a World Health Organization, Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, PO Box 7608 Nasr City, Cairo, Egypt. b World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. c World Health Organization, Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, Cairo, Egypt. Correspondence to Driss Zine-Eddine El-Idrissi (e-mail: [email protected]). doi:10.2471/BLT.08.053736 (Submitted: 3 April 2008 – Revised v...

The Regional Workshop on National Implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention in East Asia and the Pacific was organised for strengthening the capabilities of States Parties in East Asia and the Pacific to nationally implement obligations and additional agreements stemming form the BTWC, and to support the CBM process in the region. The workshop was hosted by the Government of the Phili...

Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city, is host for this year’s conference. Edinburgh is an ancient city built on seven hills beside the Firth of Forth. Responsible for the Scottish Reformation and Enlightenment, it is now both a UNESCO world heritage site and one of the UK’s strongest economies. It is home to the world’s largest arts festival and is regularly voted as the best place to live in the...

A significant increase in real world event monitoring capability with wireless sensor networks will lead to a further evolution of ubiquitous computing. This paper describes this evolution, leading to humans being connected to the real world via computers without awareness. We address an ad hoc communication paradigm, a data-centric approach, and a middleware’s task, to understand the ultimate ...

For thousands of years, the Chinese and many other nations around the world built defensive walls around their cities. This phenomenon is not well understood from an economic perspective. To rationalize the existence of city walls, we propose a simple model that relates the dimensions of city walls to a set of economic variables. Guided by this model, we conduct an empirical analysis using hand...

RATIONALE On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center collapse created an enormous urban disaster site with high levels of airborne pollutants. First responders, rescue and recovery workers, and residents have since reported respiratory symptoms and developed pulmonary function abnormalities. OBJECTIVES To quantify respiratory health effects of World Trade Center exposure in the New York Ci...

Ever since Babylon, the great city has been damned as a great evil. Preachers and prophets, statesmen and statisticians, poets and public health experts-to say nothing of town-dwellers themselves-have accused the metropolis of being the fons et origo, the source and site of all manner of turpitude and corruption, of morbidity and mortality; and megalopolis has been judged merely the multiplier ...