OBJECTIVE To determine whether adolescents' perceived social support predicts future utilisation of sexually transmitted disease (STD) related health care. METHODS A longitudinal study of African-American adolescents ages 12-18 recruited from a random sample of households in the San Francisco Bay area in which baseline data were collected by telephone and follow up data were collected by tele...

BACKGROUND The characteristics of heterosexual attendees who visit sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinics and practice oral sex have not been revealed in China. This information is important for the development of targeted STD prevention programmes for this population. STUDY DESIGN A self-administered questionnaire survey with a cross-sectional design was administered to consecutive atten...

Researches of Spoken Term Detection (STD) have been actively conducted in recent years. The task of STD is searching for a particular speech segment from a large amount of multimedia data that include audio or speech data. In NTCIR-12, a task containing multiple spoken queries is newly added to the STD task. In this paper, we explain an STD system that our team developed for the NTCIR-12 Spoken...

BACKGROUND The high acute costs of cardiovascular disease and acute cardiovascular events are well established, particularly in terms of direct medical costs. The costs associated with lost work productivity have been described in a broad sense, but little is known about workplace absenteeism or short term disability costs among high cardiovascular risk patients. The objective of this study was...

Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are caused by organisms that infect the mucosal surfaces of the genitourinary tract. In spite of its public health importance, particular scientific problems have delayed the development of an STD vaccine, such as incomplete attenuation (human herpes simplex virus type 2), accentuated immunopathology (Chlamydia trachomatis), poor immunogenicity (Treponema pa...

CONTEXT Given the high rates of infection among urban young adults, STD and HIV testing promotion is a public health priority. To inform future testing efforts, lifetime and recent testing behaviors of this population within casual and serious relationships should be better understood. METHODS Data from a 2007-2008 study conducted in select neighborhoods in Hartford and Philadelphia were used...