SETTING Standardised tuberculosis (TB) treatment through directly observed therapy (DOT) is available in South Africa, but the level of adherence to standardised TB treatment and its impact on treatment outcomes is unknown. OBJECTIVES To describe adherence to standardised TB treatment and provision of DOT, and analyse its impact on treatment outcome. METHODS We utilised data collected for a...

Matrix factorization has found incredible success and widespread application as a collaborative filtering based approach to recommendations. Unfortunately, incorporating additional sources of evidence, especially ones that are incomplete and noisy, is quite difficult to achieve in such models, however, is often crucial for obtaining further gains in accuracy. For example, additional information...

Hormesis, a dose-response relationship phenomenon characterized by low-dose stimulation and high-dose inhibition, has been frequently observed in properly designed studies and is broadly generalizable as being independent of chemical/physical agent, biological model, and endpoint measured. This under-recognized and -appreciated concept has the potential to profoundly change toxicology and its r...

BACKGROUND The U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) cancer bioassay database provides an opportunity to compare both existing and new approaches to determining points of departure (PoDs) for establishing reference doses (RfDs). OBJECTIVES The aims of this study were a) to investigate the risk associated with the traditional PoD used in human health risk assessment [the no observed adverse e...

BACKGROUND Directly observed therapy (DOT), as recommended by the World Health Organization, is used in many countries to deliver tuberculosis (TB) treatment. The effectiveness of community-based (CB DOT) versus clinic DOT has not been adequately assessed to date. We compared TB treatment outcomes of CB DOT (delivered by community health workers or community volunteers), with those achieved thr...

For the first time, a five-parameter distribution, the so-called beta Burr XII distribution, is defined and investigated. The new distribution contains as special sub-models some well-known distributions discussed in the literature, such as the logistic, Weibull and Burr XII distributions, among several others. We derive its moment generating function. We obtain, as a special case, the moment g...

Objective To understand the situations and communications experienced by caregivers of children with tuberculosis (TB) with regard to directly observed therapy (DOT). Method A descriptive exploratory study with a qualitative approach was applied and developed in the ambulatory of Programa Einstein na Comunidade de Paraisópolis (PECP). The data were collected using semi-structured interviews of ...

Many distributions have been used as lifetime models. In this article, we propose a new threeparameter Weibull–Pareto distribution, which can produce the most important hazard rate shapes, namely, constant, increasing, decreasing, bathtub, and upsidedown bathtub. Various structural properties of the new distribution are derived including explicit expressions for the moments and incomplete momen...

We suggest a new approach for the study of the non monotonici ty of human commonsense reasoning The two main premises that underlie this work are that commonsense reasoning is an inductive phe nomenon and that missing information in the in Icraclion of the agent wi th Lhe environment may be as informative for future interactions as observed information This intui t ion is lormahzed and the prob...

that repeatedly have proven this assumption to be false and a world literature replete with reports of the success of directly observed therapy, these centers contend that there is no firm evidence demonstrating that directly observed therapy is both effective and essential in the treatment of tuberculosis. It is time for physician organizations from all parts of the international community to ...