background and objective: although hepatitis b vaccine immunogenicity is high, certain risk factors such as age, tobacco consumption, obesity and genetic background have been associated with low responsiveness to hbv vaccine. we aimed to evaluate the role of occult hepatitis b virus (hbv) infection in non-responder adults to hbv vaccine in a low endemic area for hbv. material and methods : a to...

Rainfall-runoff modeling is highly uncertain for a number of different reasons. Hydrological processes are quite complex, and their simplifications in the models lead to inaccuracies. Model parameters themselves uncertain—physical because observations conceptual due limited identifiability. Furthermore, main model input—precipitation available high spatio-temporal variability. The quantificatio...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) surface antigen (HBsAg) is one of the most important serological markers of current HBV infection. However, there are significant antigenic variations of HBsAg caused by genotypic diversity as well as mutation of the HBV genome. It is predictable that amino acid substitutions occurring in the HBsAg "a" determinant of a particular HBV genotype will affect the sensitivity ...

UNLABELLED Occult HBV infection is characterized by the persistence of HBV DNA in the liver of individuals negative for HBV surface antigen (HBsAg). Occult HBV may exist in the hepatocytes as a free genome, although the factors responsible for the very low viral replication and gene expression usually observed in this peculiar kind of infection are mostly unknown. Aims of this study were to inv...

Several authors have pointed out that conceptual models have two main shortcomings: first, they are clearly oriented to a specific development paradigm (structured, object oriented, etc.); second, once the conceptual models have been obtained, it is really difficult to change to another development paradigm, because the model orientation to a specific development approach. This fact induces pro...