introduction: renal failure affects the mechanical and the ventilatory function of the lungs. a few studies have evaluated the ventilatory and pulmonary function in dialysis patients. the present study aimed to compare pulmonary function test (pft) results in patients undergoing hemodialysis (hd) and peritoneal dialysis (pd). materials and methods: we conducted a cross-sectional study on 50  pa...

It is estimated that over 60 million Americans (1/3 of the adult population) are functionally or marginally illiterate. To recognize and gain an understanding of illiteracy and its impact on poisoning, we determined if the illiterate in our community could recognize potential poisons. A prospective study involving 29 male and 21 female adult illiterates was undertaken. A personal interview was ...

This technical note introduces the Household Hunger Scale (HHS), a simple, new indicator to assess household hunger in food insecure areas. The HHS consists of three questions and three frequencies that, when administered in a population-based household survey, allows for estimating the percent of households affected by three different severities of household hunger: 1) Little to no household h...

BACKGROUND This article reports on the use of the 'neighborhood method' to measure the prevalence and basic characteristics of children who became separated from their parents or usual caregivers subsequent to an attack by the M23 militia group in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo. METHODS A two-stage household cluster survey was conducted in 522 households in North Kivu in August ...

background one common challenge to social systems is achieving equity in financial contributions and preventing financial loss. because of the large and unpredictable nature of some costs, achieving this goal in the health system presents important and unique problems. the present study investigated the household financial contributions (hfcs) to the health system.   methods the study investiga...

This paper presents the first computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of viscous flow due to a small sphere vibrating near a fish, a configuration that is frequently used for experiments on dipole source localization by the lateral line. Both two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) meshes were constructed, reproducing a previously published account of a mottled sculpin approach...

Heat shock proteins (HSPs), which are molecular chaperones that stabilize numerous vital proteins, may be attractive targets for cancer therapy. The aim of the present study was to investigate the possible anticancer effect of single or dual targeting of HSP90 and HSP70 and the combination treatment with HSP inhibitors and chemotherapeutic agents in bladder cancer cells. The expression of HSP90...

BACKGROUND A six-fold increase in pediatric MRSA infections, prompted us to examine the clinical profile of children with MRSA infections seen at Mercy Children's Hospital, Toledo, Ohio and to characterize the responsible strains. METHODS Records were reviewed of pediatric patients who cultured positive for MRSA from June 1 to December 31, 2007. Strain typing by pulsed field gel electrophores...

High-latitude ecosystems play an important role in the global carbon cycle and in regulating the climate system and are presently undergoing rapid environmental change. Accurate land cover data sets are required to both document these changes as well as to provide land-surface information for benchmarking and initializing Earth system models. Earth system models also require specific land cover...

Multi-scale modeling of Arctic tundra vegetation requires characterization of the heterogeneous tundra landscape, which includes representation of distinct plant functional types (PFTs). We combined high-resolution multi-spectral remote sensing imagery from the WorldView-2 satellite with light detecting and ranging (LiDAR)-derived digital elevation models (DEM) to characterize the tundra landsc...