Effect of drought on water quality and agricultural land value

In addition to yield, drought also affects water quality. Therefore, for long-term agricultural planning, the climatic situation of the regions must be determined. Therefore, in the present study, while evaluating the effects of drought on the quality of surface water salinity, the effects of drought and water salinity on the rent of agricultural lands were examined. For this purpose, by using SPI index, drought classes in the region were determined and by using QUAL2K model, water salinity was simulated in Taleghan river. Then, using Ricardian's approach, the effect of climatic, salinity and economic variables and their interactions on agricultural land rent were evaluated. The results of the QUAL2K model show that the drought has a direct and non-linear relationship with surface water quality, so that with decreasing river flow during moderate, severe and very severe drought classes, salinity decreases by 20.5, 41.3 and 57.8%, respectively. Based on the results of the Ricardin model, agricultural land rent is inversely related to water salinity and temperature, and is directly related to rainfall. The results of changes in the rent of agricultural land also showed that during the middle, severe and very severe drought classes, land rent decreased by 17.7, 32 and 42.4 percent, respectively. Therefore, it is suggested that farmers' compensation be determined on the basis of the amount of "lost rent", as it provides an accurate estimate of the actual amount of drought damage

Addressing the Younger Age at Onset in Breast Cancer Patients in Asia: An Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Fifty Years of Quality Data from the International Agency for Research on Cancer

There is an established fact that Asian breast cancer patients are, on average, younger than their European counterparts. This study aimed to utilize the data from the Cancer Incidence in Five Continents I through XIII (published by the International Agency for Research on Cancer) to examine what contributes to the younger age at onset in the Asian population. Material and Methods. Data (number of breast cancer cases and corresponding population figures) for 29 registries in Europe and 9 registries in Asia for the period of 1953–2002 was accessioned and pooled to form two distinct populations, Asia and Europe. The age specific rates were defined and analyzed cross-sectionally (period wise) and longitudinally (cohort wise). The magnitude and the pattern of age specific rates were analyzed using the age-period-cohort analysis. The constrained generalized linear model with a priority assumption of cohort effect as contributing factor to changing rates was used to analyze the data. Result. During the last 50 years, the rate of breast cancer increased for both populations with an estimated annual percent change of 1.03% (with 95% CI of 1.029, 1.031) for Asia and 1.016% (95% CI of 1.015, 1.017) for Europe. There were stronger cohort effects in the magnitude of rates among the Asian population compared to the European population. The cohort effects, expressed as the rate ratio with cohort born in 1970 as reference, ranged from 0.06 (95% CI 0.05, 0.08) to 0.94 (95% CI 0.93, 0.96) for Asians and 0.35 (95% CI 0.33, 0.36) to 1.03 (95% CI 1.02, 1.04) for Europeans. The estimated longitudinal age specific rates (adjusted for cohort and period effects) showed similar patterns between the two populations. Conclusion. It was concluded that a strong cohort effect contributes to the younger age at onset among Asian breast cancer patients

The Inquiry of International Standards for Medical Tourism: A Case Study into Hospitals of Tehran University of Medical Sciences

Introduction: Medical tourism is a rapidly growing industry that has provided special opportunities to gain competitive advantage over international health organizations. This study aimed to investigate the quality requirements based on Joint Commission International (JCI) for medical tourism in selected hospitals of Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Methods: This is a descriptive and cross-sectional study that was conducted at three educational hospitals operated by Tehran University of Medical Sciences in 2013. The data were collected through the last updated checklists (translation of the standards of JCI, comprising 13 axial) completed by the researcher. Data analysis was done using descriptive and analytical tests including frequency, standard deviation and T- Test by means of SPSS 19.0. Results: Studied hospitals met 76.8% of organization-oriented standards plus 75.4% of patient-oriented standards. There were two patient-oriented standards, namely access to care and its continuity 87.2% alongside anesthesia and surgery care 86.6% which were met at the highest level. On the other side, organization-oriented standard of leadership and guidance 69.2% was the item met at the least. Conclusion: It seems that studied hospitals are ready to attract medical tourists by the advantage of service quality. Moreover, it is necessary to give attention to the strengths and improve the weaknesses concerning quality of services. Criteria on service charges, waited time and etc, should be scientifically analyzed and reviewed as well

Epidemiological study of cholera in Qazvin city during summer of 2011

Cholera is an acute intestinal infection caused by consuming food or water contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Two main epidemiological characteristic of disease is tendency for create of sudden outbreaks and the ability to causing a pandemic. The objective of this study is to describe the epidemiology of the disease. This survey is a descriptive cross-sectional study based on reports from the health centers and hospitals covered by city health centers. Rectal swab is obtained from all suspected cases. After reporting each positive case, health team was sent to the location and it completed the epidemiological form. Data were analyzed by version 16 of SPSS software. All reported patients were 44 cases. Epidemic lasted from 4 August to 18 September 2011. Ogawa was the predominant pathogenic serosubtype. 47.7% of all patients admitted to the hospital and 52.3% were treated as outpatients. Most of the patients were in age group >60 years and there were no reports of disease in age group under 15 years.  2 of the 44 patients had mild symptoms of diarrhea, 13 patients had moderate and 29 cases had severe diarrhea. Not affection of age groups less than 15 years indicates epidemic patterns of disease in the city. Severity of symptoms is important in case finding; then, in disease surveillance system we should obtain rectal swab specimen from all cases of diarrhea with severe symptoms.

SecAODV: A Secure healthcare routing scheme based on hybrid cryptography in wireless body sensor networks

In recent decades, the use of sensors has dramatically grown to monitor human body activities and maintain the health status. In this application, routing and secure data transmission are very important to prevent the unauthorized access by attackers to health data. In this article, we propose a secure routing scheme called SecAODV for heterogeneous wireless body sensor networks. SecAODV has three phases: bootstrapping, routing between cluster head nodes, and communication security. In the bootstrapping phase, the base station loads system parameters and encryption functions in the memory of sensor nodes. In the routing phase, each cluster head node calculates its degree based on several parameters, including, distance, residual energy, link quality, and the number of hops, to decide for rebroadcasting the route request (RREQ) message. In the communication security phase, a symmetric cryptography method is used to protect intra-cluster communications. Also, an asymmetric cryptography method is used to secure communication links between cluster head nodes. The proposed secure routing scheme is simulated in the network simulator version 2 (NS2) simulator. The simulation results are compared with the secure multi tier energy-efficient routing scheme (SMEER) and the centralized low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH-C). The results show that SecAODV improves end-to-end delay, throughput, energy consumption, packet delivery rate (PDR), and packet loss rate (PLR)

Toward designing a secure authentication protocol for IoT environments

Authentication protocol is a critical part of any application to manage the access control in many applications. A former research recently proposed a lightweight authentication scheme to transmit data in an IoT subsystem securely. Although the designers presented the first security analysis of the proposed protocol, that protocol has not been independently analyzed by third-party researchers, to the best of our knowledge. On the other hand, it is generally agreed that no cryptosystem should be used in a practical application unless its security has been verified through security analysis by third parties extensively, which is addressed in this paper. Although it is an efficient protocol by design compared to other related schemes, our security analysis identifies the non-ideal properties of this protocol. More specifically, we show that this protocol does not provide perfect forward secrecy. In addition, we show that it is vulnerable to an insider attacker, and an active insider adversary can successfully recover the shared keys between the protocol’s entities. In addition, such an adversary can impersonate the remote server to the user and vice versa. Next, the adversary can trace the target user using the extracted information. Finally, we redesign the protocol such that the enhanced protocol can withstand all the aforementioned attacks. The overhead of the proposed protocol compared to its predecessor is only 15.5% in terms of computational cost

Cryptanalysis of two recent ultra-lightweight authentication protocols

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is a critical part of many Internet of Things (IoT) systems, including Medical IoT (MIoT) for instance. On the other hand, the IoT devices’ numerous limitations (such as memory space, computing capability, and battery capacity) make it difficult to implement cost- and energy-efficient security solutions. As a result, several researchers attempted to address this problem, and several RFID-based security mechanisms for the MIoT and other constrained environments were proposed. In this vein, Wang et al. and Shariq et al. recently proposed CRUSAP and ESRAS ultra-lightweight authentication schemes. They demonstrated, both formally and informally, that their schemes meet the required security properties for RFID systems. In their proposed protocols, they have used a very lightweight operation called Cro(·) and Rank(·), respectively. However, in this paper, we show that those functions are not secure enough to provide the desired security. We show that Cro(·) is linear and reversible, and it is easy to obtain the secret values used in its calculation. Then, by exploiting the vulnerability of the Cro(·) function, we demonstrated that CRUSAP is vulnerable to secret disclosure attacks. The proposed attack has a success probability of "1" and is as simple as a CRUSAP protocol run. Other security attacks are obviously possible by obtaining the secret values of the tag and reader. In addition, we present a de-synchronization attack on the CRUSAP protocol. Furthermore, we provide a thorough examination of ESRAS and its Rank(·) function. We first present a de-synchronization attack that works for any desired Rank(·) function, including Shariq et al.’s proposed Rank(·) function. We also show that Rank(·) does not provide the desired confusion and diffusion that is claimed by the designers. Finally, we conduct a secret disclosure attack against ESRAS

Ectopic expression of miRNA-21 and miRNA-205 in non-small cell lung cancer

This research is a part of the efforts of the professors and colleagues of Masih Daneshvari Hospital of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences and Mashhad Medical Sciences University. All involved are sincerely thanked.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Modeling Transportation Demand of Urban Households in Tehran Province: (System Wide Approach)

Transportation services as an important component of the urban economy is one of the items constituting the household portfolios. This paper aims to model the transportation demand among urban households in Tehran by using a system-wide approach to modeling demand. For this purpose, data on household spending in Tehran province, during the period of 1389 to 1358 is used. Results indicate that the demand for transport services have low sensitivity to price changes and price changes have little impact on demand management in this section. Income elasticity of demand for urban households in Tehran province of transport services is equal to 1.59