In 2007, a waterborne outbreak of Cryptosporidium hominis infection occurred in western Ireland, resulting in 242 laboratory-confirmed cases and an uncertain number of unconfirmed cases. A boil water notice was in place for 158 days that affected 120,432 persons residing in the area, businesses, visitors, and commuters. This outbreak represented the largest outbreak of cryptosporidiosis in Irel...

An approach for techno-economic optimisation and for the analysis of industrial biomass use is proposed in this paper. The ARGUS model (German acronym for: allocation module for a computer-aided generation of environmental strategies for emissions), based on linear programming, has been implemented as one of the few models that investigates VOC emissions from approximately 40 industrial sectors...

This note extends the analysis of Lemoine, Kammen, and Farrell's paper "An innovation and policy agenda for commercially competitive plug-in hybrid electric vehicles" (http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1748-9326/3/1/014003/) to cover the case of all-electric vehicles (EVs). We pay particular attention to grid impacts, break-even battery costs, and the three ways in which EVs could dramatically cha...

BACKGROUND Pre-eclampsia is a major contributor to maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality. Our objectives in this study are to economically assess, from the payer perspective, routine screening for pre-eclampsia using placental markers -placental protein 13 and placental growth factor - and uterine artery Doppler compared with standard care. METHODS A decision model was developed, whic...

This review article aims to provide an introduction to the methodology of health economic assessment of a health technology. Attention is paid to defining the fundamental concepts and terms that are relevant to health economic assessments. The article describes the methodology underlying a cost study (identification, measurement and valuation of resource use, calculation of costs), an economic ...