prosopis cineraria (l.) druce (kahour in persian) is a native and indicative species of saharo-sindian region. prosopis forest in iran extends from the beach of persian gulf and oman sea in boushehr, hormozgan and sistan-baluchistan provinces to south of kerman province. in this research ecological conditions of prosopis such as floristic diversity, climate, soil and the biomass were studied. i...

BACKGROUND Charcoal-burning, a new suicide method, emerged in Hong Kong during the latest economic recession. Within 2 months charcoal-burning had become the third most common suicide method. AIMS To examine the characteristics of suicides by charcoal-burning, and to delineate the pathways linking macro-level economic and social changes with the subjective experiences of those surviving a cha...

We investigated the association of the intensity of newspaper reporting of charcoal burning suicide with the incidence of such deaths in Taiwan during 1998-2002. A counting process approach was used to estimate the incidence of suicides and intensity of news reporting. Conditional Poisson generalized linear autoregressive models were performed to assess the association of the intensity of newsp...

Charcoal burning has emerged as a novel suicide method in Taiwan and its impact on maternal filicide-suicide (MFS) remains unexplored. Using official national mortality data and reports of MFS cases from electronic newspaper archives, the authors aimed to examine whether the newly available charcoal burning was associated with an increase in MFS incidents during the period from 1999 to 2006. Th...

BACKGROUND An epidemic of carbon monoxide poisoning suicide by burning barbecue charcoal has occurred in East Asia in the last decade. We investigated the spatial and temporal evolution of the epidemic to assess its impact on the epidemiology of suicide in Taiwan. METHODS AND FINDINGS Age-standardised rates of suicide and undetermined death by charcoal burning were mapped across townships (me...

OBJECTIVES Following the first case in Hong Kong in 1998, the method of committing suicide by charcoal burning has spread to other communities. This aim of this study was to examine the impact of charcoal burning suicides on both overall suicide rates and older-method suicide rates in Hong Kong and urban Taiwan. DESIGN Trend analysis of the overall and method-specific suicide rates between 19...

BACKGROUND The charcoal burning suicide epidemics in both Hong Kong and Taiwan have been well documented. However, little is known about the situation in Japan. AIMS To examine the impact of charcoal burning suicide on the overall and other method-specific suicide rates between 1998 and 2007 in Japan. METHOD Using data obtained from the Vital Statistics of Japan, negative binomial regressio...

In Ghana, about 73% of households rely on solid fuels for cooking. Over 13,000 annual deaths are attributed to exposure to indoor air pollution from inefficient combustion. In this study, assessment of thermal efficiency, emissions and total global warming impact of three cookstoves commonly used in Ghana was completed using IWA water boiling test (WBT) protocol. Statistical averages of three r...

Fire suppression and changing climate have resulted in increased large wildfire frequency and severity in the western United States, causing carbon cycle impacts. Forest thinning and prescribed burning reduce high-severity fire risk, but require removal of biomass and emissions of carbon from burning. During each fire a fraction of the burning vegetation and soil organic matter is converted int...

We conducted an exploratory controlled trial to examine the efficacy of restricting access to charcoal in preventing suicides from carbon monoxide poisoning by charcoal burning in Hong Kong. All charcoal packs were removed from the open shelves of major retail outlets in the intervention region for 12 months; in the control region, charcoal packs were displayed as usual. The suicide rate from c...