A temporal analysis on patient and health service delays in pulmonary tuberculosis in Portugal: inter and intra‑regional differences and in(equalities) between gender and age.

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis and treatment delays increase the period of infectiousness, making TB control difficult and increasing the fatality rates. This study aimed to determine the evolution of health care service delay (time between the patient's first contact with the health service and the diagnosis/start of treatment) and patient delay (time between onset symptoms date and the date of first contact with health services) for Pulmonary Tuberculosis (PTB) in Portugal between 2008 and 2017 across different regions, age groups and gender.

Methods: An exploratory analysis was performed, trends of both delays were studied, and 36 months forecasts were generated.

Modelling animal growth in random environments: An application using nonparametric estimation.

We study a stochastic differential equation growth model to describe individual growth in random environments. In particular, in this paper, we discuss the estimation of the drift and the diffusion coefficients using nonparametric methods for the case of nonequidistant data for several trajectories. We illustrate the methodology by using bovine growth data.