The present article proposes a climatic approach to the study of the interaction between influenza spreading and climatic and meteorological factors in different climatic domains of the Iberian Peninsula. This association can be used to help in the prevention and mitigation of influenza epidemics. A biometeorological index has been defined and applied to the epidemic periods that took place in ...

Crater degradation on Mars is a key to understand erosion through time. Strongly eroded craters in the highlands are interpreted to be the result of enhanced erosion rate during the Noachian epoch [1]. While fluvial valleys climatic meaning and duration are still difficult to define (strongly warmer climate or episodic activity under slightly warmer climate), the enhanced Noachian craters degra...

This work develops Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) models applied to predict the consumption forecasting considering climatic factors. It is intended to verify the influence of climatic factors on the electricity consumption forecasting through the ANN. The case study is applied in the Campinas city, Brazil. This work used Perceptron and Backpropagation ANN models. The specific goal is compari...

Ecologic niche modeling has allowed numerous advances in understanding the geographic ecology of species, including distributional predictions, distributional change and invasion, and assessment of ecologic differences. We used this tool to characterize ecologic differentiation of Triatoma brasiliensis populations, the most important Chagas' disease vector in northeastern Brazil. The species' e...

Ecologic studies use data aggregated over groups rather than data on individuals. Such studies are popular because they use existing databases and can offer large exposure variation if the data arise from broad geographical areas. Unfortunately, the aggregation of data that define ecologic studies results in an information loss that can lead to ecologic bias. Specifically, ecologic bias arises ...

Many authors have pointed out that relative-risk estimates derived from ecologic data are vulnerable to biases not found in estimates derived from individual-level data. Nevertheless, biases in ecologic studies still are often dealt with in the same manner as biases in other observational studies, and so are not given adequate treatment. This commentary reviews and illustrates some of the more ...

This paper summarizes the salient features of the ecologic method, with emphasis on its application in the study of environmental health. Various types of ecologic design are described, with examples. Finally, the main advantages and disadvantages are indicated. A companion paper discusses the methodology of ecologic designs in more detail and describes a census of data sets with potential suit...

73.5% to 81.9% nucleotide sequence identity and from 90.1% to 96.9% amino acid sequence identity (Table). This level of sequence divergence, as well as the geographic specifi city of this hantavirus in French Guiana led us to provisionally name it Maripa virus. Results of a serologic survey to identify cases of respiratory disease with no evident etiology led us to identify an HPS case-patient ...