Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool? How much does campaign spending really matter? What truly made crime fall in the 1990s? These are the sort of questions raised—and answered—in the new book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. In yesterday's excerpt, authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner explored the impact of a child's first name, pa...

A rapid, in situ thermonuclease test that identifies colonies of Staphylococcus aureus among staphylococci isolated from swimming pool water by membrane filtration recovery on various selective and differential media is described.

Water from swimming pools in the Miami area was analyzed for nitrates, chlorates and trihalomethanes. The average concentrations of nitrate and chlorate found in freshwater pools were 8.6 mg/liter and 16 mg/liter respectively, with the highest concentrations being 54.9 mg/liter and 124 mg/liter, respectively. The average concentration of total trihalomethanes found in freshwater pools was 125 m...

OBJECTIVE To examine the effectiveness of aquatic exercise training on fatigue and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in women with multiple sclerosis (MS). DESIGN Randomized controlled trial, 4-week and 8-week follow-up. SETTING Referral center of a multiple sclerosis society. PARTICIPANTS Women (N=32) diagnosed with relapsing-remitting MS (mean age ± SD, 32.6±8.0y) were recruited in...

Though process evaluation of health programs has received growing attention, few interventions have reported process evaluation over multiple years. This article describes 2 years of process evaluation (2003-04) for the Pool Cool Diffusion Trial. Pool Cool is a skin cancer prevention program designed to increase sun protection habits among children and improve organizational and environmental s...

OBJECTIVES To determine the prevalence of proper fencing around outdoor swimming pools among US households and to describe this fencing in relation to demographic and other household factors. To estimate the number of drownings among children <5 years of age that might be prevented by having proper fencing around all residential pools in the United States. METHODS A 1994, randomly dialed nati...

ISSUE ADDRESSED We report on a process evaluation of a project that aimed to replace energy-dense, nutrient-poor (EDNP) items at a community swimming pool kiosk. The analytic framework was the Analysis Grid for Environments Linked to Obesity (ANGELO). To contribute to health promotion practice in recreational settings, the process evaluation sought to determine the extent to which project'contr...

Atlantic gardens and swimming pools constitute one of the most relevant features of a new phase in the history of the urbanization process in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona, coinciding with the real state “madness”, by which the traditionally compact urban form typical of Mediterranean cultures lose ground to more disperse patterns of settlement characteristic of Anglo-Saxon countries. Th...