Transition towards health promoting hospitals: adapting a global framework to Pakistan.

The World Health Organization encourages hospitals to become Health Promoting Hospitals (HPH) but adapting this concept to Pakistan has not been investigated. We explore perceptions of healthcare stakeholders about strategies and a priority action-plan to encourage HPHs in Pakistan. We conducted a qualitative study in 2007 where key-informant interviews and focus group discussions were held with healthcare stakeholders in Karachi. Thematic analysis was done and emerging themes were categorized. The HPH core components were perceived as the standard framework , however more emphasis was placed on priority actions as to satisfy basic needs of Patients, staff and the community. This included basic facilities of comfort, health, hygiene, safety, security and emotional support. A change in the traditional mindset from cure to care and identification of key personnel, awareness-raising and cooperation would strengthen advocacy efforts for HPH in Pakistan

Altered pituitary hormone secretion in male rats exposed to Bisphenol A

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a xenobiotic estrogenic compound. This compound has been suspected to have estrogenic effects on reproductive system of males and females. In this present study we investigated possible low-dose effects of BPAon Luteinizing Hormone in rats. Male Wistar rats (12-13 weeks old) were administrated a daily intra peritoneal 10 μg/kgbw/day, 50 μg/kgbw/day, 100 μg/kgbw/ day dose of BPA for 6, 6, and 12 days, and one day after last injection, serum level of Luteinizing Hormone was examined by ELISA method. All data were expressed as means ± SE. Two-way ANOVA was performed. Analysis of data showed that in all dose groups, plasma level of Luteinizing Hormone significantly decreased compared to control group. The present study showed that BPA at low doses affects Luteinizing Hormone, one of main hormones in spermatogenesis in the adult Wistar rats, and subsequently alters the steroidgenesis in testicular Leydig cells

Multi-criteria governmental crop planning problem based on an integrated AHP-PROMETHEE approach

The study uses analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and preference ranking organisation method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE) to deal with the crop planning problem as a multi-criteria decision-making problem, for governmental lands in Gaza Strip under two conditions: the normal economy condition and the resistant economy condition. These two conditions are studied from the governmental point of view. The study goal is to rank crops according to some considered criteria. Crops are divided into eight types that include vegetables, fruits, citrus, olives, palms, export crops, field crops and medical and aromatic crops. The developed AHP and PROMETHEE compare crops with respect to seven main criteria, namely; economical, financial, marketing, environmental, technical, political and social criteria. AHP is used to obtain criteria weights to be used as input for PROMETHEE to outrank alternatives. The

Automatic Verification of Erlang-Style Concurrency

This paper presents an approach to verify safety properties of Erlang-style, higher-order concurrent programs automatically. Inspired by Core Erlang, we introduce Lambda-Actor, a prototypical functional language with pattern-matching algebraic data types, augmented with process creation and asynchronous message-passing primitives. We formalise an abstract model of Lambda-Actor programs called Actor Communicating System (ACS) which has a natural interpretation as a vector addition system, for which some verification problems are decidable. We give a parametric abstract interpretation framework for Lambda-Actor and use it to build a polytime computable, flow-based, abstract semantics of Lambda-Actor programs, which we then use to bootstrap the ACS construction, thus deriving a more accurate abstract model of the input program. We have constructed Soter, a tool implementation of the verification method, thereby obtaining the first fully-automatic, infinite-state model checker for a core fragment of Erlang. We find that in practice our abstraction technique is accurate enough to verify an interesting range of safety properties. Though the ACS coverability problem is Expspace-complete, Soter can analyse these verification problems surprisingly efficiently.Comment: 12 pages plus appendix, 4 figures, 1 table. The tool is available at http://mjolnir.cs.ox.ac.uk/soter

HIGH-CYCLE FATIGUE BEHAVIOUR OF SPHEROIDAL GRAPHITE CAST IRON

International audienc

Polymer Bound Elastase Inhibitors

Pharmaceutical compositions and methods of inhibiting the enzyme elastase and increasing the biological half-life and/or potency in terms of inhibitory activity of the enzyme elastase of peptide compounds is achieved by use of a polymer of the formula P--(L--R)q wherein P is a polymer containing at least one unit of the formula (An Bn) wherein An Bn is substantially nonbiodegradable, and has an average molecular weight of about 1,000 to 5,000 daltons, L is a covalent bond or a linker group and R is a peptide

Multi criteria governmental crop planning problem: an analytic hierarchy approach

The goal of this study is to rank crops to cultivate in the governmental agricultural lands in Gaza Strip using AHP methodology as a Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) tool. This study is applied under the normal condition, from the governmental point of view. Seven main criteria were first identified consisting of economical, financial, marketing, environmental, technical, political, and social criteria, while thirty one sub-criteria were then identified. Crops were divided into eight types that include vegetables, fruits, citrus, olives, palms, export crops, field crops and medical and aromatic crops. The results indicate that the economic criteria are the most important criteria as they represent 0.33 of the total weight, while the technical criteria are the least important criteria as they represent 0.07 of the total weight. Sub-criteria weights indicate that the contribution to GDP sub-criterion is the most important one with respect to the goal as it has 0.103 of the total weight. Cropping pattern is skewed towards export crops, citrus and vegetables