THE COMMON RAT of Polynesia is Rattus exulans (Peale). It appears to be closely related to, and ptobably derived from Rattus concolor of the Malay region. The concolor group, and its derivatives, occur all over the Pacific, being represented in the Oceanic islands by R. exulans, R. micronesiensis and R. hawaiiensis. Other species have been erected for the Polynesian forms, but it may be simpler...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this paper is to portray the views of key stakeholders on the potential impacts of Samoa's free trade negotiations and agreements, on health and wellbeing in Samoa. METHODS A series of key informant interviews were undertaken with identified stakeholders during June and July, 2011. Interviews were conducted using a semi-structured interview protocol. They were conduc...

In this talk, we present Apache SAMOA, an open-source platform for mining big data streams with Apache Flink, Storm and Samza. Real time analytics is becoming the fastest and most efficient way to obtain useful knowledge from what is happening now, allowing organizations to react quickly when problems appear or to detect new trends helping to improve their performance. Apache SAMOA includes alg...

The genetic structure of Staphylococcus aureus populations sampled from diverse regions of the globe have been the subject of numerous investigations. Here we describe the structure of S. aureus populations collected from the Southwest Pacific. Multi-locus sequence typing was performed on 467 isolates obtained from people with nasal colonization or bacteremia in Auckland (NZ), and patients pred...

Little is known about the epidemiology of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in most Pacific Island nations. Relatively high rates of MRSA have been reported in Polynesian people living outside the Pacific Islands. To determine the prevalence and characteristics of MRSA, we assessed wound swabs from 399 persons with skin and soft tissue infection living in Samoa. MRSA was isolat...

Lactose malabsorption was studied by a breath hydrogen technique in 139 Samoan and 68 white schoolchildren. The Samoans were studied in four locations, two in Western Samoa and two in New Zealand, and the white children in both the Cook Islands and New Zealand. The prevalence of malabsorption varied with location: for Samoans it ranged from 41% to 60% in Western Samoa and 0% to 35% in New Zeala...