The building code for radon prevention and the associated practical guidelines were revised in Finland in 2003-2004. Thereafter, preventive measures have become more common and effective and indoor radon concentrations have been markedly reduced. In this study, the indoor radon concentration was measured in 1500 new low-rise residential houses. The houses were randomly selected and represented ...

BACKGROUND Few studies have examined the impact of community-based smoke alarm (SA) distribution programmes on the occurrence of house fire-related deaths and injuries (HF-D/I). OBJECTIVE To determine whether the rate of HF-D/I differed for programme houses that had a SA installed through a community-based programme called Operation Installation, versus non-programme houses in the same census...

The State of Florida has a radon standard for new construction. This study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of two slab types (monolithic and slab-in-stem wall) in retarding radon entry in new houses built in accordance with the proposed standard over high radon potential soils. Fourteen houses were monitored during their construction on sites whose soil gas radon concentrations were...

The aim of this paper was to study the influence of microbial biofilms on the high copper levels measured in the drinking water of rural houses. Drinking water parameters and copper pipe surfaces were analysed in the copper plumbing systems of rural and urban houses. The water in rural houses had pH values of 6.2 and alkalinity values of 63mg/L as CaCO3, whereas in urban houses the pH values we...

In many countries, the population is either declining or rapidly concentrating in big cities, which causes problems in the form of vacant houses in many local communities. It is often challenging to keep track of the locations and the conditions of vacant houses, and for example in Japan, costly manual field studies are employed to map the occupancy situation. In this paper, we propose a techni...

OBJECTIVE This paper describes how powerful detectors of adverse events manifested in multivariate series of biosurveillance data can be learned using only a few labeled instances of such events. BACKGROUND The context of the work presented here is rapid detection of statistically significant emerging patterns of adverse events in data related to food-and agriculturesafety collected by the U.S....

BACKGROUND House screening should protect people against malaria. We assessed whether two types of house screening--full screening of windows, doors, and closing eaves, or installation of screened ceilings--could reduce house entry of malaria vectors and frequency of anaemia in children in an area of seasonal malaria transmission. METHODS During 2006 and 2007, 500 occupied houses in and near ...

Rural America is witnessing widespread housing development, which is to the detriment of the environment. It has been suggested to cluster houses so that their disturbance zones overlap and thus cause less habitat loss than is the case for dispersed development. Clustering houses makes intuitive sense, but few empirical studies have quantified the spatial pattern of houses in real landscapes, a...

Extensive damage to houses during severe tropical cyclones in the 1970s in Australia highlighted the need for research-based structural engineering principles to be applied in design and construction of houses. Houses have structural redundancies and complex load paths, so the analysis of even simple houses was complicated. In order to evaluate the structural performance of these parallel syste...

Losses to life and property from unplanned fires (wildfires) are forecast to increase because of population growth in peri-urban areas and climate change. In response, there have been moves to increase fuel reduction--clearing, prescribed burning, biomass removal and grazing--to afford greater protection to peri-urban communities in fire-prone regions. But how effective are these measures? Seve...