The symbiotic relationship between agriculture and the environment has undergone a profound shift with advent of extensive chemicalization. While this approach initially bolstered yields, it simultaneously disrupted delicate equilibrium nature. repercussions have been felt across spectrum, from weakened natural defenses in plants animals to human health concerns. efficacy traditional agricultur...

Aims A significant number of preventable cardiac deaths in infancy and childhood are due to long QT syndrome (LQTS) and to unrecognized neonatal congenital heart diseases (CHDs). Both carry a serious risk for avoidable mortality and morbidity but effective treatments exist to prevent lethal arrhythmias or to allow early surgical correction before death or irreversible cardiac damage. As an elec...

On March 23, with the strokes of 22 pens, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This sprawling health care reform bill has many unknowns – chief among them, will it really reduce the deficit by $143 billion over 10 years, as the Congressional Budget Office estimated? But here’s what we do know: The bill will expand health insurance to an estimated 32 mi...

Claims data have become common during the past two decades. The electronic records include information entered on bills (claims) submitted by healthcare providers to third-party payers. They are an attractive data source; however, they contain limitations that threaten the validity of studies that use them. We reviewed 168 studies that employed claims data, published during 2000-2005 in five he...

There have been many parallel external sorting algorithms reported such as NOW-Sort, SPsort, and hill sort, etc. They are for sorting large-scale data stored in the disk, but they differ in the speed, throughput, and costeffectiveness. Mostly they deal with data that are uniformly distributed in their value range. Few research results have been yet reported for parallel external sort for data w...

Background The breakthrough of advanced composite materials in various applications has occurred to a smaller extent than might have been expected previously, mainly due to the high integral costs of composite products: a high cost of manufacturing added to the already expensive raw material. There is a clear need for improved costeffectiveness. The key issues are considered to be: cheaper prod...

Broadly speaking, pharmaceutical policy in Spain has been unable to control either the price or the volume of drugs prescribed. Limited attempts have been made to bring together the regulation of the pharmaceutical market and policies, in pursuit of the desired goals of efficiency and quality. This paper assesses the regulation of the Spanish pharmaceutical market over the last two decades by e...

The authors examine the incremental cost-effectiveness of using quadrivalent influenza vaccines rather than trivalent vaccines in various age and risk groups in England, finding that use of quadrivalent vaccines in pediatric groups was most likely to be cost-effective (i.e., with the greatest incremental cost per quadrivalent dose), with extending quadrivalent vaccination to high risk adults or...