BACKGROUND Occurrence of psoriasis has been found to be strongly genetically controlled in Northern European and U.S. twin and family studies. OBJECTIVE Our purpose was to assess cumulative incidence and heritability of psoriasis in the Australian population. METHODS Australian twins reporting psoriasis on a screening questionnaire received from 3808 pairs were mailed a detailed instrument ...

While multiple studies have shown that a woman’s control over land is positively associated with bargaining power outcomes, few have succeeded in highlighting successful methods for increasing this control. We report on a policy experiment in an unplanned settlement in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that provided access to formal land titles to informal settlers at randomized prices, with additional ...

OBJECTIVES To assess whether public health nurses adhered to Dutch guidelines for tuberculosis contact investigations and to explore which factors influenced the process of identifying contacts, prioritizing contacts for testing and scaling up a contact investigation. METHODS A multiple-case study (2010-2012) compared the contact investigation guidelines as recommended with their use in pract...

OBJECTIVE Area 7 of the autonomous region of Madrid has one of the highest incidences of tuberculosis (23/100,000 population per year 2004). This study aimed to identify tuberculosis control in this area. METHODS A descriptive study of tuberculosis cases diagnosed in area 7 from January 1, 1999 to December 31, 2004 was carried out by analyzing the incidence of tuberculosis and the management ...

In clinical research, questionnaires are an important tool available for population and large family studies to gather information on a patient’s medical history. In 1989, we described a large kindred of FrenchCanadian descent with an 8-fold increased risk of venous thrombosis due to the 3363C insertion in the protein C gene [1]. We developed a questionnaire for use in this family to assess gen...

A new score statistic is derived, which uses information from registries (age-specific incidences) and family studies (sib-sib marginal correlation) to weight affected sibling pairs according to their age at onset. Age at onset of sibling pairs is modelled by a gamma frailty model. From this model we derive a bivariate survival function, which depends on the marginal survival and on the margina...

We conducted a tuberculosis contact investigation for a female military recruit with an unreported history of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDRTB) and subsequent recurrence. Pertinent issues included identification of likely contacts from separate training phases, uncertainty on latent MDRTB infection treatment regimens and side effects, and subsequent dispersal of the contacts after exposure.

Despite extensive investigation, many features of prion protein misfolding remain enigmatic. Physicochemical variables known to influence misfolding are reviewed to help elucidate the mechanism of prionogenesis and identify salient features of PrP(Sc), the misfolded conformer of the prion protein. Prospective work on refinement of candidate PrP(Sc) models based on thermodynamic considerations w...

We consider the fermionic contributions to the free energy of noncommutative QED at finite temperature T . This analysis extends the main results of our previous investigation where we have considered the pure bosonic sector of the theory. For large values of θT 2 (θ is the magnitude of the noncommutative parameters) the fermionic contributions decrease the value of the critical temperature, ab...