the currently reactor wreckage in fukushima raised the following important questions: is our knowledge of the possible dangers of ionizing radiation sufficient to warrant special action? what is the role of the medical community in technical radiation accidents from windscale to fukushima? what is the role of the medical community in terrorist radiation attacks? are we prepared for those challe...

Community networks are a successful example of a collective where communities operate ICT infrastructure and provide IP connectivity based on the principle of reciprocal resource sharing of network bandwidth. This sharing, however, has not extended to computing and storage resources, resulting in very few applications and services which are currently deployed within community networks. Cloud co...

AIM This paper is a report of a scoping review examining children and young people's health services with respect to choice in order to inform future development of choice initiatives. BACKGROUND The importance of including children and young people in the choice agenda reflects the increasing acknowledgement that, individually and collectively, they are important consumers of health care in ...

BACKGROUND Being an important part of China's Urban Health Care Reform System, Community Health Centers (CHCs) have been established throughout the entire country and are presently undergoing substantial reconstruction. However, the services being delivered by the CHCs are far from reaching their performance targets. In order to assess the role of the CHCs, we examined their performance in six ...

BACKGROUND We compared regional coverage rates of influenza vaccination (composition in 1999/00 was A/Sydney-like A/Beijing-like B/Yamanashi-like and in 2000/01 was A/Moscow A/New Caledonia B/Beijing) to the rates, cost, and mortality for community-acquired pneumonia. METHODS We used the Pearson's correlation coefficient to establish linear associations between variables derived from Alberta ...

Recently, many web-log (blog) hosting services have begun in Japan. Blog users have continued to multiply, producing new Internet communities. This study extracts and analyzes blog communities based on the blog link structure. Blog networks can be constructed as follows: a blog (all entries of one blog) is considered as a node. A link between two blogs is considered as an edge. We attempt two e...

The Infectious Diseases Society of Taiwan (IDST) established and issued the first version of “Guidelines on Antimicrobial Therapy of Pneumonia in Taiwan” in December 1999. A revised version was issued in conjunction with the Taiwan Society of Pulmonary and Critical Medicine in 2001. With the advances in many areas of medicine and revisions in the American “Update of Practice Guidelines for the ...

This column describes and evaluates the Harris County Community Behavioral Health Program, a new integrated care program operating in community health centers serving low-income uninsured residents in Houston, Texas. Patient service data, provider satisfaction, patient outcome data, and appointment waiting periods were obtained to evaluate the initial operation of the program. The integrated ca...

Although community health centers (CHCs) provide primary health services to the medically underserved and poor, limited access to off-site specialty services may lead to poorer outcomes among underinsured CHC patients. This study evaluates access to specialty health services for patients receiving care in CHCs, using a survey of medical directors of all federally qualified CHCs in the United St...

BACKGROUND While the demand for health services keep escalating at the grass roots or rural areas of China, a substantial portion of healthcare resources remain stagnant in the more developed cities and this has entrenched health inequity in many parts of China. At its conception, China's Deepen Medical Reform started in 2012 was intended to flush out possible disparities and promote a more equ...