background performance-based financing (pbf) has been advanced as a solution to contribute to improving the performance of health systems in developing countries. this is the case in benin. this study aims to analyse how two pbf approaches, piloted in benin, behave during implementation and what effects they produce, through investigating how local stakeholders perceive the introduction of pbf,...

Vibrio cholerae O139 Bengal emerged on the Indian subcontinent in late 1992 and was first recognized in Thailand in 1993. To characterize the epidemiology of this disease, a hospital-based case-control study was conducted in Samutsakorn, a port city 30 km southwest of Bangkok. Between November 15, 1993, and June 3, 1994, 366 patients were confirmed to have cholera by culture, including 165 (45%...

block-flexure is the most common mode of toppling failure in natural and excavated rock slopes. in such failure, some rock blocks break due to tensile stresses and some overturn under their own weights and then all of them topple together. in this paper, first, a brief review of previous studies on toppling failures is presented. then, the physical and mechanical properties of experimental mode...

background: thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine malignancy. several risk factors were found to play a role in thyroid cancer. the purpose of the study was to determine the risk factors for thyroid cancer, in babol, north of iran. method: 80 patients with thyroid cancer were selected as case group and 160 people living in the neighborhood of the patients as control group. risk factors in...

OBJECTIVE To study the prevalence of low birth weight (LBW) and its association with maternal factors. DESIGN Cohort study. SETTING Urban community. SUBJECTS Cohort of 210 pregnant women. RESULTS The LBW prevalence was 30.3%. On multivariate analyses the maternal factors significantly associated with LBW were anemia (OR-4.81), low socioeconomic status (OR-3.96), short birth interval (OR...

The relation of oral contraceptive use to the risk of breast cancer in white women aged 25-59 years was assessed with data collected during 1977-1992 in a case-control surveillance system in hospitals in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. A total of 3,540 cases with breast cancer were compared with 4,488 controls with nonmalignant nongynecologic conditions unrelated to oral contraceptive use. ...

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) stresses the examination of evidence from clinical research and describes it as a shift in medical paradigms, in contrast to intuition, unsystematic clinical experience, and pathophysiologic rationale. While the importance of randomized trials has been created by the concept of the hierarchy of evidence in guiding therapy, much of the medical research is observatio...

Some studies (but not all) have suggested that there may be an increase in the risk of breast cancer associated with a prior induced abortion. The risk, if present, may vary according to the duration of the pregnancy in which the abortion occurred, or to a woman's age or parity at that time. The authors conducted a case-control study of breast cancer in white women under age 45 years to address...

In this paper, fundamental conditions which bound the network processing unit (NPU) worst-case performance are established. In particular, these conditions formalize and integrate, with mathematical rigor, two existing approaches for finding the NPU performance bounds, i.e., the work conserving condition and instruction/latency budget based approaches. These fundamental conditions are then empl...