BACKGROUND Several European and North American studies have reported associations between cold temperatures and mortality from diseases of the circulatory system. However, the effects of cold vary between the settings warranting further research in other parts of the world. OBJECTIVES To study associations between temperature and mortality from selected diseases of circulatory system in Astan...

THE dermatological lesions of sarcoidosit were first described by Boeck in I899, and in 1905 Winkler reported the manifestations of this disease in the nervous system (cited by Salvesen), while others at about the same time described involvement of other organs by sarcoid tissue. Among 20 cases of sarcoidosis at autopsy, Aszkanazy (1952) found three to have central nervous system lesions. Howev...

The transition rate of the stimulated emission at the higher energy levels of the excited states in a silica-based erbium-doped fiber can be enhanced by introducing fundamental-mode cutoff filtering mechanism. The electrons excited by optical pumping can more occupy the higher energy levels of the excited states when the transition rate for the lower energy levels (longer wavelengths) of the ex...

Pharmaceutical products can be of poor quality either because they contain zero correct active ingredient (referred to as “counterfeit”) or because they contain a non-zero but incorrect amount of the right active ingredient (referred to as “substandard”).While both types of poorquality drugs can be dangerous, they differ in health consequence, price, and potential policy remedies. Assessing bas...

It's no big secret that one of the primary influences of service-orientation has been the well established object-oriented design paradigm. Though there are distinct differences, there is also much common ground between these two design philosophies. In fact, if it wasn't for the innovative design principles and patterns formalized by objectorientation, the service-oriented architectural model ...

Experiments were performed to study the effect of measurement duration on palatability of eleven range species and to define thereafter a palatability index. The range species were randomly distributed in five combinations (C l to C5) containing each four species. Each combination was tested over a15-day experimental period on four one-year old sheep and five two-year old one-humped camels (cam...

Stable carbon isotope ratios of bacterial biomarkers were determined to infer sources of organic carbon used by bacteria in the sediments of three salt marshes. Biomarkers studied were polar lipid-derived fatty acids (PLFA), mainly bacteria-specific, methyl-branched i15 : 0 and a15 : 0. Experiments showed that isotopic fractionation between substrate and biomarkers was relatively constant (24 t...

Marine sediment slurries enriched for anaerobic, sulfate-reducing prokaryotic communities utilizing glucose and acetate were used to provide the first comparison between stable-isotope probing (SIP) of phospholipid fatty acids (PLFA) and DNA (16S rRNA and dsrA genes) biomarkers. Different 13C-labelled substrates (glucose, acetate and pyruvate) at low concentrations (100 microM) were used over a...

Evaluation of the health state of employees in relation to the working environment is one of the main tasks of occupational medicine. The specified results represent a part of a methodically oriented project which was focused on evaluation of: age structures of employees in the metallurgical plant being monitored in comparison with the age structure in the whole region, evaluation of the health...

Lipid biomarker analysis has proven valuable in testing the hypothesis that attributes of the extant microbiota can directly reflect the occurrence of contaminant biodegradation. Two past research efforts have demonstrated this utility and are described here. A 4.5 m vertical core was obtained from a diesel fuel oil contamination plume. Core material was assayed for total petroleum hydrocarbons...