Ecological approaches in veterinary epidemiology: mapping the risk of bat-borne rabies using vegetation indices and night-time light satellite imagery

Rabies remains a disease of significant public health concern. In the Americas, bats are an important source of rabies for pets, livestock, and humans. For effective rabies control and prevention, identifying potential areas for disease occurrence is critical to guide future research, inform public health policies, and design interventions. To anticipate zoonotic infectious diseases distribution at coarse scale, veterinary epidemiology needs to advance via exploring current geographic ecology tools and data using a biological approach. We analyzed bat-borne rabies reports in Chile from 2002 to 2012 to establish associations between rabies occurrence and environmental factors to generate an ecological niche model (ENM). The main rabies reservoir in Chile is the bat species Tadarida brasiliensis; we mapped 726 occurrences of rabies virus variant AgV4 in this bat species and integrated them with contemporary Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The correct prediction of areas with rabies in bats and the reliable anticipation of human rabies in our study illustrate the usefulness of ENM for mapping rabies and other zoonotic pathogens. Additionally, we highlight critical issues with selection of environmental variables, methods for model validation, and consideration of sampling bias. Indeed, models with weak or incorrect validation approaches should be interpreted with caution. In conclusion, ecological niche modeling applications for mapping disease risk at coarse geographic scales have a promising future, especially with refinement and enrichment of models with additional information, such as night-time light data, which increased substantially the model’s ability to anticipate human rabies

Meningothelioma as the predominant histological subtype of midline skull base and spinal meningioma

Object. This study was undertaken to test a hypothesis that meningiomas of the midline skull base and spine are predominantly of the meningothelial histological subtype

Boundary conditions of the emotional exhaustion-unsafe behavior link: The dark side of group norms and personal control

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/sI0490-015-9455-7This study focuses on the conditions under which emotional exhaustion leads to employee unsafe behavior. In a sample of 592 construction workers nested in 33 groups, we found that both emotional exhaustion and unsafe behavior norms were positively related to unsafe behavior by employees. Unsafe behavior norms moderated the relationship between emotional exhaustion and unsafe behavior, such that high group unsafe behavior norms strengthened the emotional exhaustion-employee unsafe behavior link. Furthermore, results indicated a three-way interaction effect in which employees with high emotional exhaustion conducted the highest levels of unsafe behavior when both group unsafe behavior norms and personal control over work were high. This paper provides important implications on understanding the influence of group norms on employee unsafe behavior, as well as its magnifying effect with personal control on the emotional exhaustion-unsafe behavior link.National Natural Science Foundation of ChinaFulbright ScholarshipCenter for Statistical Science, Peking UniversityKey Laboratory of Mathematical Economics and Quantitative Finance (Peking University, Ministry of EducationGrant no. 10901010Grant No. 7150217