Background: In rural areas of developing countries, children of agricultural workers have a high potential for exposure to organophosphorus (OP) pesticides. This puts them at an increased risk of damage to neurobehavioural performance, cognitive and psychomotor dysfunction. The main objective of this study was to assess the neurological risk of exposure to organophosphate pesticides in the chil...

BACKGROUND Refugees have poorer health compared to indigenous populations, which may be explained by lower health literacy, i.e. not being able to access, understand, appraise or apply health information. This study aims to determine levels of functional and comprehensive health literacy, and factors associated with inadequate health literacy, in refugees coming to Sweden. METHOD A cross-sect...

Schooling has been shown to provide substantial externality benefits by increasing farm output and shifting the production frontier outwards. This paper investigates the role of schooling at the householdand site-levels in the adoption and diffusion of agricultural innovations in rural Ethiopia. We find that household-level education is important to the timing of adoption but less crucial to th...

Background: Leber’s congenital amaurosis (LCA) accounts for 5% of inherited retinal disease and is usually inherited as an autosomal recessive trait. Genetic and clinical heterogeneity exist. Mutations have been described in the RPE65, CRB1, RPGRIP1, AIPL1, GUCY2D, and CRX genes and other pedigrees show linkage to the LCA3 and LCA5 loci. The latter is a new locus which maps to 6q11-q16. The ocu...

In this paper, a model of the nitrogen cycle in the soil is incorporated in a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of the Tanzanian economy, thus establishing a two-way link between the environment and the economy. For a given level of natural soil productivity, profit-maximising farmers choose input levels — and hence production volumes — which in turn influence soil productivity in the ...

Sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs) that lead to an increase in productivity are central to the acceleration of economic growth; this will alleviate poverty and help to overcome the recurrent food shortages that affect millions of households in Africa. However, the adoption rates of SAPs remain below expected levels. This paper analyzes the factors that facilitate or impede the probabilit...

Article history: Received 3 March 2014 Received in revised form 18 November 2014 Accepted 18 November 2014 Available online 26 November 2014 We consider a North–South duopolistic competition in the market of a perishable good. North's harvest can be sold over two periods whereas South's harvest can be sold in the first period only, because of the lack of storage technology.Weexamine the impact ...

The risk of loses of income and productive means due to adverse weather associated to climate change can significantly differ between farmers sharing a productive landscape. It is important to learn more about how farmers react to different levels of risk, under measurable and unmeasurable uncertainty. Moreover, the costs associated to investments in reduced vulnerability to climatic events are...

In many arid and semi-arid regions whether or not to desalinate seawater has long been a non-issue and policy debates are focused on the timing and extent of the desalination activities. We analyze how water scarcity and demand structure, on the one hand, and cost reduction via R&D programs, on the other hand, affect the desirable development of desalination technologies and the time profiles o...

OBJECTIVE Determining informal sellers' health status and working conditions in the Bazurto market in Cartagena. METHODS The target population consisted of informal sellers working in the Bazurto market; sample size consisted of 584 sellers. A check-list was used to describe their working conditions. A "health disorders" test and neurotoxic symptoms scale (Q16) were used to determine health s...