Occupation Location Research Articles

Workers' compensation costs for healthcare caregivers: Home healthcare, long‐term care, and hospital nurses and nursing aides

Healthcare workers (nurses and nursing aides) often have different exposures and injury risk factors depending on their occupational subsector and location (hospital, long-term care, or home health care). A total of 5234 compensation claims for nurses and nursing aides who suffered injuries to their lower back, knee, and/or shoulder over a 5-year period were obtained from the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation and analyzed. Injury causation data was also collected for each claim. The outcome variables included indemnity costs, medical costs, total costs, and the number of lost work days. The highest prescribed morphine equivalent dose for opioid medications was also calculated for each claim. Home healthcare nurses and nursing aides had the highest average total costs per claim. Hospital nurses and nursing aides had the highest total claim costs, of $5 million/year. Shoulder injuries for home healthcare nursing aides (HHNAs) had the highest average total claim costs ($20,600/injury) for all occupation, setting, and body area combinations. Opioids were most frequently prescribed for home healthcare nurses (HHNs) and nursing aides (18.9% and 17.7% having been prescribed opioids, respectively). Overexertion was the most common cause for HHN and nursing aide claims. With the rapidly expanding workforce in the home healthcare sector, there is a potential health crisis from the continued expansion of home healthcare worker injuries and their associated costs. In addition, the potential for opioid drug usage places these workers at risk for future dependence, overdose, and prolonged disability. Future research is needed to investigate the specific and ideally reversible causes of injury in claims categorized as caused by overexertion.

Occupational Exposure to Blood-Borne Pathogens among Healthcare Workers in a Tertiary Care Center in Lebanon

Despite numerous initiatives, occupational exposure to blood-borne pathogens (BBP) caused by percutaneous injuries or mucosal contamination remain common among healthcare workers (HCWs). These exposures were decreasing at the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) in the previous decades. Recently, the medical center activity has been increasing with higher number of interventions performed and shorter hospital stay. Our aim was to determine the trend of incidents resulting from BBP exposures at AUBMC from 2014 till 2018 and identify whether the increase in hospital activity affected the rate of these exposures. We also aimed to assess the risk factors associated with needle stick injuries (NSIs). A retrospective observational descriptive study of all exposures to BBPs among HCWs reported to the Environmental Health, Safety, and Risk Management department at the AUBMC between 2014 and 2018 was performed. There were 967 exposures reported among which 84% were due to needlesticks. Residents (40%), followed by nurses (30%), and then by attending physicians (16%) were the top three most exposed occupational groups. Half of the participants injured themselves using either a syringe or a suture needle; and mostly during or after use. Occupation and incident location were associated with NSIs. The mean BBP exposure incidence rate was 5.4 per 100 full-time employees, 65.6 per 100 bed-years, and 0.48 admission-years. The BBP exposure rate per 100 occupied beds per year decreased between 2014 and 2017 then increased in 2018 (P < 0.001). The number of BBP exposures showed a strong, though non-significant negative correlation with the average length of hospital stay (Spearman correlation coefficient = -0.9, P = 0.083). BBP exposure remains a serious occupational hazard. Our study shows that the BBP exposure rate per 100 occupied beds per year started decreasing during the study period before increasing again in 2018. Only the nursing department showed a consistent decrease of exposures. The occupation and incident location were found to be risk factors associated with NSIs. In addition to providing education and training, additional steps such as providing safety equipment and future interventions directed towards adjusting to higher workload should be all considered.

Perceived usefulness of social media in financial decision-making: differences and similarities

Financial decision-making through social media blogs and opinions is an area not much explored by the researchers. This study intends to understand the perceived usefulness of social media in financial decision-making amongst individuals and groups based on demographic similarities and social parameters. This paper aims to understand the perception of various subgroups in society within the large population sample. The paper applies Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric tests to examine the proposed research questions from a dataset of 201 individuals residing in two most populated states in Northern India. The analysis reveals the differences between different groups categorized based on generation, financially dependent, educational background, occupation, and geographical location. In terms of social media’s perceived utility in financial decision-making, results suggest that segregated groups based on cohort generation and occupation have significant variations relative to others. Based on the educational context, all other segments, number of financially dependent, geographical location, were found insignificant. The novelty of the paper lies in investigating the perceived usefulness of social media in financial decision-making amongst various homogenous groups based on demographics in a developing country. The study outcomes can be useful for the financial service providers and social media platforms in comprehending consumer behavior to devise an innovative marketing strategy for financial products targeting specific segments through enhanced coordination between them. AcknowledgmentThis paper was supported by Internal Grant Agency of FaME TBU No. IGA/FaME/2019/002.

Epidemiological study of ocular trauma in SNMC and HSK hospital Bagalkot

Aim: To study the epidemiology of ocular trauma in a medical college hospital in North Karnataka region. Materials and Methods: Demographic data, detail history and ocular examination were done for all the patients who presented to our hospital between the periods of August 2016 to April 2017 with any ocular trauma. Data were collected and analyzed using Open- Epi software. Result: 104 patients presented to our hospital during the time period of 9months.The mean age of trauma was 32.78 with SD 16.97. Male ( 65.38%) were more affected than female(34.61%).57.69% were from rural and 42.3% were from urban. Ocular trauma mostly occurs between 30-50 years (41.3%). Home, road and field were the most common location of ocular injury. Foreign body, stick and lime were the most common offending agent. The association between age of ocular trauma and location of injury and occupation was clinically significant with p value 0.05 and 0.041 respectively. The association between gender and location of injury was clinically significant with p value 0.0013 but occupation and gender of ocular trauma was clinically not significant with p value 0.08. Conclusion: Considering the prevalence, middle aged men are more vulnerable to ocular trauma mostly while working at field or driving. Prognosis might be challenging. Appropriate education for eye protection and use of safety measures, would help in reducing ocular morbidity. Educating for timely treatment and intervention after injury is helpful for saving vision. Keyword: Epidemiology, Ocular trauma, Rural.

Deep-Learning-Based Occupant Counting by Ambient RF Sensing

With the proliferation of the Internet of Things and radio-frequency identification (RFID), the ambient radio signals can be leveraged for indoor occupant monitoring. In this article, we have employed passive RFID tags in the ambient for occupant counting by a deep-learning solution. The reader collects both carrier phase and received signal strength from each tag, which are inputs to a convolutional neural network. A novel background calibration is proposed to reduce phase offsets and noises in the presence of heavy multipath, which further improves model accuracy. Our results show satisfactory performance, with 0.82 probability for detecting the correct number of occupants, and 1.0 if ±1 error is permitted. The model also exhibits occupant location and posture independent learning, allowing limited and faster training data collection. To demonstrate generalized learning without strong bias to indoor setup, we have also transferred this pre-trained model to another similar-sized room, achieving 0.85 – 1.0 accuracy for different tag-receiver placements and furnishing.

CMS Mega-Rule Update and the Status of Pharmacy-Related Deficiencies in Nursing Homes.

The scope, frequency, and nursing home characteristics associated with pharmacy-related deficiency citations following the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 2016 "Mega-Rule" update are described. A retrospective analysis of data from Nursing Home Compare and LTCfocus.org was conducted on pharmacy-related deficiencies (including pharmacy services, drug regimen review, unnecessary medications, medication errors, and labeling/storage). The most commonly cited pharmacy-related deficiencies (N = 11,678) were related to labeling/storage (comprising 25.1% of pharmacy-related deficiencies), unnecessary psychotropic medications (20.5%), and routine pharmacy services (16.8%). In multivariable analysis, nursing home characteristics significantly associated with receiving any pharmacy-related deficiency included less geographic competition (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]: 0.68), registered nurse hours (aOR: 0.66), occupancy (aOR: 0.67), for-profit status (aOR: 1.27), and Midwest (aOR: 1.50) or West (aOR: 2.95) location. Given the frequency of pharmacy-related citations and the lack of standardization in pharmacists' roles in nursing homes, further research is needed to better understand how pharmacist services can affect inspection compliance.

Networks from archives: Reconstructing networks of official correspondence in the early modern Portuguese empire

Historical archives provide invaluable insights into societies of the past, including social networks. However, the required amount of traditional archival work makes historical network studies usually small-scaled. We consider the problem of processing a large corpus of unstructured textual information to extract network data. The corpus consists of almost 170,000 documents of administrative correspondence of the Portuguese Empire, from 1610 to 1833, catalogued in the Portuguese Overseas Archives of Lisbon. Our contribution is twofold: the method and the result. Firstly, grounded in the review of manual, semi-manual and automatic methods of network data extraction from natural language corpora, we propose and demonstrate an approach using modern natural language processing algorithms. This approach tries to mimic traditional archivist’s coding practices and is applicable to large corpora of texts, for which manual coding is infeasible because of scale. We believe our approach is generic and adaptable to other substantive contexts, languages, and types of historical archives. Secondly, the dataset created is rich in additional information such as occupation, administrative affiliation, and geographical location of senders and recipients. We provide a preliminary network analysis suggesting that the dataset is an attractive material for historians and social network researchers for addressing research questions about the political and social evolution of the early modern Portuguese Empire, spanning the reign of seven Portuguese monarchs.

A home-based approach to understanding seatbelt use in single-occupant vehicles in Tennessee: Application of a latent class binary logit model

Although the enforcement of seatbelt use is considered to be an effective strategy in reducing road injuries and fatalities, lack of seatbelt use still accounts for a substantial proportion of fatal crashes in Tennessee, United States. This problem has raised the need to better understand factors influencing seatbelt use. These factors may arise from spatial/temporal characteristics of a driving location, type of vehicle, demographic and socioeconomic attributes of the vehicle occupants, driver behaviours, attitudes, and social norms. However, the above factors may not have the same effects on seatbelt use across different individuals. In addition, the behavioural factors are usually difficult to measure and may not always be readily available. Meanwhile, residential locations of vehicle occupants have been shown to be associated with their behavioural patterns and thus may serve as a proxy for behavioural factors. However, the suitability of geographic and residential locations of vehicle occupants to understand the seatbelt use behaviour is not known to date.This study aims to fill the above gaps by incorporating the residential location characteristics of vehicle occupants in addition to their demographics and crash characteristics into their seatbelt use while accounting for the varying effects of these factors on individual seatbelt use choices. To achieve this goal, empirical data are collected for vehicular crashes in Tennessee, United States, and the home addresses of vehicle occupants at the time of the crash are geocoded and linked with the census tract information. The resulting data is then used as explanatory variables in a latent class binary logit model to investigate the determinants of vehicle occupants’ seatbelt use at the time of the crash. The latent class specification is employed to capture the unobserved heterogeneity in data. Results show that Tennessean drivers belong to two general categories—conformist and eccentric—with gender, vehicle type, and income per capita determining the likelihood of these categories. Overall, male drivers, younger drivers, and drivers who have consumed drugs are less likely to wear a seatbelt, whereas drivers who come from areas with higher population density, travel time, and income per capita are more likely to wear a seatbelt. In addition, driving during the day and in rainy weather are associated with an increased likelihood of seatbelt use. The findings of this study will help developing effective policies to increase seatbelt use rate and improve safety.

Effects of private education fever on tenure and occupancy choices in Seoul, South Korea

This study investigates how private education fever affects tenure and occupancy choices in Seoul, South Korea. We used a bivariate probit model to control for sample selection bias that could be caused by sample selectivity from a chain of tenure and occupancy choices. This study found that households with school-age children seem to utilise housing occupancy choice through location choice. Moreover, opportunity for private education is more important to households with school-age children than for households without school-age children, and households with school-age children are more likely to choose a housing occupancy and residential location offering better chances for private education. The study’s main contributions, limitations, and policy implications are described.

Adaptive and distributed operation of HVAC systems: Energy and comfort implications of active diffusers as new adaptation capacities

Human-aware HAVC operations have been shown to be effective in improving energy efficiency, which is constrained by the HVAC system configuration and operational logic. These constraints can result in a lack of operational flexibility, which in turn reduces the adaptation capacity for energy efficiency. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the energy efficiency implications of novel adaptive capacities for HVAC including the use of proposed active diffusers, which add to the dynamics of the HAVC systems by adjusting the behavior of diffusers using two modalities of (1) binary actuation of air flow (turning flow on and off), and (2) adjusting the flow direction to target individual needs in an environment. Computational fluid dynamics was used to model and simulate the behavior of a “real-world” thermal zone to evaluate five scenarios of adaptive operations using distributed feedback from the environment, as well as active diffusers. Three scenarios used binary actuation at the thermal zone (collection of rooms) level, and two examined the adaptive operations at the diffusers level. Moreover, we examined the integration of distributed feedback at occupant locations into the control loop using averaged temperatures (in the first three scenarios) and individual-level feedback (in scenarios with diffuser level actuation). The coupling of distributed feedback and independent directional flow at the diffuser level considerably improved thermal comfort while reducing energy demands by ~25%—reflecting a considerable impact on improved energy efficiency. These findings demonstrate the potentials that artificial intelligence frameworks could bring about by enabling autonomous adaptive operations.

Psychological Impact and Factors Associated with It in COVID-19 Patients of a Designated COVID-19 Hospital

Background: One of the important clinical outcomes in COVID 19 patients is psychological impairment. We tried to analyze the psychological impact by assessing the prevalence of stress, anxiety, depression, and related factors in COVID 19 patients. Methods: This was a cross-sectional hospital-based study. An exit interview of COVID 19 positive patients was conducted at the time of discharge. A semi-structured proforma with socio-demographic variables was filled. For assessing psychological impact we used Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) for stress, and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) for anxiety and depression scores. Ethical clearance was taken. Analysis was done using SPSS. Appropriate statistical tests were used to estimate the results of the study. Findings: A total of 114 patients were studied. 50% were native of other Indian states. 79% of patients had symptoms of stress on PSS while 30·7% and 34·2% of patients had definite anxiety and depressive symptoms on HADS. Multiple statistical tests were applied to compare the means of various psychological scores (stress, anxiety, and depression) w.r.t. different socio-demographic variables. It showed statistically significant differences in perceived stress scores w.r.t. age(p=·049), occupation(p=·006), and COVID 19 infection in family members with t(112)=-3·351,p=·001 while in HADS depression score w.r.t. occupation(p=·021), location of residence(p=·007) and COVID 19 infection in family members t(112)=-2·739,p=·007. Multiple linear regression was applied to predict the HADS depression score of patients based on their total PSS scores and HADS anxiety score. A significant regression equation was found (F (2, 111) = 43·567, p2 0·430. Interpretation: The notable factors were the presence of infection in family members, location of native place, age, and occupation. These factors may help health care workers to identify at-risk patients, who at later stages may develop anxiety or depressive disorders. Funding: No source of funding.Declaration of Interests: The authors know of no conflicts of interest associated with the publication, and there has been no financial support for this work that could have influenced its outcome.Ethics Approval Statement: Institute Ethical clearance was taken.

Nonphysical Workplace Violence in a State-Based Cohort of Education Workers.

The purpose of this study was to estimate the prevalence, identify risk factors, and assess the impact of nonphysical workplace violence (WPV) events among education workers (teachers, professionals, and support personnel). A cross-sectional survey was mailed to a random sample of 6450 education workers, stratified by sex, occupation, and school location in Pennsylvania. Multivariable logistic regression was performed to assess risk factors. Of the 2514 participants, 859 (34%) reported experiencing at least one nonphysical WPV event during the 2009-2010 school year. Coworkers were the most common source of bullying. Most education workers responded that they did not receive an adequate response from their administration after reporting a nonphysical WPV event. Risks of nonphysical assaults increased for education workers who were female, those working in an urban school, and those in their first 3 years of working in their current school. Those assaulted were significantly likely to have low job satisfaction, find work more stressful, and have poor mental health compared to those were not assaulted. Administration support for specific prevention efforts and post-event responses that address the risk factors for nonphysical WPV are essential for creating a positive, safe work environment in schools.

A cooperative ceiling air supply method to satisfy personal thermal preferences in a discretionary indoor position

Rapid and personalized regulation of the thermal environment is desired in air ventilation designs. Traditional air-conditioning systems regulate indoor environments by cooling or heating the entire room, while current personal air-conditioning devices are usually limited to certain fixed locations. A novel design of a multiple ceiling air vents configuration together with its control strategies is proposed to quickly cool a flexible indoor position. Considering the influence of the cooperation of multiple air vents on the personal microenvironment, the possible occupant locations are classified into three types of regions according to the distances from the air vents. The number of adjacent air vents offering personalized regulations is determined accordingly. Control strategies describing the appropriate flow rate and the incident angle of each air vent for occupants with personal thermal requirements in certain locations are determined by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. This method allows the microenvironments of occupants to quickly reach PMV values between -0.5 and 0.5, with surface air velocities below 0.8 m/s. Up to 36% of the capital costs can be saved by arranging the ceiling air vents using the proposed method instead of in arrays.

Discrimination and Racial Disparities in Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Wwii

The 1940s witnessed substantial reductions in the Black-white earnings gap. We study the role that domestic WWII defense production played in reducing this gap. Exploiting variation across labor markets in the allocation of war contracts to private firms, we find that war production contracts resulted in significant increases in the earnings of Black workers and declines in the racial wage gap, with no effect on white workers. This was achieved via occupational upgrading among Black men to skilled occupations. The gains largely persisted through at least 1970. Using a structural model, we show that declines in discrimination (and not migration or changes in productivity) account for all of the occupational upgrading and half of the estimated wage gains associated with the war production effort. Additionally, the war production effort explains one quarter (one seventh) of the overall improvements in racial gaps in occupation allocations (wages) witnessed over this decade. Finally, war spending led to an increase in the high school graduation rate of Black children, suggesting important intergenerational spillovers associated with declines in labor market discrimination. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Leptospirosis trends in China, 2007-2018: A retrospective observational study.

Leptospirosis is one of the most common and neglected tropical waterborne diseases in China, causing serious economic losses, and constituting a significant public health threat. Leptospirosis has recently received increased attention and is considered a re-emerging infectious disease in many countries. The incidence of leptospirosis among people suggests that occupation, age, season, sex and water recreational activities are significant risk factors. The aim of this study was to describe the epidemiological profiles of leptospirosis in China during the 2007-2018 period. The morbidity data of leptospirosis by age, season (month), gender, occupation and geographic location (different provinces) were obtained from the public health science data centre of China for subsequent epidemiological analysis. The results indicate that the incidence of leptospirosis has shown a slow downward trend from 2007 to 2018, but morbidity rates were still relatively high (0.0660-0.0113). The incidence of leptospirosis varied in different provinces of China; cases localized mainly to the Southern and Central provinces, areas with warm weather and ample rainfall. Older people (aged 60-75), males, farmers, students and field workers were high-risk populations. During the 2007-2018 observation period, morbidity rates increased beginning in May, remained at high levels in August and September and decreased after November. The present investigation highlights the re-emergence of leptospirosis in some provinces of China (especially in Yunnan and Fujian) and shows that leptospirosis remains a serious public health threat. The results of this study should enhance measures taken for the prevention, control, and surveillance of leptospirosis in China.

Mulheres paulistanas no Prouni: mediações entre a universidade e a precariedade

O presente artigo pretende discutir o lugar de precariedade de mulheres paulistanas contempladas pelo Programa Universidade para Todos (Prouni) no ensino superior privado, comparando dois perfis caracterizados por área ocupacional, idade e localização do campus universitário de uma grande instituição de ensino privado de São Paulo. Criado no ano de 2005 pelo governo Lula, o Prouni se firmou como uma política pública cujo propósito de formar mão de obra qualificada abriu espaço para que 1,4 milhão de pessoas de classes baixas chegassem ao ensino superior privado até 2014. Com base em entrevistas inéditas e no trabalho de campo desenvolvido entre os anos de 2012 e 2014, trabalhamos metodologicamente como um estudo de caso ampliado,com o objetivo de mapear as trajetórias de vida e as visões de mundo cultivadas por essas mulheres diante de temas centrais em seus lugares de classe: o trabalho, a educação, a mobilidade e, evidentemente, as relações sociais de sexo. Em cada grupo, a precariedade se apresenta em suas especificidades, em que a flexibilização ressignifica a própria heterogeneidade do mercado de trabalho brasileiro.

Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard, by Thora Hands

Reviewed by: Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard by Thora Hands Lacey Sparks (bio) Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard, by Thora Hands; pp. xiv + 195. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, £26.90, $31.00, and free as an eBook at springer.com. For every working-class drunkard stumbling down Gin Lane, and for every corresponding middle-class temperance activist trying to save him, millions of unremarkable, moderate drinkers toasted another evening to each other’s health. Thora Hands’s Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard interrogates the habits of those ordinary drinkers, finding the power and meaning of their rituals and embedding their practices in a heady brew of social, economic, political, and medical contexts. A social history, Drinking also contains elements of the history of food and drink, medicine, drugs, gender, and empire by turns. Ideal in particular for an undergraduate audience, a free eBook on an enjoyable topic, written in Hands’s clear, direct prose, can serve as a gateway drug to more in-depth studies of Victorian history and culture. Fundamentally, according to Hands, “[h]istory has shown that it does not matter how often or to what extent alcohol consumption has been problematized or prohibited—people still continue to drink. Therefore, the key to understanding drinking behavior is to try and understand why people drink” (2). To that end, she draws on other social and cultural histories of alcohol, undergirding her analysis with frameworks from [End Page 695] theorists such as Pierre Bordieu and Michel de Certeau. Deftly maintaining her analytical legibility, she uses their theories with a light touch to situate the intersections of consumption and everyday life within their broader contexts, sometimes upholding and sometimes challenging the status quo. As Hands convincingly illustrates, alcohol consumers were rational actors; at the same time, their actions were influenced, often explicitly, by broad, deep contexts, from medical discourse to popular culture to advertisements. Hands begins at the endpoint of Brian Harrison’s Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (1997), an analysis of the nineteenth-century temperance movement until 1872, which she identifies as a pivot-point in the global drink trade, a lucrative enterprise expanding so rapidly that profits tempered the temperance movement. Hands’s most significant scholarly contribution is her reframing of Victorian and Edwardian histories of drink to encompass all drinkers rather than reproducing the nineteenth-century fixation on alcohol abuse. Hands centrally argues that Victorian and Edwardian intoxication existed along a continuum of behaviors and motivations for drinking. The choice of what, where, and how much to drink lay at the center of a dense web of social and cultural forces. Hands skillfully captures the fundamental tension at the core of her narrative, which came to a head when an anti-drink temperance movement based on morality met a pro-drink movement based on laissez-faire principles, encompassing both drink merchants’ freedom of trade—on an industrialized, global scale—and consumers’ freedom of choice. Late-Victorian attitudes toward drink distilled into the desire for both the liberal freedom to drink and the moral judgment not to exercise that freedom. In representing this context, Hands organizes the book into three parts, and in the first section, “Drinkers,” she examines the political discourse surrounding drinking and drunkenness, mining parliamentary enquiries from the mid-to-late nineteenth century. She argues that these testimonies uncovered a range of drinking behaviors that varied according to “social class, gender, occupation, ethnicity and regional location” (11). Drawing on testimony including crime statistics, doctors’ interviews, and data from analytical chemists, parliamentarians increasingly realized that the working class drank because poverty conditions made them miserable. These enquiries further revealed that members of Parliament could conceive of a working-class man rationally exercising his right to drink in moderation in a pub; however, the quiet menace of the unfeminine working-class woman secretly drinking to excess continued to perpetuate sexist double standards of behavior. The second section, “Drinks,” provides three case studies for the marketing and selling of beer, spirits, and wine in the late-nineteenth century: beer...

Adult characteristics of survivors of early life malnutrition in an impoverished population.

To determine the characteristics of adults who survived early life malnutrition (ELM) and the possible associated factors. The setting is an impoverished community in Kenya. The coastal region of Kenya has a high prevalence of acute protein-energy-malnutrition and stunting. Observational cross-sectional survey where 872 skeletally mature adults of African origin, were surveyed in a period of three months. A discrimination tool to detect ELM survivors was created. Personal, historical and family data were collected in a semi-structured questionnaire. Various observations and body measurements were done. The subjects were grouped into two, those with ELM (Group1), and those without (Group2). Group1 had 242 participants, 49.8% males, mean age of 49.1±8.7 years. Group2 had 630 participants, 48.3% males, mean age 41.0±9.7 years. The phenotypic characteristics included height, BMI, and head circumference (P<0.05). Developmental characteristics were duration of schooling, occupation and income (P<0.001). Factors associated with malnutrition were County of origin, parental education, parental occupation, and family size (P<0.001). There are discernible phenotypic and developmental characteristics associated with adult survivors of ELM. The predisposing factors for ELM are location of birth, parental education and occupation, and family size.

The effect of urban green space on uncertainty stress and life stress: A nationwide study of university students in China.

The aim of this study is to investigate the impacts of urban green space on stress among Chinese university students. Participants were 11,954 students from 50 universities in 42 cities. Each student completed the Global Health Professional Student Survey (GHPSS) on Tobacco Control in China. Regional variables were retrieved from the National Bureau of Statistics database. Both unadjusted and adjusted methods were used in the logistic regression analysis. Almost one third of the students (31.1%) suffered from high levels of uncertainty and life stress. The multilevel logistic regression model showed that while certain individual and environmental factors, such as higher family income, having parents with a professional occupation and urban home location, reduced uncertainty stress among students, so did the effects of green space. This was particularly important for reducing uncertainty stress but also had some effects on life stress. The findings support a wider body of literature on the positive effects of green space on stress and mental health. Future studies need to pay greater attention not only to intra-urban differences in student use of green space, but also to how the natural environment features in stress management policies in Chinese universities.

Estimating real-time infiltration for use in residential ventilation control.

Minimum outdoor air ventilation rates specified in standards such as ASHRAE Standard 62.2 are generally based on envelope airtightness, building floor area, geographical location, and number of occupants. ASHRAE Standard 62.2 allows for a constant infiltration credit, which reduces the required mechanical ventilation. However, infiltration rates vary based on the weather and system operation. Thus, mechanical systems could potentially operate less if the real-time (RT) infiltration rate were known and used to adjust the mechanical ventilation rate. CONTAM models of two test houses on the campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology were verified with measurements and used to simulate hourly infiltration rates in three cities. The infiltration rates were passed to a theoretical controller that changed the hourly mechanical ventilation rate to meet the ventilation requirement. Simulated energy use and relative annual occupant exposure for this RT control strategy was compared with ventilating at a constant rate. Implementation of the RT control strategy resulted in annual average energy savings of $66USD across both houses and three cities without increasing the annual occupant exposure compared with ventilating continuously at a constant rate. The authors discuss the advantages and limitations of the proposed real-time ventilation control strategy.