Determining the Dynamics of Agricultural Water Use: Cases from Asia and Africa

Across Africa and Asia, water resources are being affected by a complex mixture of social, economic, and environmental factors. These include climate change and population growth, food prices, oil prices, financial disruptions, and political fluctuations. The need to produce more food will have one of the largest impacts on water and will continue to reshape the patterns of agricultural water use in major food-growing regions. With this increasing demand on water for agriculture, from large-scale irrigation to intensification of rainfed systems, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure that water resources decision-making has access to information that captures the spectrum of water uses, across seasons, and over time. Furthermore, the major sectors that place demands on water and otherwise affect the resource need water-related information to inform their decisions. In this paper we consider two cases where the range of agricultural water management uses have been examined. We examine the methodologies and approaches used, the utility of this information to decision-making in the water and agricultural sectors, and the limitations of the information gathered

Determining the Dynamics of Agricultural Water Use: Cases from Asia and Africa

Across Africa and Asia, water resources are being affected by a complex mixture of social, economic, and environmental factors. These include climate change and population growth, food prices, oil prices, financial disruptions, and political fluctuations. The need to produce more food will have one of the largest impacts on water and will continue to reshape the patterns of agricultural water use in major food-growing regions. With this increasing demand on water for agriculture, from large-scale irrigation to intensification of rainfed systems, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure that water resources decision-making has access to information that captures the spectrum of water uses, across seasons, and over time. Furthermore, the major sectors that place demands on water and otherwise affect the resource need water-related information to inform their decisions. In this paper we consider two cases where the range of agricultural water management uses have been examined. We examine the methodologies and approaches used, the utility of this information to decision-making in the water and agricultural sectors, and the limitations of the information gathered

A Systematic Review of Published Respondent-Driven Sampling Surveys Collecting Behavioral and Biologic Data.

Reporting key details of respondent-driven sampling (RDS) survey implementation and analysis is essential for assessing the quality of RDS surveys. RDS is both a recruitment and analytic method and, as such, it is important to adequately describe both aspects in publications. We extracted data from peer-reviewed literature published through September, 2013 that reported collected biological specimens using RDS. We identified 151 eligible peer-reviewed articles describing 222 surveys conducted in seven regions throughout the world. Most published surveys reported basic implementation information such as survey city, country, year, population sampled, interview method, and final sample size. However, many surveys did not report essential methodological and analytical information for assessing RDS survey quality, including number of recruitment sites, seeds at start and end, maximum number of waves, and whether data were adjusted for network size. Understanding the quality of data collection and analysis in RDS is useful for effectively planning public health service delivery and funding priorities

Reduced Bias for Respondent Driven Sampling: Accounting for Non-Uniform Edge Sampling Probabilities in People Who Inject Drugs in Mauritius

People who inject drugs are an important population to study in order to reduce transmission of blood-borne illnesses including HIV and Hepatitis. In this paper we estimate the HIV and Hepatitis C prevalence among people who inject drugs, as well as the proportion of people who inject drugs who are female in Mauritius. Respondent driven sampling (RDS), a widely adopted link-tracing sampling design used to collect samples from hard-to-reach human populations, was used to collect this sample. The random walk approximation underlying many common RDS estimators assumes that each social relation (edge) in the underlying social network has an equal probability of being traced in the collection of the sample. This assumption does not hold in practice. We show that certain RDS estimators are sensitive to the violation of this assumption. In order to address this limitation in current methodology, and the impact it may have on prevalence estimates, we present a new method for improving RDS prevalence estimators using estimated edge inclusion probabilities, and apply this to data from Mauritius

Evaluation of the role of location and distance in recruitment in respondent-driven sampling.

BACKGROUND: Respondent-driven sampling(RDS) is an increasingly widely used variant of a link tracing design for recruiting hidden populations. The role of the spatial distribution of the target population has not been robustly examined for RDS. We examine patterns of recruitment by location, and how they may have biased an RDS study findings. METHODS: Total-population data were available on a range of characteristics on a population of 2402 male household-heads from an open cohort of 25 villages in rural Uganda. The locations of households were known a-priori. An RDS survey was carried out in this population, employing current RDS methods of sampling and statistical inference. RESULTS: There was little heterogeneity in the population by location. Data suggested more distant contacts were less likely to be reported, and therefore recruited, but if reported more distant contacts were as likely as closer contacts to be recruited. There was no evidence that closer proximity to a village meeting place was associated with probability of being recruited, however it was associated with a higher probability of recruiting a larger number of recruits. People living closer to an interview site were more likely to be recruited. CONCLUSIONS: Household location affected the overall probability of recruitment, and the probability of recruitment by a specific recruiter. Patterns of recruitment do not appear to have greatly biased estimates in this study. The observed patterns could result in bias in more geographically heterogeneous populations. Care is required in RDS studies when choosing the network size question and interview site location(s).RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

High-Dose Carmustine, Etoposide, and Cyclophosphamide Followed by Allogeneic Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation for Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma

AbstractAllogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) has been shown to be curative in a group of patients with aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). A previous study has demonstrated equivalent outcomes with a conditioning regimen based on total body irradiation and another not based on total body irradiation with preparative therapy using cyclophosphamide, carmustine, and etoposide (CBV) in autologous HCT. We investigated the safety and efficacy of using CBV in an allogeneic setting. Patients were required to have relapsed or be at high risk for subsequent relapse of NHL. All patients had a fully HLA-matched sibling donor. Patients received carmustine (15 mg/kg), etoposide (60 mg/kg), and cyclophosphamide (100 mg/kg) on days −6, −4, and −2, respectively, followed by allogeneic HCT. All patients were treated with cyclosporine and methylprednisolone as prophylaxis for graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Thirty-one patients (median age, 46 years) who were felt to be inappropriate candidates for autologous transplantation were enrolled. Each subject had a median of 3 previous chemotherapy regimens. All patients engrafted. Fifteen of 31 patients are alive. Median follow-up time was 11.5 months (range, .4-126). There were 8 deaths due to relapse. Nonrelapse mortality (n = 8) included infection (n = 3), GVHD (n = 2), diffuse alveolar hemorrhage (n = 1), veno-occlusive disease in the setting of concurrent acute GVHD of the liver (n = 1), and leukoencephalopathy (n = 1). Probabilities of event-free survival and overall survival were, respectively, 44% (95% confidence interval, 26%-62%) and 51% (33%-69%) at 1 year and 44% (26%-62%) and 47% (29%-65%) at 5 years. Probability of relapse was 33% (15%-51%) at 1 year and 5 years. Probability of nonrelapse mortality was 31% (13%-49%) at 1 year and 5 years. Incidences were 29% for acute GVHD and 39% for chronic GVHD. None of the 12 patients who developed chronic GVHD has disease recurrence. Patients who had required >3 previous chemotherapy regimens before HCT had an increased probability of relapse. CBV is an effective preparative regimen for patients with aggressive NHL who undergo allogeneic HCT

Proton pump inhibitor and histamine-2 receptor antagonist use and risk of liver cancer in two population-based studies

The analysis of UK Biobank has been conducted using the UK Biobank Resource under Application Number 34374. We acknowledge collaboration with the Research Applications and Data Management Team lead by Ms Katie Wilde, University of Aberdeen in conducting this study. KTT is supported by the Vietnam International Education Cooperation Department. Access to PCCIU data was provided by Queen’s University Belfast and the Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Aberdeen. Access to the UK Biobank was funded by a Cancer Research UK Population Research Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to ÚCMcM. HGC is a co-investigator of the UKCRC Centre of Excellence for Public Health Northern Ireland.Peer reviewedPostprin