BACKGROUND Evidence for an association between road traffic pollution and asthma is inconclusive. We report a case-control study of hospital admissions for asthma and respiratory illness among children aged 5-14 in relation to proxy markers of traffic related pollution. METHODS The study was based on routine hospital admissions data in 1992/3 and 1993/4 for North Thames (West) health region w...

Background—Evidence for an association between road traYc pollution and asthma is inconclusive. We report a case-control study of hospital admissions for asthma and respiratory illness among children aged 5–14 in relation to proxy markers of traYc related pollution. Methods—The study was based on routine hospital admissions data in 1992/3 and 1993/4 for North Thames (West) health region within ...

Background: Emergency call centres, commonly known as “112” or “911”, are a crucial part of modern infrastructure. The location of the emergency, any related data, and good GIS support are required for their efficient operations. The location in particular is a vital piece of information but nevertheless often not obtained automatically at all or with insufficient accuracy, thus limiting both t...

A Road Accident Prevention (RAP) scheme based on Vehicular Backbone Network (VBN) structure is proposed in this paper for Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET). The RAP scheme attempts to prevent vehicles from highway road traffic accidents and thereby reduces death and injury rates. Once the possibility of an emergency situation (i.e. an accident) is predicted in advance, instantly RAP initiates a ...

As South Africa’s road system comprises a total road network of rural and urban roads of approximately 534 000 kilometres, it is of utmost importance to have an effective road network level management system in place, which utilises reliable traffic loading data for long-term planning. Road authorities are therefore largely dependent on the availability and accuracy of traffic loading informati...

Received: April 19, 2010 Accepted for publication: October 21, 2010 From the Department of Emergency Medicine, Taipei Hospital, Department of Health, Taiwan Department of Emergency Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital and College of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan Department of Internal Medicine, Hsin Chu General Hospital, Hsinchu City, Taiwan Address reprint requests and correspondence: Dr. ...

Facing limited time and budgetary resources, state and local health departments need a practical, competency-based training approach to meet the all-hazards readiness requirements of their employees. The Road Map to Preparedness is a training tool designed to assist health departments in providing comprehensive, agency-tailored readiness instruction to their employees. This tool uses an incenti...

It is very costly to conduct experiments to test smart environments installed in large-scale public spaces (e.g. airports and railway stations). As a tool to examine the design of such experiments beforehand, we developed a multiagent simulator integrating a large number of software agents and humans into a crowd that can produce complex group behaviors. In the testing of our emergency guidance...

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are expected to be used for the dissemination of emergency warning messages on the roads. The emergency warning messages such as post crash warning notification would require an efficient multi hop broadcast scheme to notify all the vehicles within a particular area about the emergency. Such emergency warning applications have low delay and transmission overhe...

We study a vehicular traffic scenario on Swiss roads in an emergency situation, calculating how sequentially roads block due to excessive traffic load until global collapse (gridlock) occurs and in this way displays the fragilities of the system. We used a database from Bundesamt für Raumentwicklung which contains length and maximum allowed speed of all roads in Switzerland. The present work co...