BACKGROUND Although practice guidelines are important tools to improve quality of care, implementation remains challenging. To improve adherence to an evidence-based guideline for the management of mental health problems, we developed a tailored implementation strategy targeting barriers perceived by occupational physicians (OPs). Feasibility and impact on OPs' barriers were evaluated. METHOD...

This paper presents the experimental results of an on-going research project on geopolymer lightweight concrete using two locally available waste materials--low calcium fly ash (FA) and oil palm shell (OPS)--as the binder and lightweight coarse aggregate, respectively. OPS was pretreated with three different alkaline solutions of sodium hydroxide (NaOH), potassium hydroxide, and sodium silicate...

Given a positive Borel measure whose support is an infinite set of points in the real line the problem of the construction of an orthogonal polynomial sequence (OPS) with respect to that measure is known as direct problem. An inverse problem (IP) consists in finding the orthogonality measure when only some information is known about a given OPS (e.g., via a three-term recurrence relation, or vi...

BACKGROUND Organophosphorus pesticides are widely used throughout the world. Because of their ease of availability, organophosphorus compounds are commonly used for self-poisoning in developing countries. The acute effects of exposure to organophosphorus pesticides are well known, but the chronic effects are unclear. Recent studies suggest that abnormalities of the central and peripheral nervou...

The amount of Internet traffic in current backbone networks has grown enormously due to wide deployment of broadband Internet access and new multimedia applications such as sensing data sharing and real-time streaming. In regard to optical transport technology based on Wavelength Division Multiplex (WDM), available bandwidth within single fiber could be over 20Tb/s, according to the most recent...

This study evaluated whether oyster crude polysaccharides (OPS) attenuates lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced immune stress in weanling piglets. Thirty healthy crossbred piglets (28 ± 1 days old) were randomly divided into five groups (6 piglets/group). Blank control and LPS groups were fed with the basal diet, while low, medium and high dose of OPS groups were fed with the basal diet supplemente...

Yersinia enterocolitica serotype O:9 is a gram-negative enteropathogen that infects animals and humans. The role of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in Y. enterocolitica O:9 pathogenesis, however, remains unclear. The O:9 LPS consists of lipid A to which is linked the inner core oligosaccharide, serving as an attachment site for both the outer core (OC) hexasaccharide and the O-polysaccharide (OPS; a h...

OBJECTIVES To investigate cooperation between occupational physicians (OPs) and general practitioners (GPs). METHODS Literature review; structured interviews; questionnaires sent to randomised samples of OPs (n = 232) and GPs (n = 243). RESULTS Actual cooperation is poor. However, more than 80% of both groups responded that they want to improve their cooperation, aiming at better quality of...

BACKGROUND The provision of occupational health (OH) services to the UK population is limited and concentrated in certain industries. Occupational physicians (OPs) therefore see a different subset of the population than general practitioners (GPs) and their recognition of work-related ill health may differ. AIMS To examine how reports submitted by OPs and GPs compare and to discuss how biases...

BACKGROUND For the detection of respiratory pathogens, the sampling strategy may influence the diagnostic yield. Ideally, samples from the lower respiratory tract are collected, but they are difficult to obtain. OBJECTIVES In this study, we compared the diagnostic yield in sputum and oropharyngeal samples (OPS) for the detection of respiratory pathogens in patients with community-acquired pne...