BACKGROUND Neisseria meningitidis causes 500 000 cases of septicemia and meningitis worldwide annually, with approximately 200 cases in Canada each year. Previous studies describe a case-fatality rate of 5%-15% and up to 20% of survivors suffering from long-term disability. METHODS This study was performed in Canada between 2002 and 2011; the study area included >50% of the country's populati...

Objectives: To investigate the differences of genotypic distributions among isolates between immunosuppressed and immunocompetent patients in a Taiwanese population. Methods: Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) isolates from 76 patients with adequate chart data were analyzed. Polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) was used to define gB genotypes which include gB1...

Avian influenza is an important zoonotic disease that has become endemic in Southeast Asia and in the case of highly pathogenic H5N1 has caused significant human mortality and morbidity. Avian influenza virus (AIV) infections may be asymptomatic or present as mild conjunctivitis in humans; however, H5N1 infections may present as severe pneumonia progressing to acute respiratory disease syndrome...

I find that a 1% increase in aggregate bank credit growth implies that the excess returns of bank stocks over the next one year are lower by nearly 3%. Unlike most other forecasting relationships, credit growth tracks bank stock returns over the business cycle and explains nearly 14% of the variation in bank stock returns over a 1-year horizon. This effect is robust to the exclusion of data fro...

The hypoxia and proliferation index increase with grade in human glial tumors, but there is no agreement whether either has prognostic importance in glioblastomas. We evaluated these end points individually and together in 16 de novo human glioblastomas using antibodies against the 2-nitroimidazole hypoxia detection agent EF5 and the proliferation detection agent Ki-67. Frozen tumor tissue sect...

Objective: Our purpose was to determine the bacterial profile and prevalence of antibiotic resistance patterns of uropathogens, as well as evaluate the problem with extendedspectrum -lactamase (ESBL) producing isolates, causing urinary tract infections (UTIs) in Al-Amiri Hospital, Kuwait, over a 3-year period. Materials and Methods: Isolates (56,505) from symptomatic UTI cases from January 2005...

We study a scheduling problem in which jobs have locations. For example, consider a repairman that is supposed to visit customers at their homes. Each customer is given a time window during which the repairman is allowed to arrive. The goal is to find a schedule that visits as many homes as possible. We refer to this problem as the prize-collecting traveling salesman problem with time windows (...

Objectives: To assess the baseline knowledge regarding stroke risk factors, symptoms, treatment and information resources in an Iranian urban population. Subjects and Methods: A community-based face-to-face interview survey was conducted in the Shiraz urban area in Iran. A total of 385 potential participants between the ages of 15 and 83 years were randomly selected from people referred to Mota...

We study a generalization of covering problems called partial covering. Here we wish to cover only a desired number of elements, rather than covering all elements as in standard covering problems. For example, in k-partial set cover, we wish to choose a minimum number of sets to cover at least k elements. For k-partial set cover, if each element occurs in at most f sets, then we derive a primal...

BACKGROUND Although serum thyroglobulin (Tg) is an excellent marker for detecting recurrent or persistent differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC), it is unreliable in patients who have positive anti-Tg antibodies. Furthermore, a growing number of patients with DTC have elevated Tg levels but no detectable disease on radioiodine scanning or other imaging studies. The objective of this study was to d...