IN THE PERPETUALLY RESOURCE-STARVED environment of public health, where each disease or risk factor has to fight for a scrap of the federal budget, it is easy to forget how fast progress can be made when appropriate policy attention and resources are marshaled to solve a problem. The natural response of public health professionals to the starvation diet is to maintain low expectations. But thos...

INTRODUCTION An attractive facial appearance is considered nowadays to be a decisive factor in establishing successful interactions between humans. In relation to this topic, scientific literature states that some of the facial features have more impact then others, and important authors revealed that certain proportions between different anthropometrical landmarks are mandatory for an attracti...

China is experiencing a syphilis epidemic of enormous proportions. The regions most heavily affected by syphilis correspond to regions where sexually transmitted HIV infection is also a major public health threat. Many high-risk patients in China fail to receive routine syphilis screening. This missed public health opportunity stems from both a failure of many high-risk individuals to seek clin...

Application of the Next generation sequencing (NGS) technology has demonstrated that most tumor samples exhibit intra-tumor heterogeneity. Here we proposed SAPPH (Somatic Aberrations Prediction for Paired Heterogeneous tumor samples), as a new method for estimating tumor somatic copy number aberrations as well as inferring tumor subclone proportions from heterogeneous tumor sequencing data. Thi...

We suggest that the conventional need for overwhelming amounts of astrophysical dark matter should be regarded as a warning to standard gravity rather than as merely a challenge to it, and show that the systematics of galactic rotation curve data can just as readily point in the direction of the equally covariant conformal gravity alternative. In particular we identify an apparent imprint of th...

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are commonly spread via sexual contact. It is estimated that one million STIs are acquired every day worldwide. Besides their impact on sexual, reproductive and neonatal health, they can cause disastrous and life-threatening complications if left untreated. In addition to this personal burden, STIs also represent a socioeconomic problem, deriving in treatm...