Small-scale irrigation has gained momentum in recent years as one of the development priorities Sub-Saharan Africa. However, farmer-led is often informal with little support from extension services and a paucity data on land suitability for irrigation. To map spatial explicit dry season small-scale irrigation, we developed method using an ensemble boosted regression trees, random forest, maximu...

AIMS To investigate the lagged effects of cold temperature on cardiorespiratory mortality and to determine whether "wind chill" is a better predictor of these effects than "dry bulb" temperature. METHODS Generalised linear Poisson regression models were used to investigate the relation between mortality and "dry bulb" and "wind chill" temperatures in the three largest Scottish cities (Glasgow...

As the third largest freshwater lake in China, Taihu Lake has experienced severe cyanobacterial blooms and associated water quality degradation in recent decades, threatening the human health and sustainable development of cities in the watershed. The Yili River is a main river of Taihu Lake, contributing about 30% of the total nitrogen load entering the lake. Tracing the nitrate sources of Yil...

BACKGROUND Dengue is an increasingly important public health problem in most Latin American countries and more cost-effective ways of reducing dengue vector densities to prevent transmission are in demand by vector control programs. This multi-centre study attempted to identify key factors associated with vector breeding and development as a basis for improving targeted intervention strategies....

"Using published census data, metropolitan area population and employment statistics are constructed for several large Latin American cities in 1950, 1960, and 1970, and compared to similar statistics from selected North American cities. The Latin cities are experiencing decentralization of population and some decentralization of employment. Overall population density patterns of large Latin ci...

Shrinking cities are widespread throughout the world despite the rapidly increasing global urban population. These cities are attempting to transition to sustainable trajectories to improve the health and well-being of urban residents, to build their capacity to adapt to changing conditions and to cope with major events. The dynamics of shrinking cities are different than the dynamics of growin...

over half of the world’s population lives in cities and united nations (un) demographers project an increase of 2.5 billion more urban dwellers by 2050. yet there is too little systematic comparative research on the practice of urban health policy and management (hpam), particularly in the megacities of middle-income and developing nations. we make a case for creating a global database on citie...

BACKGROUND Creating healthy cities promotes socio-economic development, thus, the creation of such cities has been receiving more attention from the Chinese government and the Chinese people. In the current study, the intention was to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the creation of healthy cities in Henan province in central China. METHODS We randomly selected 18 cities (7 healthy citie...

BACKGROUND Driving a taxicab remains one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States, with leading homicide rates. Although safety equipment designed to reduce robberies exists, it is not clear what effect it has on reducing taxicab driver homicides. FINDINGS Taxicab driver homicide crime reports for 1996 through 2010 were collected from 20 of the largest cities (>200,000) in the U...