BACKGROUND The Belgian Sentinel Network of Laboratories (SNL) was created in 1983 in order to monitor trends in infectious diseases. Given the evolution of the surveillance system, such as the waivers, fusions and adhesions of laboratories over time, it is important to evaluate whether the SNL is still fit for purpose. This study aims to evaluate aspects of the sensitivity and representativenes...

OBJECTIVE To identify clustering areas of infants exposed to HIV during pregnancy and their association with indicators of primary care coverage and socioeconomic condition. METHODS Ecological study where the unit of analysis was primary care coverage areas in the city of Porto Alegre, Southern Brazil, in 2003. Geographical Information System and spatial analysis tools were used to describe i...

Abstract Over the last 20 years, researchers have undertaken systematic comparisons of migration policies—mainly at national level—by creating indicators and indexes. These indexes been used to analyse differences trends in policy. Based on a review previous projects literature topic, this chapter provides an overview existing indicators, compares methodology employed as well their temporal, ge...

The English national human papillomavirus (HPV) immunisation programme has offered vaccination to girls aged 12 years at the start of each school year since September 2008. A catch-up programme has offered vaccination to girls up to 18 years. Delivery is predominantly school-based, with some general practitioner (GP)-based immunisation. The relationship between HPV immunisation coverage and dep...

Today most population genomic studies of nonmodel organisms either sequence a subset of the genome deeply in each individual or sequence pools of unlabelled individuals. With a step-by-step workflow, we illustrate how low-coverage whole-genome sequencing of hundreds of individually barcoded samples is now a practical alternative strategy for obtaining genomewide data on a population scale. We u...

In this paper, we first propose four-layer optimization for UMTS coverage area: (i) cell-oriented intra-SGSN layer, which is optimized RA areas covering the intra-SGSN signaling cost, paging cost and RA load balancing, (ii) RA-oriented intra-MSC layer, which is optimized location areas covering the intra-MSC signaling cost and LA load balancing,(iii) RA-oriented inter-SGSN layer, which is optim...

Every effort is made to ensure everyone is counted in a census. However, no census is perfect and some people are missed. This underenumeration does not usually occur uniformly across all geographical areas or across other sub-groups of the population such as age and sex groups. Coverage levels in censuses across the world are declining leading to an increasing need to firstly slow the decline ...

[1] This study examines the temporal variability of ocean heat uptake in observations and in climate models. Previous work suggests that coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (A-OGCMs) may have underestimated the observed natural variability of ocean heat content, particularly on decadal and longer timescales. To address this issue, we rely on observed estimates of heat content fr...

conclusions health managers in iran should continuously monitor the coverage of vaccination with at least three doses of opv in the level of over 95%, monitor the health of the helmand river water which comes from afghanistan to iran, vaccinate the immigrants and replace bivalent vaccine (bopv) with trivalent (topv) vaccine. context the wild polio virus is disrupted in all countries in the worl...

BACKGROUND For systematic reviews providing evidence for policy decisions in specific geographical regions, there is a need to minimise regional bias when seeking out relevant research studies. Studies on people's views tend to be dispersed across a range of bibliographic databases and other search sources. It is recognised that a comprehensive literature search can provide unique evidence not ...