Research has demonstrated the health and financial cost to working caregivers of older adults and the cost to business in lost productivity. This paper describes the implementation of the Worker Interactive Networking (WIN) project, a Web-based program designed to support employed caregivers at work. WIN innovatively linked working caregivers via the Internet to home to monitor elders' status u...

Pesticides are ubiquitous neurotoxicants, and several lines of evidence suggest that exposure may be associated with depression. Epidemiologic evidence has focused largely on organophosphate exposures, while research on other pesticides is limited. We collected detailed pesticide use history from farmers recruited in 1998-2000 in France. Among 567 farmers aged 37-78 years, 83 (14.6%) self-repor...

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) requests assistance in preventing organic dust toxic syndrome (ODTS), an acute respiratory illness in agricultural workers who inhale contaminated organic dust. This Alert describes four case reports in which a total of 29 agricultural workers developed ODTS following inhalation of organic dusts contaminated with microorganisms. ...

Thielaviopsis basicola is a soil-borne fungal pathogen with a wide host range and a cosmopolitan distribution. It causes disease on many agricultural crops, and in South Africa is the causal agent of black pod rot of groundnuts and black root rot on chicory. Knowledge of the population diversity of T. basicola could provide valuable information regarding management strategies, the possible move...

The focus of the review paper is to discuss how biotechnological innovations are opening new frontiers to mitigate nutrition in key agricultural crops with potential for large-scale health impact to people in Africa. The general objective of the Africa Biofortified Sorghum (ABS) project is to develop and deploy sorghum with enhanced pro-vitamin A to farmers and end-users in Africa to alleviate ...

Antifeedant and Insecticidal Activity of Quassinoids against the Diamondback Moth (Pintella rylostella) and Structure-Activity Relationships Masayuki DAiDo, Nobuhiro OHNo, Kazunori IMAMuRA, Narihiko FuKAMiyA, Makoto HATAKosHi," Hiroko YAMAzAKi,' Kiyoshi TAGAHARA,'" Kuo-Hsiung LEE,"** and Masayoshi OKANot Department of lhterdisciplinary Studies on Natural Ehvironment, Fbculty of lhtegrated Arts ...

BACKGROUND Nigeria has suffered from several healthcare workers' strikes in the past 36 months, involving all categories of health workers. Frequent healthcare workers' strikes result in the closure of public healthcare institutions preventing Nigerians' access to quality health services. The purpose of this study was to identify the root cause(s) of strikes by healthcare workers, their effects...

This paper presents a novel approach to classify agricultural crops using NDVI time series. The novelty lies in i) extracting a set of features from the each and every NDVI curve, and ii) using them to train a crop classification model using a Support Vector Machine (SVM). Specifically, we use the TIMESAT program package to: 1) smooth the time series, 2) decompose them into agricultural seasons...

A reanalysis of results from a recent paper on the effect of oscillation on gas exchange through leaves of cottonwood (Populus deltoides, Marsh) is presented. Mass flow of air through the leaf cannot account for the observed increase in gas exchange during oscillation in that experiment. Consideration of various published data shows that in the field, mass flow will not constitute more than a f...

In the Workers' Compensation Insurance (WCI) system in Korea, occupational diseases (ODs) are approved through deliberation meetings of the Committee on Occupational Disease Judgment (CODJ) after disease investigations when workers or medical institutions requested the Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service (COMWEL) for medical care benefits. Insufficient data presented by employers or...