Public health emergencies such as H1N1 and SARS pandemics have demonstrated and validated the necessity of a strong and cohesive laboratory response system that is able to respond to threats in an efficient and timely manner. Individual laboratories, through connection with other laboratories or networks, are able to enhance their capacity for preparedness and response to emergencies. Efficient...

The detection of consanguinity by the presence of multiple regions of homozygosity (ROH) is not an uncommon occurrence in clinical laboratories performing SNP microarray analysis. Reporting practices amongst laboratories are highly variable, due in part to differences in testing platforms, threshold parameters, language utilized, and laboratory policies. While guidance documents have provided a...

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR-) ribotyping was performed on 243 strains of Salmonella enterica serotype Enteritidis isolated during the years 1980-1994 from 58 foodborne outbreaks occurring in different regions of Italy. The majority (37) of the outbreaks were attributed to phage type (PT) 4, followed by PT1 (seven outbreaks); the latter was identified in 1993 in Italy in epidemic strains of E...

Emissions from traditional cooking practices in low- and middle-income countries have detrimental health and climate effects; cleaner-burning cookstoves may provide "co-benefits". Here we assess this potential via in-home measurements of fuel-use and emissions and real-time optical properties of pollutants from traditional and alternative cookstoves in rural Malawi. Alternative cookstove models...

A wide-angle Michelson Doppler imaging interferometer (WAMDII) is described that is intended to measure upper atmospheric winds and temperatures from naturally occurring visible region emissions, using Spacelab as a platform. It is an achromatic field-widened instrument, with good thermal stability, that employs four quarterwave phase-stepped images to generate full images of velocity, temperat...

Residential energy consumption is now an important component of total energy consumption and its related emissions. In addition,this consumption has significant potential for growth in both developed and developing countries, as average incomes increase, and domestic appliance numbers rise. Reduction in this energy use may be achieved both through conservation measures, and through increased ef...

BACKGROUND Emergency Department (ED) medical officers are often the first medical responders to emergencies in Jamaica because pre-hospital emergency response services are not universally available. Over the past decade, several new ED training opportunities have been introduced locally. Their precise impact on the health care system in Jamaica has not yet been evaluated. We sought to determine...

The importance of laboratories cannot be gainsaid as far as the health of any country is concerned. This is especially considering that laboratories have a bearing on the accuracy of research carried out on varied ailments, as well as the effectiveness of any remedial substance. Of course, there are numerous categories of laboratories with histology laboratories coming as some of the most funda...

Measurements of reactive chlorocarbons over the Surinam tropical rain forest: indications for strong biogenic emissions H. A. Scheeren, J. Lelieveld, J. Williams, H. Fischer, and C. Warneke Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht, The Netherlands Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany NOAA Aeronomy Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado, USA Received: 11 September 2003 – Accept...

Jet observables, event shapes and jet rates, revealed themselves as one of the richest laboratories to explore QCD. Being infrared and collinear safe (IRC), they can be predicted with perturbative (PT) techniques, but their high sensitivity to low energy emissions allows us to investigate the fairly unknown nonperturbative regime. Most discriminatory studies make use of distributions. In integr...