Zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis (ZCL) is a serious and increasing public health problem in many rural areas of Iran. Previous studies showed that rodent control operations are effective in ...destroying rodents and reducing the incidence of ZCL on a small scale and in special circumstances. The objective of this study was to determine suitable timing for rodent control operations in reducing the incidence of ZCL in an endemic area in Badrood, Iran.
We conducted rodent control operations by baiting rodent holes using zinc phosphide once a month in May, June, July and September in 1997 within a 500-meter circle of houses in the intervention area. From 1999 to 2002, the numbers of active rodent holes were counted in May and October in the intervention and control areas. When the numbers of rodent holes increased to 30% or more of the number before the first baiting in May 1997, holes in the intervention area were baited again with zinc phosphide in the intervention area; no baiting was done in the control village. Case findings were done by house-to-house visits once every season during 2000 to 2002.
Changes in the number of rodent holes over time in the intervention and control villages were statistically significant (P<0.000001). There were also significant differences in the incidence of ZCL between the intervention and control villages (P<0.005) during 2000 to 2002. The incidence of ZCLwas unchanged in the years 2000 and 2001, but increased in one village in 2002 after an increase in the number of rodent holes.
We suggest that rodent control operations using zinc phosphide be done within a 500-meter circle of houses once every two years before the beginning of the active season of sandflies, which begins in late April.
The Followingfollowing paper explores cooperation among Caspian Sea countries for naturalgas exporting to Europe. What is puzzling here is whether environmental requirements, inNabucoo and Trans ...Caspian Sea gas projects, play an important role in the strategic decisionprocess among three gas-exporting countries in the region: Iran, Azerbayejan andTurkmenistan. using Maskin’s cooperation model, considering externality, , coalitionamong natural gas exporters and importers for the Projects has been exploredIn this paper we answer the question whether a coalition should be formed between the threecountries to export gas to Europe. We also calculate the bargaining power of these twocountries (or three countries?!).The results show that (or all?!) countries have profits to make the coalition for gas exportingamong the Nabucoo project. Given the environmental requirements, Trans Caspian is lessEconomical than Nabucco so Iran can play important and active role to form a coalition toexport gas to Europe in the Nabucco project.
Following paper explores Iran & Turkmenistan's behavior in exporting natural gas to Europe. Taking this matter these two countries can be a potential of gas exporter to Europe. By using a framework ...of cooperative game theory, coalition among natural gas exporters and transmitters for the Nabucco Project has been explored. In this paper we answer the question whether the two countries should go to the coalition for exporting gas to Europe or not. Moreover, we calculate bargaining power of these two countries. By having outcomes of following paper one can conclude that the both countries have profits to make the coalition for gas exporting among the Nabucoo project. Iran has more bargaining power than Turkmenistan so Iran can play important and active role to make a coalition to export gas to Europe among the Nabucco project.
Colon perforation is a rare and serious complication of ventriculoperitoneal shunt. The authors report a 7-month-old male infant with vomiting and watery diarrhea after colon perforation by a ...ventriculoperitoneal shunt. A minimal laparotomy incision was performed accurately where preoperative colonoscopy had detected the penetration site of shunting tube in the left colon.
Objectives: The main purpose of this study was to determine the interactive role of physical activity and personality traits inpsychosocial development of elders. Methods & Materials: This research ...was a casual comparative with 300 elders (150 active and 150 non-actives) with 60-85 years old from Tehran selected as statistical sample on available bases. All subjects completed psychosocial development questionnaire (MPD) and Eysenk personality traits questionnaire (EPI). Data were analyzed with using descriptive statistic (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistic (t-test and Factorial ANOVA) with SPSS soft ware Vr.11.5 on P<0.05 . Results: Data showed that 70% of active and 68% of non-active elders were in range of 60-70 years old, 55% of active and %53.3 of non active elders had completed high school and 46.7% of active and 56.7% of non-active elders were moderate level, considering economicalcondition. The level of personality traits (extroversion-introversion and stable-unstable personality traits) and psychosocial development in active elders were higher than non-active elders and active elderswith extroversion and stable traits were in higher psychosocial status. Conclusion: The finding of this research showed that physical activity modifies the interaction between personality traits and psychosocial development. Therefore, active living style in life span, probably with the effect of positive personality traits, could postponephysical and psychosocial regression during aging.
According to the increase of Multi-Level Inverter (MLI) applications in distributed generations, a novel single-phase grid-connected MLI topology is proposed in this paper. The proposed inverter is ...planned to feed the utility grid from renewable energy sources (RESs) to overcome the issue of output sinusoidal waveform in conventional MLIs by generating a multilevel waveform with too many levels, and fewer switches count. The proposed structure is fault-tolerant and modular. A detailed analysis of the proposed topology for two different 13 and 20 switches have been carried out to show its superiority over the conventional MLI topologies. The 79-level and 321-level of the proposed MLI are designed and simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. After a precise simulation, due to compliance with the IEC 61727-2004, about total harmonic distortion (THD) of output voltage and current, there is no need to use extra output filter.
We investigate the three-user MIMO Gaussian broadcast channel with i.i.d. fading and the same number of antennas at each receiver, and with the delayed channel state information at the transmitter ...(CSIT). We obtain achievability results on the degrees of freedom (DoF) of this channel and also show that our achievable DoF is tight for some ranges of transmit-receive antenna ratio. It is observed that when the number of antennas at the transmitter is strictly greater than that at each receiver, the DoF with delayed CSIT lies strictly between the DoF with perfect CSIT and DoF with no CSIT.
COVID-19 is a virus with high transmission rate that demands rapid identification of the infected patients to reduce the spread of the disease. The current gold-standard test, Reverse-Transcription ...Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR), has a high rate of false negatives. Diagnosing from CT-scan images as a more accurate alternative has the challenge of distinguishing COVID-19 from other pneumonia diseases. Artificial intelligence can help radiologists and physicians to accelerate the process of diagnosis, increase its accuracy, and measure the severity of the disease. We designed a new interpretable deep neural network to distinguish healthy people, patients with COVID-19, and patients with other pneumonia diseases from axial lung CT-scan images. Our model also detects the infected areas and calculates the percentage of the infected lung volume. We first preprocessed the images to eliminate the batch effects of different devices, and then adopted a weakly supervised method to train the model without having any tags for the infected parts. We trained and evaluated the model on a large dataset of 3359 samples from 6 different medical centers. The model reached sensitivities of 97.75% and 98.15%, and specificities of 87% and 81.03% in separating healthy people from the diseased and COVID-19 from other diseases, respectively. It also demonstrated similar performance for 1435 samples from 6 different medical centers which proves its generalizability. The performance of the model on a large diverse dataset, its generalizability, and interpretability makes it suitable to be used as a reliable diagnostic system.
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