BACKGROUND Ireland introduced a comprehensive workplace smoke-free legislation in March, 2004. Smoking-related adverse birth outcomes have both health care and societal cost implications. The main aim of this study was to determine the impact of the Irish smoke-free legislation on small-for-gestationa- age (SGA) births. METHODS AND FINDINGS We developed a population-based birthweight (BW) per...

BACKGROUND After more than a decade of establishing and expanding access to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), empirical evidence on its impact on trends of opportunistic infections (OIs) associated with the deadly human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in resource poor settings is scarce. The primary objective of this study was to assess the effect of HAART coverage on trends of five mo...

Intermittent preventive treatment (IPT) is used to reduce malaria morbidity and mortality, especially in vulnerable groups such as children and pregnant women. IPT with the fixed dose combination of piperaquine (PQ) and dihydroartemisinin (DHA) is being evaluated as a potential mass treatment to control and eliminate artemisinin-resistant falciparum malaria. This study explored alternative DHA-...

Our study examines whether price momentum strategy (cross section momentum effect on longshort portfolios) can be profitable on Russian stock market. We testing the statistical significance of zero cost portfolio excess returns. Our sample covers the period from 2004 to 2013 capturing different states of Russian economy. We implement relative strength strategy with 10% quantile to construct equ...

BACKGROUND Chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) formerly known as chronic idiopathic urticaria (CIU) is a severe and distressing skin condition that remains uncontrolled in approximately one half of patients, despite the use of licensed, recommended doses of modern, second-generation H1-antihistamines. So far, the humanistic, societal and economic burden of CSU/CIU has not been well quantified. ...

     Diurnal air temperature modeling is a beneficial experimental and mathematical approach which can be used in many fields related to Geosciences. The modeling and spatio-temporal analysis of air Diurnal Temperature Cycle (DTC) was conducted using data obtained from 105 synoptic stations in Iran during the years 2013-2014 for the first time; the key variable for controlling the cosine term i...

BACKGROUND The frequency of testing sex workers for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in Victoria, Australia, was changed from monthly to quarterly on 6 October 2012. Our aim was to determine the impact of this change to the clients seen at the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre (MHSC). METHODS Computerised medical records of all clients attending at MHSC from 7 October 2011 to 7 October 201...