BACKGROUND We explore the health care literature and draw on two decades of experience in the provision of medical care at mass gatherings and special events to illustrate the complementary aspects of mass gathering medical support and disaster medicine. Most communities have occasions during which large numbers of people assemble in public or private spaces for the purpose of celebrating or pa...

Organisms should invest more in gathering information when the pay-off from finding a profitable resource is likely to be greater. Here, we ask whether animal societies put more effort in scouting for a new nest when their current one is of low quality. We measured the scouting behaviour of Temnothorax albipennis ant colonies when they inhabit nest-sites with different combinations of desirable...

The importation of infectious diseases during a mass gathering may result in outbreaks. Infectious diseases associated with mass gatherings vary depending on the type and location of the mass gathering. The annual Hajj to Makkah in Saudi Arabia is one of the largest annual religious mass gatherings in the world. Preparation for the Hajj encompasses multiple sectors to develop comprehensive plan...

In this article, experimental results on the effect of CO2 sorption and desorption on the creep response of polycarbonate (PC) are presented. Tensile specimens machined from PC sheets were exposed to CO2 and the absorbed gas mass fraction ranged from 0.045 to 0.12. The creep/creep recovery response of as-received PC, saturated PC, and saturation-cycled PC was characterized. It was found that th...