The effectiveness of any drug supply systems in providing a trustworthy supply of essential drugs is a critical issue. To evaluate this effectiveness, it is necessary to watch over the status of the essential medicines in any country impartially and continuously. Some countries and also the World Health Organization (WHO) have codified a list of minimum medicines needed for a basic health care ...

Providing sustainability of the food supply is becoming increasingly challenging in today’s rapidly changing global economic environment. Food security remains a serious problem, especially in developing countries where the challenge of the sustainable food supply is exacerbated by the rapid rise in the population, limited access to food intake, vulnerability, price volatilities, protection mea...

Background. The purpose of this study was to explore healthcare providers' perspectives on antiretroviral (ART) adherence in two ART clinics in southern Malawi. Nonadherence to ART is a significant hindrance to the success of HIV/AIDS treatment. Methods. A one-on-one semistructured interview was conducted with eight healthcare providers in two ART clinics in rural and urban southern Malawi. The...

Pollinators are required for producing 15-30% of the human food supply, and farmers rely on managed honey bees throughout the world to provide these services. Yet honey bees are not always the most efficient pollinators of all crops and are declining in various parts of the world. Crop pollination shortages are becoming increasingly common. We found that behavioral interactions between wild and...

Optofluidics is a rapidly advancing field that utilizes the integration of optics and microfluidics to provide a number of novel functionalities in microsystems. In this review, we discuss how this approach can potentially be applied to address some of the greatest challenges facing both the developing and developed world, including healthcare, food shortages, malnutrition, water purification, ...

-Foraging models are a growing pan of the ethnobiological study of huntergatherers . Highly simplified for analytic reasons, the early "classical" versions of these models excluded consideration of several relevant factors. Among them is the possibilit y of maladaptive food shortages due to the effects of stochastic environmental fluctuations on food capture rates . To remedy this deficiency, t...

Daily torpor has never been reported for any rodent species during lactation. To test whether torpor and lactation are incompatible processes, we administered 2-deoxy-d-glucose (2-DG), a glucose analog that interferes with cellular glycolysis, to Siberian hamsters during the 2nd wk postpartum. 2-DG (2,500 mg/kg of body mass) induced torpor in lactating as well as nonlactating females. Although ...

U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s comments on space exploration, told me that the ultimate goal of any medical researcher was “to touch the face of God”.1 When pushed for clarification, he asserted that science – neuroscience in particular – is a utopian pursuit (free from the foibles and fallacies that normally plague people), whose practitioners (i.e. scientists) must altruistically strive to ma...