Geographically weighted regression on dengue epidemic in peninsular Malaysia

Dengue has been a global epidemic since World War II, with millions of individuals being infected every year. Repetitive dengue epidemic is one of the main health problems that, due to its rapid spread and geographically widespread, has become a major concern for the government authorities in dealing with this disease. In Malaysia, cases of dengue are reported annually. To keep cases under control, it is important to examine the possible factors that help the growth of the virus. Climatological factors such as rainfall, temperature, wind speed, and humidity are expected to have high potential to increase the growth of the virus in this study, and their spatial variation is associated with cases of dengue. The result revealed that Ordinary Least Square was not an effective method for modelling the relationships between dengue cases and climate variables, as climate variables in different spatial regions act differently. During the analysis, there could be some issues of non-stationarity since the geographical aspect and spatial data were involved. Hence, the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) is implemented due to its capability to identify the spatial non-stationarity behavior of influencing factors on dengue incidence and integrate the geographical location and altitude for the spatial analysis. GWR analysis found that the influenced factors exhibited a significant relationship with dengue incidence. GWR also shows a significant improvement in Akaike Information Criteria (AIC) values with the lowest value and the highest adjusted R square. It is expected that the developed model can help the local hygienic authorities design better strategies for preventing and controlling this epidemic in Malaysia

Tulane University final report

The Frontiers in Reproductive Health (FRONTIERS) program is a 10-year cooperative agreement between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Population Council in partnership with Family Health International and Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. This report summarizes the main activities undertaken by Tulane University under its subagreement with the Population Council on the FRONTIERS project from 1998–2004. As a partner, Tulane furthered progress toward all three of the program’s intermediate results: contributing innovative interventions tested to improve reproductive health through the small grants program; helping research staff take a more proactive approach to promoting utilization; and capacity-building activities, developing a standard research protocol for systematic screening of services, and developing and facilitating a workshop on operations research for program managers. Through the internship program, selected Tulane students were provided opportunities to work on the design, implementation, and management of operations research reproductive health projects. Currently, Tulane University is considering adding a course on Introduction to Operations Research to its academic program in International Health and Development

Managing data using neighbor replication on a triangular-grid structure.

Data is one of the domains in grid research that deals with the storage, replication, and management of large data sets in a distributed environment. The all-data-to-all sites replication scheme such as read-one write-all and tree grid structure (TGS) are the popular techniques being used for replication and management of data in this domain. However, these techniques have its weaknesses in terms of data storage capacity and also data access times due to some number of sites must ‘agree’ in common to execute certain transactions. In this paper, we propose the all-data-to-some-sites scheme called the neighbor replication on triangular grid (NRTG) technique by considering only neighbors have the replicated data, and thus, minimizes the storage capacity as well as high update availability. Also, the technique tolerates failures such as server failures, site failure or even network partitioning using remote procedure call (RPC)

Effect of climate factors on hand-foot-mouth disease: a generalized additive model approach

Hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) has become an endemic childhood disease in Asia, including Malaysia, over the last few decades. This infectious disease caused by the Entero and Coxsackie viruses has been a major public health threat in Malaysia since 1997. Climate change has been considered an influential factor in HFMD cases and has been explored in other countries using various statistical analyses. The most popular is the Generalized Linear Model (GLM). However, GLM often fails to capture the non-linearity effect of the variables. The study, therefore, proposes to use the Generalized Additive Model (GAM) to analyse the non-linear effects of temperature, humidity, rainfall, and wind speed at varying time lags of HFMD in Selangor. In summary, the result indicates that the weekly temperature, humidity, and rainfall were significantly associated with HFMD cases in Selangor and clarified with two weeks of lag time. This disease's risk increased in the subsequent two weeks with a temperature range of 27C to 30C, 70% to 85% of humidity, and 5mm to 20mm of rainfall. Besides, this study also found that the seasonal distribution of HFMD in Selangor has a large peak during the Southwest monsoon. A small peak was observed at the end of the year during the Northeast monsoon. The findings of this study could be a practical guide for HFMD intervention strategies, especially in Malaysia

A human MAP kinase interactome.

Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathways form the backbone of signal transduction in the mammalian cell. Here we applied a systematic experimental and computational approach to map 2,269 interactions between human MAPK-related proteins and other cellular machinery and to assemble these data into functional modules. Multiple lines of evidence including conservation with yeast supported a core network of 641 interactions. Using small interfering RNA knockdowns, we observed that approximately one-third of MAPK-interacting proteins modulated MAPK-mediated signaling. We uncovered the Na-H exchanger NHE1 as a potential MAPK scaffold, found links between HSP90 chaperones and MAPK pathways and identified MUC12 as the human analog to the yeast signaling mucin Msb2. This study makes available a large resource of MAPK interactions and clone libraries, and it illustrates a methodology for probing signaling networks based on functional refinement of experimentally derived protein-interaction maps

The impact of computer assisted auditing techniques in the audit process: an assessment of performance and effort expectancy

The rapid advancement of technology has had a significant impact on a wide range of industries, including the auditing industry. It is now obvious that employing Computer Assisted Auditing Techniques (CAATs) is a possible tactic for enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of the audit process. This study evaluates how CAATs affect auditors' expectations for performance and effort in Jordan. Through a comprehensive survey of Jordanian auditors, this research provides insights into the factors that drive CAATs adoption. Utilizing structural equation modeling, the study confirms that both Effort Expectancy and Performance Expectancy positively influence CAATs adoption. These relationships are supported by robust path coefficients and low P-values, indicating statistical significance. The results of this study should clarify the possible advantages of including CAATs in the audit process and point out any difficulties auditors could encounter. Companies and professionals may choose wisely whether to embrace and use CAATs by comprehending Performance Expectancy and Effort Expectancy

Prevalence of somatisation and psychologisation among patients visiting primary health care centres in the State of Qatar

Background: Medically unexplained somatic complaints are among the most common clinical presentations in primary care in developing countries and they are considerable burden for patients and health care system. Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of somatisation in comparison to psychologisation among a sample of Qatari patients who were visiting primary health care (PHC) centres and to investigate the clinical and socio-demographic characteristics of somatisers (STs) and psychologisers (PGs). Method: The survey was conducted among PHC Qatari patients during the period from January to July 2007. About 2,320 patients were approached, of whom 1,689 agreed to participate and responded to the questionnaire. Among the studied Qatari patients, 404 patients were identified for clinical interview. The first stage of the study was conducted with the help of general practitioners, using the 12-item General Health Questionnaire. The second stage was carried out by a consultant using the Clinical Interview Schedule. A specific operational criterion was used to identify STs and PGs. Results: The prevalence rate of STs among the total studied sample was 12.4%, while the PGs were 11.5%. Among the identified psychiatric cases, the proportion of STs (52%) was higher than PGs (48%). Most of the diagnostic categories were more prevalent among PGs. The dissatisfaction at work and stressful life events within 12 months before the onset of the presenting symptoms were the three postulated determinants which were significantly more among STs than PGs. Conclusion: The prevalence of somatised mental disorder was little higher than the psychologised mental disorder. The prevalence of somatisation and psychologisation is comparable with other reported studies from the Middle-East and Western countries. Dissatisfaction at work and stressful life events were significantly higher among STs than PGs

The global EPTO database: Worldwide occurrences of aquatic insects

Motivation: Aquatic insects comprise 64% of freshwater animal diversity and are widely used as bioindicators to assess water quality impairment and freshwater ecosystem health, as well as to test ecological hypotheses. Despite their importance, a comprehensive, global database of aquatic insect occurrences for mapping freshwater biodiversity in macroecological studies and applied freshwater research is missing. We aim to fill this gap and present the Global EPTO Database, which includes worldwide geo-referenced aquatic insect occurrence records for four major taxa groups: Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera and Odonata (EPTO). Main type of variables contained: A total of 8,368,467 occurrence records globally, of which 8,319,689 (99%) are publicly available. The records are attributed to the corresponding drainage basin and sub-catchment based on the Hydrography90m dataset and are accompanied by the elevation value, the freshwater ecoregion and the protection status of their location. Spatial location and grain: The database covers the global extent, with 86% of the observation records having coordinates with at least four decimal digits (11.1 m precision at the equator) in the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84) coordinate reference system. Time period and grain: Sampling years span from 1951 to 2021. Ninety-nine percent of the records have information on the year of the observation, 95% on the year and month, while 94% have a complete date. In the case of seven sub-datasets, exact dates can be retrieved upon communication with the data contributors.Major taxa and level of measurement: Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera and Odonata, standardized at the genus taxonomic level. We provide species names for 7,727,980 (93%) records without further taxonomic verification. Software format: The entire tab-separated value (.csv) database can be downloaded and visualized at https://glowa bio.org/proje ct/epto_datab ase/. Fifty individual datasets are also available at https://fred.igb-berlin. de, while six datasets have restricted access. For the latter, we share metadata and the contact details of the authors

Mutations in the Beta Propeller WDR72 Cause Autosomal-Recessive Hypomaturation Amelogenesis Imperfecta

Healthy dental enamel is the hardest and most highly mineralized human tissue. Though acellular, nonvital, and without capacity for turnover or repair, it can nevertheless last a lifetime. Amelogenesis imperfecta (AI) is a collective term for failure of normal enamel development, covering diverse clinical phenotypes that typically show Mendelian inheritance patterns. One subset, known as hypomaturation AI, is characterised by near-normal volumes of organic enamel matrix but with weak, creamy-brown opaque enamel that fails prematurely after tooth eruption. Mutations in genes critical to enamel matrix formation have been documented, but current understanding of other key events in enamel biomineralization is limited. We investigated autosomal-recessive hypomaturation AI in a consanguineous Pakistani family. A whole-genome SNP autozygosity screen identified a locus on chromosome 15q21.3. Sequencing candidate genes revealed a point mutation in the poorly characterized WDR72 gene. Screening of WDR72 in a panel of nine additional hypomaturation AI families revealed the same mutation in a second, apparently unrelated, Pakistani family and two further nonsense mutations in Omani families. Immunohistochemistry confirmed intracellular localization in maturation-stage ameloblasts. WDR72 function is unknown, but as a putative β propeller is expected to be a scaffold for protein-protein interactions. The nearest homolog, WDR7, is involved in vesicle mobilization and Ca2+-dependent exocytosis at synapses. Vesicle trafficking is important in maturation-stage ameloblasts with respect to secretion into immature enamel and removal of cleaved enamel matrix proteins via endocytosis. This raises the intriguing possibility that WDR72 is critical to ameloblast vesicle turnover during enamel maturation