OBJECTIVE Previous reports suggest that maternal exposure to acute stress related to earthquakes affects the sex ratio at birth. Our aim was to examine the change in sex ratio at birth after Eastern Marmara earthquake disasters. MATERIAL AND METHODS This study was performed using the official birth statistics from January 1997 to December 2002 - before and after 17 August 1999, the date of th...

BACKGROUND Public education is one of the most important elements of earthquake preparedness. The present study identifies methods and appropriate strategies for public awareness and education on preparedness for earthquakes based on people's opinions in the city of Tehran. METHODS This was a cross-sectional study and a door-to-door survey of residents from 22 municipal districts in Tehran, t...

Fault geometry, depth, and slip distribution of the Sanriku-oki earthquake of December 28, 1994 (Ms 7.5) are estimated from seismic waveforms, geodetic measurements, and tsunami waveforms, and compared with those of the 1968 Tokachi-oki earthquake (Mw 8.2), the most recent large earthquake in the epicentral region. Seismic wave inversions indicate a shallowly dipping thrust type mechanism and t...

PURPOSE Massive earthquakes are harmful to humankind. This study of a historical cohort aimed to investigate the difference between earthquake-related crush thoracic traumas and thoracic traumas unrelated to earthquakes using a multi-detector Computed Tomography (CT). METHODS We retrospectively compared an earthquake-exposed cohort of 215 thoracic trauma crush victims of the Sichuan earthquak...

Coarse Particles and Dust Storm Mortality In a paper titled "Episodes of High Coarse Partide Concentrations Are Not Associated with Increased Mortality," Schwartz et al. (1) concluded that "coarse particles from windblown dust are not associated with mortality risk." The authors seem to have overlooked the medical literature on the health effects of the historic U.S. dust storms of the dust bow...

background: the recent devastating earthquake of december 26 in bam, 2003 created various risk factors; caused a sharp increase in incidence of anthroponotic cutaneous leishmaniasis (acl) cases and reached to an epidemic proportion. the objective of this study was to evaluate the status of acl cases five years before the earthquake compared to the cases occurred five years after the earthquake ...

On March 11, 2011, the Pacific side of Japan's northeast was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami. For years, many researchers have been working on ways of examining the psychological effects of earthquakes on survivors in disaster areas who have experienced aftershocks, catastrophic fires, and other damage caused by the earthquake. The goal of this study is to examine scores on psychologica...

We show that strictly abnormal geodesics arise in graded nilpotent Lie groups. We construct such a group, for which some Carnot geodesics are strictly abnormal and, in fact, not normal in any subgroup. In the 2-step case we also prove that these geodesics are always smooth. Our main technique is based on the equations for the normal and abnormal curves, that we derive (for any Lie group) explic...