BACKGROUND On April 1, 2009, the federal cigarette excise tax increased from 39 cents to $1.01 per pack. METHODS This study describes call volumes to 16 state quitlines, characteristics of callers and cessation outcomes before and after the tax. RESULTS Calls to the quitlines increased by 23.5% in 2009 and more whites, smokers ≥ 25 years of age, smokers of shorter duration, those with less ...

We study a supremacy distribution in evolving Barabasi-Albert networks. The supremacy s(i) of a node i is defined as the total number of all nodes that are not older than i and can be linked to it by a directed path (including the node i ). The nodes form a basin connected to the node i as its in-component. For a network with a characteristic parameter m=1,2,3,... , the supremacy of an individu...

OBJECTIVES This article investigates whether the help with care needs that is received from others depends on the potential supply of family helpers. METHODS Data from the first round of survey data collected in the National Health and Aging Trends Study are used to create measures of whether help is received, the number of helpers, and the hours of help received. Regression analysis is used ...

Methods: Vaccine wastage was defined as the number of doses received by a health centre minus the total number of doses administered during and returned following the outbreak vaccination campaign. Vaccine data were collected from the Provincial Health Information Office, the Provincial Vaccine Store register and clinic and health centre immunization registers for calculating the vaccine wastag...

A simple model is introduced in which the cosmological constant is interpreted as a true Casimir effect on a scalar field filling the universe (e.g. R × T p × T q , R × T p × S effect is driven by compactifying boundary conditions imposed on some of the coordinates, associated with large and with small scales (the total number of large spatial coordinates being always three). The very small —bu...

The experiment was designed to evaluate differences in reproductive performance parametres in sows of selected utilitarian breeds before and after repopulation. The experimental population consisted of 160 sows, while the group before repopulation counted 80 sows from 1 to 5 litter. The repopulated (newly brought) group counted 80 gilts at the 1 litter. The values of the total number of piglets...

The need for routine amblyopia screening of all children, making such screening "as important a part of medical care as immuni­ zations," is all but self-evident. Although, as Lippman points out, many of the traditional incidence statistics need interpretation to be meaningful, most recent large-scale screening efforts of children indicate an amblyopia in­ cidence of 1 to 3 % in the general pop...

This study was conducted to explore the effectiveness of participatory training for promoting farmer's health and reducing agricultural work-related injuries. Candidates for this study included 595 farmers in 8 rural villages of South Korea. The one-day course participatory training was administered to 217 (36.5%) farmers and included an action-checklist, a good example presentation, and group ...

The Fast Marching Method is a numerical algorithm for solving the Eikonal equation on a rectangular orthogonal mesh in O(M log M) steps, where M is the total number of grid points. In this paper we extend the Fast Marching Method to triangulated domains with the same computational complexity. As an application, we provide an optimal time algorithm for computing the geodesic distances and thereb...