West Nile virus was first detected in North America in 1999 and has subsequently spread throughout the United States and Canada and into Mexico and the Caribbean. This review describes the epidemiology and ecology of West Nile virus in North America and the prospects for effective treatments and vaccines.

West African Aspergillus flavus S isolates differed from North American isolates. Both produced aflatoxin B1. However, 40 and 100% of West African isolates also produced aflatoxin G1 in NH4 medium and urea medium, respectively. No North American S strain isolate produced aflatoxin G1. This geographical and physiological divergence may influence aflatoxin management.

1First Department of Medicine, Hokkaido University School of Medicine, North 15 West 7, Kita-ku, Sapporo 060-8638, Japan 2Department of Immunology, Okayama University Graduate School of Medicine, Dentistry, and Pharmaceutical Sciences, 2-5-1 Shikata-cho, Okayama 700-8558, Japan 3Department of Medical Oncology, Hokkaido University Graduate School of Medicine, North 15 West 7, Kita-ku, Sapporo 06...

A novel feature based corner detection method is proposed to extract accurate corner positions than unstable corner points in existing algorithms such as Intensity-based Harris corner method and Edge-based corner method. The former algorithm cannot detect accurate corner positions in noisy environments while the latter cannot identify stable corners due to incomplete edge detection. The propose...

For a two-dimensional solid silicon thermal wind sensor with symmetrical structure, the wind speed and direction information can be derived from the output voltages in two orthogonal directions, i.e., the north-south and east-west. However, the output voltages in these two directions will vary linearly with the ambient temperature. Therefore, in this paper, a temperature model to study the temp...

In this paper we propose an effective and robust approach for detecting corner points on a given binary image. Unlike other corner detection methods the proposed method is non-parametric in nature, that is, it does not require any input parameter. The proposed method is based on mathematical morphology. It makes use of morphological skeleton for detecting corner points. Convex corner points are...

This research study shows the potential of large image-block adjustment with nadir viewing sensor images. The method uses the geometric correction system developed for multi-source images at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing. The results with 15 Landsat-7 ETM images show that the same accuracy can be obtained with a large image block than with a single image using the same number of ground c...

OBJECTIVE Although previous research has shown limited availability of healthy food in low-income urban neighbourhoods, the association between food source use and food-purchasing patterns has not yet been examined. We explored food-purchasing patterns in the context of food source use and food source access factors in low-income areas of Baltimore City. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey. SETTI...