The life and health challenges of young Malaysian couples: results from a stakeholder consensus and engagement study to support non-communicable disease prevention

BACKGROUND: Malaysia faces burgeoning obesity and diabetes epidemics with a 250% and 88% increase respectively between 1996 and 2006. Identifying the health challenges of young adults in Malaysia, who constitute 27.5 % of the population, is critical for NCD prevention. The aim of the study was two-fold: (1) to achieve consensus amongst stakeholders on the most important challenge impacting the health of young adults, and (2) to engage with stakeholders to formulate a NCD prevention framework.METHODS: The Delphi Technique was utilised to achieve group consensus around the most important life and health challenges that young adults face in Malaysia. Subsequently, the results of the consensus component were shared with the stakeholders in an engagement workshop to obtain input on a NCD prevention framework.RESULTS: We found that life stress was a significant concern. It would seem that the apathy towards pursuing or maintaining a healthy lifestyle among young adults may be significantly influenced by the broader distal determinant of life stress. The high cost of living is suggested to be the main push factor for young working adults towards attaining better financial security to improve their livelihood. In turn, this leads to a more stressful lifestyle with less time to focus on healthier lifestyle choices.CONCLUSIONS: The findings highlight a pivotal barrier to healthier lifestyles. By assisting young adults to cope with daily living coupled with realistic opportunities to make healthier dietary choices, be more active, and less sedentary could assist in the development of NCD health promotion strategies<br/

E-Services Effectiveness: A Case of Companies Commission of Malaysia

E-Technology has become a reason for enabling more effective government through better access to services and the democratic process. Technology make both the public and private sector work more effectively by giving attention to the needs of customers while, at the same time, reducing costs, time and improving the quality of services. This paper, will discusses some of the key aspects of e-Service providing in Companies Commission of Malaysia (CCM) and the role of internal IT department and operational department to encourage the eservices in CCM to cater the drastically increasing application. Method undertaken in this study was throughinterviews with project sponsors and a number of other stakeholders and surveys of several focus groups of users. Data were collected using online questionnaire from CCM customers, employees and interview the stakeholders such as board of members. An online questionnaire survey of CCM employees was sent, accompanied by email imitating respondents to existing customer. This study will add more information on how to examine the value and the effectiveness of e-Services with a focus on three specific aspects of effectiveness such as the view of management and IT department; social, cultural and ethical implications; and the customers view of the usefulness and success of e-Service initiatives

Brain Acceleration During Ball-To-Head Impact in Soccer

There has been a long debate whether purposeful heading could cause harm to the brain. Studies have shown that repetitive heading occasion could lead to degeneration of brain cells, which is similarly found in patients with mild traumatic brain injury. A two-degree of freedom linear mathematical model was developed to study the impact of soccer ball to the brain during ball-to-head impact in soccer. From the model, the acceleration of the brain upon impact can be obtained. The model is a mass-spring-damper system, in which the skull is modelled as a mass and the neck is modelled as a spring-damper system. The brain is a mass with suspension characteristics that are also defined by a spring and a damper. The model was validated by experiment, in which a ball was dropped from different heights onto an instrumented dummy skull. The validation shows that the results obtained from the model are in a good agreement with the brain acceleration measured from the experiment. This findings show that a simple linear mathematical model can be useful in giving a preliminary insight on what human brain endures during a ball-to-head impact

Public attitude towards modern biotechnology

This article reviews the literature related to the main idea of the study, rooting from the definition of biotechnology, global status of commercialized biotechnology products, and global and local public attitudes towards modern biotechnology and past models for attitude towards modern biotechnology. The first section of the review will be the in-depth-discussion regarding the definition of modern biotechnology according to several established international organizations, followed by global status of commercialized biotechnology products which will emphasize on how modern biotechnology is classified and which area are being focused more by the stakeholders, and global and local public attitudes towards modern biotechnology based on previous studies. Last but not least, the final section is credited to past studies related to attitudes and past models of public attitudes towards biotechnology, both globally and locally. A developing country like Malaysia was chosen in this article as an example of the case study related to local situation of modern biotechnology.Key words: Modern biotechnology, genetically modified (GM), public attitude, Malaysi

Recent advances on palm oil mill effluent (POME) pretreatment and anaerobic reactor for sustainable biogas production

Palm oil is one of the leading agricultural crops in the world, as it dominates 34% of the global vegetable oil market, with approximately 64.6*103 million kgs of production in 2017. However, along with its breakthrough, the generation of palm oil mill effluent (POME) as uncontrolled waste has become a serious matter and requires proper management to reduce its negative effects on the environment. Subsequently, the high organic content of POME makes it possible to convert waste into value-added products, such as biogas. A ratio of 0.5 for biological oxygen demand to chemical oxygen demand (BOD/COD) indicates a high possibility for biological treatment. Recently, the utilisation of POME as a cheap source for biogas production has gained an extraordinary amount of attention, and intensive research has been conducted on the upstream to downstream process. Finding the most suitable and efficient pretreatment technique and reactor configuration are vital parameters for the treatment and conversion of POME to biogas. This review describes existing pretreatment processes for POME and recommends recently manufactured high-rate anaerobic reactors as the most suitable and efficient pretreatment technique for maximising the extraction of biogas from POME

Modeling of Single Bay Precast Residential House Using Ruaumoko 2D Program

Precast residential houses are normally constructed in Malaysia using precast shear-key wall panel and precast wall panel are designed using BS8110 where there is no provision for earthquake. However, the safety of this house under moderate and strong earthquake is still questionable. Consequently, the full-scale of residential house are designed, constructed, tested and analyzed under in-plane lateral cyclic loading. Hysteresis loops are plotted based on the experimental work and compared with modeling of hysteresis loops using HYSTERES in RUAUMOKO 2D program. Modified Takeda hysteresis model is chosen to behave a similar pattern with experimental work. This program will display the earthquake excitations, spectral displacements, pseudo spectral acceleration, and deformation shape of the structure. It can be concluded that this building is suffering severe cracks and damage under moderate and severe earthquake

Aerobic granulation for real domestic sewage treatment at hot and low humidity climate condition

With inoculum sludge from a conventional activated sludge wastewater treatment plant, a sequencing batch reactor fed with real domestic wastewater was operated at 50 ± 1 °C to study the formation of aerobic granular sludge (AGS) for simultaneous organics and nutrients removal with a complete cycle time of 3 h. The AGS were successfully cultivated with excellent settling ability and demonstrated exceptional performance in the organics and nutrients removal with influent loading rate of 1.2 kg COD m-3 d-1. Stable, regular, dense and fast settling granule (average diameter, 2.0 mm and sludge volume index, 73.501 mL g-1) were developed in a single reactor. In addition, 89 % COD removal efficiency was observed in the system at the maturation stage of the granulation, while its ammonia nitrogen removal efficiencies were up to 99 %. The study demonstrated the capabilities of AGS formation in a single, high and slender column type-bioreactor at high temperature which is suitable to be applied for hot climate and low humidity condition (e.g. Saudi Arabia)