BACKGROUND One of the major health policy issues, in the both developed and developing countries, is the equality in the distribution of health resources. The aim of this study was to investigate the disparity in the distribution of health physical resources across the provinces of Iran in 2001 and 2011. METHODS This was a cross-sectional retrospective study which investigated inequality in t...

PURPOSE This study examined whether any of a series of segmental and whole-word measures of articulatory competence captured more of the variance in impressionistic ratings of severity of involvement in speech delay. It also examined whether knowing the age of the child affected severity ratings. METHOD Ten very experienced speech-language pathologists rated severity of involvement from conve...

Tourism has become a very important and dynamic sector both in the world economy and particular in the developing countries. Its growth affects not only the activities directly linked to tourism but also other sectors. Tourism is already an important sector in some developing countries and will become so for others. Developing countries have been fast growing in tourism industry terms in the wo...

This interaction profile discusses and evaluates the evidence for joint toxic action among lead, manganese, zinc, and copper. The interaction profile recommends how to incorporate concerns about possible interactions or additivity into public health assessments of hazardous waste sites where people might be exposed to mixtures of these chemicals. The profile recommends using endpoint-specific h...

background and aims: air pollution is one of the health problems worldwide. previous epidemiological studies have investigated the impacts of air pollution on respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. the aim of this study was to determine the associations between air pollution levels and different health indicators among world countries. methods: this ecological study was performed in 2013 by u...

A comparative study was performed on the initial and final bacillary indexes of 213 multibacillary leprosy patients who received 12 doses (Group 1: 128 patients) or 24 doses (Group 2: 85 patients) of multidrug therapy (MDT/WHO) to measure the effectiveness of the two regimens. All patients were evaluated at treatment baseline, 12 months, and 24 months. The reduction in bacillary levels and mean...

In order to evaluate the graduates attending second-round examination objectively, this study established graduate second-round examination evaluate system based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. Evaluation indexes in the system included knowledge structure, scientific research ability and comprehensive quality of graduates attending second-round exa...

BACKGROUND Acute coronary syndromes (ACS) have been associated with lower health utilities (HUs) compared with the general population. Given the prognostic improvements after ACS with the implementation of coronary angiography (eg, percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI)), contemporary HU values derived from patient-reported outcomes are needed. METHODS We analysed data of 1882 patients with...

This paper demonstrates the advantage of combining a ranked output from a fulltext index and another from an index generated using generic summary texts. Our main ndings are as follows: (1) The combination of a fulltext-based run and a summary-based run can signi cantly outperform either alone, especially when the fulltext evidence is emphasized. (2) The primary role of the summary index in the...