A complete understanding of the epidemiology of Bordetella pertussis is complicated by imperfect diagnostic methods and incomplete recognition, testing and notification of the disease. It is generally agreed that notification rates represent an under-reporting of actual incidence. However, Australia has improved surveillance for pertussis since the early 1990s and currently has the highest repo...

Since the early 1990s almost all states have moved some or all of their Medicaid beneficiaries to Medicaid managed care (MMC). Critics have worried about quality since MMC's inception. Proponents argued that state Medicaid agencies, as large-scale purchasers of care, would pursue "value-based purchasing" and other strategies to stimulate quality improvements. In this paper we extend and update ...

Several application domains have suffered from the general policies dictated by general purpose OS (GPOS), like the UNIX system [1]. Therefore, since the early 1990s, OS community realized the need for customizable OS, where the application performance can be enhanced by customizing the OS for a certain application. However, since then, no one acceptable system was widely used. In this report, ...

Early attempts at spinal arthroplasty in the 1950s yielded limited success. A revival of this procedure occurred in the 1980s and became a realistic treatment option in the 1990s. Both lumbar and cervical arthroplasties have been introduced in the US since 2000 for randomized, prospective studies in accordance with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigational device exemption provisio...

The human cornea is the transparent, dome-shaped tissue that covers anterior segment of the eye. It consists of five thin layers: epithelium, Bowman’s layer, stroma, Descemet’s membrane and endothelium. Due to its transparency, real-time in vivo confocal microscop‐ ic observation of the normal and diseased cornea was developed since the early 1990s. [1,2] Since histologic-like images are obtain...

The trend of globalization since the early 1990s has had a profound impact on trade relations between China and South Korea. It affected these two countries in positive ways, and brought Sino-Korean trade to its highest level since the establishment of diplomatic relations on August 24, 1992. Sino-Korean trade, as the scale of its growth and development accelerated, was also exposed to and enco...

Dengue fever/dengue haemorrhagic fever (DF/DHF) is an important public health problem in Sri Lanka since early 1990s. From the years 2000–08, the reported number of suspected and serologically positive DF/ DHF cases varied from 4749 to 15,643 involving 25–88 deaths, with a major epidemic in 2004. At present, the disease is prevalent in many urban and semi-urban areas of the country with higher ...

Product mix problem (PMP) is one of the most important and complicated problems in production systems. Different approaches have been applied to solve this problem, among them, theory of constraints (TOC) has been widely considered since 1990s. This paper develops a distinguished algorithm to solve product mix prob-lems that is efficient both in single and multi-bottleneck problems. At first, t...

Since their introduction in the early 1990s, compositionality has been reported as one of the major attractions of stochastic process algebras. The benefits that compositionality provides for model construction are readily apparent and have been demonstrated in numerous case studies. Early research on the compositionality of the languages focused on how the inherent structure could be used, in ...

Since its introduction in the early 1990s, the self-expandable metal stent (SEMS) has been increasingly used for the management of malignant colorectal obstruction, not only as a palliative method but also as a preoperative treatment in surgical candidates. However, more recently, concerns have been raised over stent complication rates. Early complications include pain, perforation, and rectal ...