The Kingdom of Bhutan is seeking to progressively realize the human right to health without addressing the cross-cutting human rights principles essential to a rights-based approach to health. Through a landscape analysis of the Bhutanese health system, documentary review of Bhutanese reporting to the United Nations human rights system, and semi-structured interviews with health policymakers in...

Indian-origin rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) have long served as an animal model for the study of human disease and behavior. Given the current shortage of Indian-origin rhesus, many researchers have turned to rhesus macaques from China as a substitute. However, a number of studies have identified marked genetic differences between the Chinese and Indian animals. We investigated the genetic c...

PURPOSE To determine and compare the major causes of childhood blindness and severe visual impairment in Bhutan and Laos. DESIGN Independent cross-sectional surveys. METHODS This survey consists of 2 cross-sectional observational studies. The Bhutanese component was undertaken at the National Institute for Vision Impairment, the only dedicated school for the blind in Bhutan. The Laotian stu...

Both the prevalence of Helicobacter pylori infection and the incidence of gastric cancer are high in Bhutan. The high incidence of atrophic gastritis and gastric cancer suggest the phylogeographic origin of an infection with a more virulent strain of H. pylori. More than 90% of Bhutanese strains possessed the highly virulent East Asian-type CagA and all strains had the most virulent type of vac...

The carrier rate of HBsAg is about 6% in Bhutan and 1% in Nepal. Since outbreaks of viral hepatitis are also known, its high prevalence in a migrated community, if any, maybe a potential threat to the local people. The present study was conducted in Beldangi 2 Extension Camp, a Bhutanese refugee camp located in eastern Nepal to know the HBsAg carrier rate among the refugees. With the help of se...

Stemming is the prerequisite step in Text Mining, Spelling Checker applications as well as a basic requirement for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Also it is very important in most of the Information Retrieval (IR) systems. This paper describes an affix stripping technique for finding out the stems from context free text in Nepali Language using lexical lookup based and rule based appr...

This paper presents the results of a preliminary investigation into the use of statistical collocation as a method for discovering characteristic properties of grammatical classes (i.e. part-of-speech categories such as noun, adjective, verb, and so on). In particular, the focus of the current investigation is the collocational patterns found around adpositions in English and Nepali. The claim ...

AIMS This study sought to ascertain the prevalence of hazardous and harmful alcohol consumption among Bhutanese refugees in Nepal and to identify predictors of elevated risk in order to better understand intervention need. METHODS Hazardous and harmful alcohol consumption was assessed using the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) administered in a face-to-face interview in a cens...