The transmission of the transfusion-associated Chagas disease is an important mechanism of its dissemination in several Latin American countries. The transmission risk depends on five factors: prevalence of infection in blood donors, degree of serological coverage, sensibility of used tests, safety of obtained results and infection risk. The Southern Cone Iniciative set off by the Pan-American ...

Smart Grid solutions are being rolled out at large scale these days. While security concerns are addressed on various levels and sophisticated technical measures applied, privacy issues are still not fully understood yet. The generation of high-frequency meter readings exposes customers to new threats. Various politic initiatives thus aim towards a strong regulatory framework to enable an appro...

The enhancement of dismissed military barracks is a big problem in Friuli Venezia Giulia region. The changed geo-politic conditions caused the abandonment of the numerous structures and the transfer of their property from State to Region and then to local municipalities. The regional government has not defined guidelines for their re-use and the work for the Patussi barracks, done to produce a ...

This article explores the politics of knowledge involved in understanding and responding to epidemics in an era of global health governance and biosecurity. It develops and applies an approach focused on how multiple, competing narratives about epidemics are constructed, mobilized and interact, and selectively justify pathways of intervention and response. A detailed ethnographic case study of ...

Drawing on large-scale computational data and methods, this research demonstrates how polarization efforts are influenced by a patterned network of political and financial actors. These dynamics, which have been notoriously difficult to quantify, are illustrated here with a computational analysis of climate change politics in the United States. The comprehensive data include all individual and ...

The body of a mediaeval monarch was always under scrutiny, and Richard III's was no exception. In death, however, his body became subject to new forms of examination and interpretation: stripped naked after the battle of Bosworth, his corpse was carried to Leicester and exhibited before being buried. In 2012, it was rediscovered. The revelation that Richard suffered from scoliosis prompts this ...

What does it mean to live for sociology, today? In attempting to answer this question I return to Max Weber’s famous lectures delivered toward the end of his life—one on science as a vocation and the other on politics as a vocation. He presented ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’ in November 1917 toward the end of World War I and the more pessimistic ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ in January 1919 after Germ...

Flood and drought occur almost every year in China, but heavy floor and drought take place every several years or in successive years. We can say that the five thousand year civilization history of China is the history that the laboring people have been fighting against floods and droughts. Reduction of grain production caused by droughts is a slow process since crops become withered because of...

RATIONALE Public health policies are often dependent on political decision-making, but little is known of the impact of different forms of government on countries' health policies. In this exploratory study we studied the association between a wide range of process and outcome indicators of health policy and four groups of political factors (levels of democracy, e.g. voice and accountability; p...

BACKGROUND Despite the availability of effective interventions and public recognition of the severity of the problem, rabies continues to suffer neglect by programme planners in India and other low and middle income countries. We investigate whether this state of 'policy impasse' is due to, at least in part, the research community not catering to the information needs of the policy makers. MET...