Abstract Crack is a form of defect that mainly seen in any types building including residential buildings. Building crack-free unrealistic as the crack cannot be fully prevented during construction process. However, simply taken only visually unattractive, it also having major effect on structure safety. This because does not pose direct threat to safety but encourage certain behaviours can lea...

Rapid tooling technology is regarded as an important method of reducing the cost and time to market in a new product development process. Silicone rubber mold is frequently used in indirect tooling. Automatic vacuum casting system is widely used to degas in the manufacturing of silicon rubber mold, but the cost of hardware is very expensive. A low-cost automatic vacuum degassing system is desig...

Reduced reference image quality assessment (RRIQA) methods aim to assess the quality of a perceived image with only a reduced cue from its original version, called ”reference image”. The powerful advantage of RR methods is their ”General-purpose”. However, most introduced RR methods are built upon a non-adaptive transform models. This can limit the scope of RR methods to a small number of disto...

Consulted experts Experts from ECDC: Hervé Zeller, Dragoslav Domanović, Celine Gossner, Denis Coulombier. External experts: Martin Beer, Paula M Kinnunen, Olli Vapalahti, Dennis Tappe, Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit, Bernd Hoffmann. Main conclusions and options for action A recently reported cluster of acute fatal encephalitis in three squirrel breeders possibly related to an infection with a newly ide...

OBJECTIVE To assess the validity of observations on eye worm and Calabar swellings for the rapid assessment of the prevalence and intensity of loiasis at the community level. METHOD A total of 12895 individuals over the age of 15 years living in 102 communities in Cameroon and Nigeria took part in the study. A standardized questionnaire was administered to participants from whom finger-prick ...

The most important public health priority in agricultural policy-making is currently food safety, despite the relatively higher importance of food security, nutrition, and other agricultural-related health issues in terms of global burden of disease. There is limited experience worldwide of using health impact assessment (HIA) during the development of agriculture and food policies, which perha...

Since February 2016, 287 confirmed hepatitis A cases infected with three distinct strains of sub-genotype IA virus have been reported by 13 EU countries. These include cases from eight additional countries, 263 more cases and one additional strain compared with the data reported in the first risk assessment published on the 19 December 2016. Most cases are reported among adult men who have sex ...

Energy-efficiency is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), since sensors are battery operated with limited life time. Energy efficient broadcasting will have a direct impact on network lifetime. Since the minimum energy broadcasting schemes are affected by broadcast storm problem, it has to be addressed to improve the energy efficiency. To overcome the broadcast storm problem, pr...