BACKGROUND Occupational risk factors are one of the major causes of respiratory illnesses and symptoms, and account for 13% of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and 11% of asthma worldwide. Majority of brick kilns in Pakistan use wood and coal for baking the bricks which makes the brick kiln workers susceptible to high exposure of air pollution. This study was designed to describe frequency...

Previous studies suggest that children with egg allergy may be able to tolerate baked egg. Reliable predictors of a successful baked egg challenge are not well established. We examined egg white-specific IgE levels, skin-prick test (SPT) results, and age as predictors of baked egg oral food challenge (OFC) outcomes. We conducted a retrospective chart review of children, aged 2-18 years, receivi...

PURPOSE It is known that ovomucoid, an egg allergen, is heat resistant and remains soluble after heating. However, a recent study showed that the antigenic activity of ovomucoid could be reduced by heating when egg white (EW) was mixed with wheat flour. This study was performed to determine the influence of wheat flour on the antigenic activities of EW proteins when EW is heated, and the influe...

In this paper, a mobile scanning system for real-time under-vehicle inspection is presented, which is founded on a “Brick” architecture. In this “Brick” architecture, the inspection system is basically decomposed into bricks of three kinds: sensing, mobility, and computing. These bricks are physically and logically independent and communicate with each other by wireless communication. Each bric...

BACKGROUND Numerous malaria epidemics have occurred in western Kenya, with increasing frequency over the past 20 years. A variety of hypotheses on the etiology of these epidemics have been put forth, with different implications for surveillance and control. We investigated the ecological and socioeconomic factors promoting highland malaria vectors in the dry season after the 2002 epidemic. ME...

In 1987, Lovv asz conjectured that every brick G diierent from K 4 , C 6 , and the Petersen graph has an edge e such that G e is a matching covered graph with exactly one brick. Lovv asz and Vempala announced a proof of this conjecture in 1994. Their paper is under preparation. We present here an independent proof of their theorem. We shall in fact prove that if G is any brick diierent from K 4...

A brick is a 3-connected graph such that the graph obtained from it by deleting any two distinct vertices has a perfect matching. The importance of bricks stems from the fact that they are building blocks of the matching decomposition procedure of Kotzig, and Lovász and Plummer. We prove that every brick except for the Petersen graph can be reduced to K4 or the prism by repeatedly applying a ce...

The Olivetti Research Laboratory has developed an experimental system based on intelligent peripherals connected directly to an ATM network. As well as multimedia modules (e.g. audio and video) the system also includes a directly connected RAID-3 storage server called the “Disc Brick”. This paper describes the architecture of the Disc Brick, and discusses some of the hardware and software issue...