Prevalence and incidence of zoonotic diseases in South Asia: a systematic review protocol.

Objective: This review aims to estimate the prevalence and incidence of zoonotic diseases from studies of populations from South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka).

Introduction: South Asia is of notable importance in terms of the prevalence and incidence of endemic zoonoses, as well as its role as a focal point for emerging zoonotic diseases.

Inclusion Criteria: All populations residing in the 8 South Asian countries, irrespective of age/gender, will be considered.

Epihiper-A high performance computational modeling framework to support epidemic science.

This paper describes Epihiper, a state-of-the-art, high performance computational modeling framework for epidemic science. The Epihiper modeling framework supports custom disease models, and can simulate epidemics over dynamic, large-scale networks while supporting modulation of the epidemic evolution through a set of user-programmable interventions. The nodes and edges of the social-contact network have customizable sets of static and dynamic attributes which allow the user to specify intervention target sets at a very fine-grained level; these also permit the network to be updated in response to nonpharmaceutical interventions, such as school closures.

Soil-test-crop-response based nutrient scheduling can improve soybean-wheat productivity and system sustainability.

Soybean-wheat sequence, one of the most vital cropping systems for farmers, has been suffering for productivity stagnation and decline due to several factors. Strategic management of the inputs particularly the nutrients could aid the crops achieve optimum growth and yield. Keeping this in mind, four years of field experiment was conducted to study the effect of combining inorganic as well as organic nutrient sources using soil-test-crop-response (STCR) approach in a randomized block design having ten treatments including control, 100% Recommended Dose of Fertilizers (RDF), 50% RDF, 100% RDF + 5 kg Zn ha (100% RDF + Zn), 100% RDF + 5 t farmyard manure ha (100% RDF + FYM), 50% RDF + 5 t farmyard manure ha (50% RDF + FYM), STCR inorganic with target yield-I (STCR TY-I), STCR inorganic with TY-II, STCR integrated with TY-I (STCR TY-I) and STCR integrated with TY-II (STCR TY-II) with each treatment replicated thrice.

Epidemiological Data of Postcricoid Cancers from a Tertiary Cancer Hospital: First Report from Northern Andhra Pradesh.

Postcricoid (PC) cancer is a global rarity, however, the burden of disease in India is little known. The data of PC cancers from Northern Andhra Pradesh (AP) are scarce due to poor reporting. This is an epidemiological study of PC cancer from a tertiary cancer hospital in Northern AP.

Novel high-stopping power scintillators for medical applications.

Development of new scintillator materials is a continuous effort, which recently has been focused on materials with higher stopping power. Higher stopping power can be achieved if the compositions include elements such as Tl (Z=81) or Lu (Z=71), as the compounds gain higher densities and effective atomic numbers. In context of medical imaging this translates into high detection efficiency (count rates), therefore, better image quality (statistics, thinner films) or lower irradiation doses to patients in addition to lowering of cost.