PURPOSE Questionnaire-based diagnostic criteria for atopic dermatitis (AD) have been proposed to detect the major group of AD with flexural dermatitis. We aimed to develop novel, questionnaire-based diagnostic criteria for childhood AD, which can detect more comprehensive AD including non-flexural type. METHODS The draft version of questionnaire to detect childhood AD was prepared to be used ...

Standardised household interviews among adults and children, open-ended questionnaires, and clinical examinations administered during cross-sectional health status surveys, as well as the registers of village health posts (VHP), were used to assess the pattern of health problems of a rural community in southeastern Tanzania, and their results compared. All four approaches gave very similar resu...

OBJECTIVES This study assesses social workers' orientation toward the evidence-based practice (EBP) process and explores which specific variables (e.g. age) are associated. METHODS Data were collected from 341 Dutch social workers through an online survey which included a Dutch translation of the EBP Process Assessment Scale (EBPPAS), along with 13 background/demographic questions. RESULTS ...

BACKGROUND Monitoring the HIV epidemic in a defined population is critical for planning treatment and preventive strategies. This is especially important in sub-Saharan Africa, which harbours the highest burden of the disease. OBJECTIVE To estimate HIV incidence in adults aged 18-47 years old and to investigate spatial variations of HIV prevalence in Manhiça, a semi-rural area of southern Moz...

Consumption by native predators is an important means by which assemblages repel invasion by non-native species. This resistance may be compromised as the diversity and abundance of species at upper trophic levels continues to decline globally. We investigated whether consumptive biotic resistance by mobile benthic fauna could explain compositional differences between a highly invaded fouling c...

BACKGROUND This article reports on the development of a systematic approach to assess for community readiness prior to implementation of a behavioural intervention for childhood obesity. Using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR), we developed research tools to evaluate local community centres' organisational readiness and their capacity to implement the intervention. ...

A large percentage of farmers do not respond to mail surveys. To gain insight into why farmers do not respond and how to improve response rates, a three-step research design was developed. First, an initial survey, based on in-person interviews with 15 farmers, was sent to 100 farmers. Second, farmers who did not respond to this mail survey were contacted by phone to investigate the reasons for...

The microbial world has been shown to hold an unimaginable diversity. The use of rRNA genes and PCR amplification to assess microbial community structure and diversity present biases that need to be analyzed in order to understand the risks involved in those estimates. Herein, we show that PCR amplification of specific sequence targets within a community depends on the fractions that those sequ...

This study addresses the impact of spatial scale on explaining variance in benthic communities. In particular, the analysis estimated the fraction of community variation that occurred at a spatial scale smaller than the sampling interval (i.e., the geographic distance between samples). This estimate is important because it sets a limit on the amount of community variation that can be explained ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the impact of health promotion programs and microcredit programs on three communities in the Dominican Republic. One community had only the health promotion program, one community had only the microcredit program, and one community had both a health promotion program and a microcredit program. This pilot project examined the hypothesis that the largest changes in 11 health i...