BACKGROUND To estimate the prevalence of anxiety and depression symptoms, and their association with professional help-seeking, among operational ambulance personnel and a general working population, and to study the symptoms of musculoskeletal pain and disturbed sleep among ambulance personnel. METHODS The results of a comprehensive nationwide questionnaire survey of operational ambulance pe...

BACKGROUND Personnel in Armed Forces entities such as the US Coast Guard (USCG) engage in strenuous tasks requiring high levels of physiological and psychological fitness. Previous reports have found increased prevalence of dietary supplement (DS) use by military personnel to meet the demands of their occupation. OBJECTIVE This study assessed DS prevalence and patterns of use in USCG personne...

Exposure to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a recognized occupational hazard to healthcare personnel. The virus also presents an operational hazard to deployed Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel. Management guidelines for work related exposure to HIV mainly deal with healthcare workers in a first world hospital environment. Formal guidelines for postexposure prophylaxis (PEP) regar...

Special Operation Forces (SOF) have historically relied upon conventional medical assets for Role II and higher medical support. Over the last five years, the need for SOF-specific medical teams and surgical support was identified and addressed. Several Special Operations based Role II assets are now available to support operations, each with unique personnel and capabilities. The Special Opera...

The ability to listen to commands in noisy environments and understand acoustic signals, while maintaining situational awareness, is an important skill for military personnel and can be critical for mission success. Seventeen auditory tasks carried out by British infantry and combat-support personnel were identified through a series of focus groups conducted by Bevis et al. For military personn...

The feasibility of partial-body shielding is discussed from two points of viev. The first assumes that limited clinical and experimental data are extrapolable to the operational situations of interest and that it is possible to selectively protect against the neural, hemapoietic, and gastrointestinal components of the acute radiation syndrome. Under this assumption, it would appear that (a) neu...

The control of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS’s) is generally characterised by logical and sequential functions under the auspices of a programmable logic controller (PLC). Operational faults associated with control processes are often confusing to maintenance personnel at workshop level. This has resulted in the development of automatic diagnosis techniques. In this paper two generic diag...