Aim Between July 2005 and May 2008, Indonesia reported 133 H5N1 confi rmed human cases with a case fatality proportion of 81%. Fifty-four percent of cases had a history of direct contact with poultry (chickens). Therefore, it is important to defi ne the detection of antibody of H5N1 among people who have intensive contact with poultry have been exposed to H5N1 viruses. Methods We collected sera...

Livestock facilities have received numerous criticisms due to their emissions of odorous air and chemicals. Hence, there is a significant need for odor emission factors and identification of principle odorous chemicals. Odor emission factors are used as inputs to odor setback models, while chemical emission factors may be compared with regulations to demonstrate possible health impacts. Additio...

OBJECTIVES To assess use of urinary collection devices (external, intermittent, and indwelling catheters; pads or briefs) and examine predictors of indwelling catheters in skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). DESIGN Retrospective cohort study. SETTING SNFs in California, Florida, Michigan, New York, and Texas. PARTICIPANTS All patients admitted to SNFs in 2003 who remained there for 1 year ...

The paper discusses the relevant features of an object support system that provides basic facilities for building flexible distributed applications in environments where objects can be mobile and occasional failures (node crashes, real or virtual network partitions) are possible. These facilities are for naming, locating and invoking objects, persistence and garbage collection. One of the key f...

Methods The Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) was used as the basis for defining potential factors affecting implementation success and guided data collection and analysis. For each of the initiatives, a sample of facilities was selected to maximize variability in implementation success, defined uniquely for each initiative. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with...

In this paper, we develop a generalized network optimization model for the complex supply chain of human blood, which is a life-saving, perishable product. In particular, we consider a regionalized blood banking system consisting of collection sites, testing and processing facilities, storage facilities, distribution centers, as well as points of demand, which, typically, include hospitals. Our...

This paper reports recent work at AT&T to develop a system for the management of personal digital photograph collections. Shoebox, the resulting software package, provides a range of browsing and searching facilities, utilising spoken annotations and image content to enable both semantically similar and visually similar images to be retrieved. We report on the design of the system, the construc...

The most important factor in reducing the impact of an epidemic is a timely response with implementation of effective control measures at the point of detection. This study sought to assess the malaria reporting and epidemic preparedness systems of health facilities in Eldoret West District, Kenya. A cross-sectional study design was adapted. A census technique was used to select all the forty f...