative measures such as the bed net. A small-scale exploratory study was conducted in several locations in the Niger Delta region, Nigeria, to discover barriers against the use of bed nets, in the context of a current drive to scale up net...

OBJECTIVES The aim of the study was to assess the knowledge, attitude and practices of pregnant women towards malaria and their association with malaria morbidity. METHODS Cross-sectional malaria survey of 1432 pregnant women attending six health centres, each of them situated in a specific health district in Rwanda from September to October 2002. RESULTS The overall prevalence of malaria i...

OBJECTIVE To describe the lay perception of kala-azar (KA) in an endemic area of Muzaffarpur District, Bihar, India: local names, symptoms, affected persons, perceived severity and modes of transmission, as well as perceived mosquito nuisance, modes of protection and use of bed nets. METHODS We held 16 focus group discussions (FGD) in eight remote villages with altogether 157 participants in ...

Many Artificial Intelligence decision-making systems operate in cycles. A typical problem-solving cycle might consist of deliberation, scheduling, and execution steps. At the deliberation step a number of feasible actions are generated. They are then evaluated by a scheduler at the scheduling step and the most suitable action is performed at the execution step. This paper presents a scheduling ...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether patients bathed daily with chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG) have a lower incidence of primary bloodstream infections (BSIs) compared with patients bathed with soap and water. METHODS The study design was a 52-week, 2-arm, crossover (ie, concurrent control group) clinical trial with intention-to-treat analysis. The study setting was the 22-bed medical intensive care...

Grid is one of the most e ective new paradigms in large scale distributed computing. Only recently Petri nets have been adopted as a formal modeling framework for describing the speci c aspects of the Grid. In this paper we describe a Grid tool for High Energy Physics data analysis, and we show how modeling its architecture with nets-withinnets has led us to identify and solve a number of defec...

Sublethal exposure to pesticides can alter insect behavior with potential for population-level consequences. We investigated sublethal effects of ActiveGuard, a permethrin-impregnated fabric, on feeding behavior and fecundity of bed bugs (Cimex lectularius L.) from five populations that ranged from susceptible to highly pyrethroid resistant. After exposure to ActiveGuard fabric or untreated fab...