OBJECTIVES This study was conducted in Northern Italy with the aim of defining the risk of agricultural workers' contact with biological agents through the determination of serum antibodies against selected zoonotic agents. Immunity against tetanus was also investigated. METHODS Two groups of agricultural workers consisting of 153 animal breeders (exposed) and 46 non- breeders (controls) were...

The greater amberjack Seriola dumerili is a large teleost fish with rapid growth and excellent flesh quality, whose domestication represents an ambitious challenge for aquaculture. The occurrence of reproductive dysfunctions in greater amberjack reared in captivity was investigated by comparing reproductive development of wild and captive-reared individuals. Wild and captive-reared breeders wer...

Chick embryo development is associated with an accumulation of polyunsaturated fatty acids in lipid tissues making them susceptible to lipid peroxidation. It has been accepted that canthaxanthin has high antioxidant capacity. Research findings have repeatedly indicated that feeding 25(OH)D3 (25-hydroxycholecalciferol), to poultry breeders, broilers and layers increased performance and health. T...

With increasing Internet coverage, the use of a web-based survey for epidemiological study is a possibility. We performed an investigation in Japan in winter 2008 using the web-based daily questionnaire for health (WDQH). The WDQH is a web-based questionnaire survey formulated to obtain information about the daily physical condition of the general public on a real-time basis, in order to study ...

The purpose of this study was to examine how exercise level, exercise motives, and barriers changed from the baseline phase to the follow-up phase after a behavioural and cognitive intervention aimed at increasing exercise. Seventy-five members of our university community (43 subjects in the control group and 32 in the experimental group), all of whom received cognitive feedback, agreed to comp...

Models of collective action infrequently account for differences across individuals beyond a limited set of strategies, ignoring variation in endowment (e.g. physical condition, wealth, knowledge, personality, support), individual costs of effort, or expected gains from cooperation. However, behavioural research indicates these inter-individual differences can have significant effects on the dy...

Allocation decisions depend on an organism's condition which can change with age. Two opposite changes in life-history traits are predicted in the presence of senescence: either an increase in breeding performance in late age associated with terminal investment or a decrease due to either life-history trade-offs between current breeding and future survival or decreased efficiency at old age. Ag...

For a breeder, understanding the inheritance of a trait that is controlled by several genes and influenced by the environment can be a nightmare. Suppose, for example, that you are trying to breed apricot Poodles, but instead of getting only a single shade, your litters always have a variety of shades from pale to dark apricot. You might blame it on variable expressivity, which is just a conven...

* Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected] Questionnaires are a useful method to determine breeder’s selection strategies, knowledge, and dog breeds welfare, as well as to define the current situation. Evaluation of the situation can lead to changes in breeding policies. The aim of our work was to study the differences that could exist among dog breeders concerning their opinions and ...