In-situ and Remote Sensing Networks for Environmental Monitoring and Global Assessment of Leptospirosis Outbreaks

AbstractLeptospirosis is a disease that affects human population and can claim many victims with large outbreaks associated with natural disasters. This work focuses on the technological aspects for inexpensive climate monitoring techniques based on ground and satellite sensors for obtaining information prior to disease outbreaks in under-developed regions and on water-quality sensors that can lead to radical changes in our ability to detect and abate this disease. The remote deployment of such sensors in areas where outbreaks can occur can help in enhancingin real-time the spatial and temporal resolution of information and allows unattended operation that will be particularly useful for monitoring under extreme climate events. Such types of monitoring advancements, when coupled with regular geographical, population and habitat monitoring can assess the hazards and risks to local population prior to a disease outbreak. Then in the eventual aftermath, it can assist in identification of affected geographical locations where abatement solutions will be required, and eventually in the assessment of the effectiveness of control measures. This work explores recent releases of open global observation data and a range of in-situ environmental monitoring tools of increasing complexity for measuring several parameters andfor detecting contaminants and pathogens that were previously irresolvable due to the high degree of complexityinthe diagnosis of this disease

Progress in the Characterization of Layered Structures by X-Ray Microanalysis

Recent advances in the mathematical description of the depth distribution of X-ray generation, $\phi (\rho z)$, have permitted the quantitative analysis of multilayer structures with a precision approaching $\pm 1$ nm. A weighted average mass absorption coefficient is proposed for use in analysis with L series radiation when the energy separation of the component lines is less than the spectrometer resolution. This is shown to improve agreement between experimental data and the theoretically calculated X-ray intensities. An example of the application of the $\phi (\rho z)$ method to the analysis of a titanium-boron nitride bilayer is described with special reference to the problem of detection of interfacial diffusion and oxidation phenomena