Symposium on integrating the science of environmental justice into decision-making at the Environmental Protection Agency: an overview.

In March 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) collaborated with government and nongovernmental organizations to host a groundbreaking symposium, "Strengthening Environmental Justice Research and Decision Making: A Symposium on the Science of Disproportionate Environmental Health Impacts." The symposium provided a forum for discourse on the state of scientific knowledge about factors identified by EPA that may contribute to higher burdens of environmental exposure or risk in racial/ethnic minorities and low-income populations. Also featured were discussions on how environmental justice considerations may be integrated into EPA's analytical and decision-making frameworks and on research needs for advancing the integration of environmental justice into environmental policymaking.

Modern environmental health hazards: a public health issue of increasing significance in Africa.

Objectives: Traditional hazards such as poor sanitation currently account for most of Africa's environmentally related disease burden. However, with rapid development absent appropriate safeguards for environment and health, modern environmental health hazards (MEHHs) may emerge as critical contributors to the continent's disease burden. We review recent evidence of human exposure to and health effects from MEHHs, and their occurrence in environmental media and consumer products.

Phase III prevention trial of fenretinide in patients with resected non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

Purpose: The study aims to evaluate the efficacy and toxicity of fenretinide in preventing tumor recurrence in patients with transitional cell carcinoma (TCC) of the bladder.

Experimental Design: We conducted a multicenter phase III, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of fenretinide (200 mg/day orally for 12 months) in patients with non-muscle-invasive bladder TCC (stages Ta, Tis, or T1) after transurethral resection with or without adjuvant intravesical Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG). Patients received cystoscopic evaluation and bladder cytology every 3 months during the 1-year on study drug and a final evaluation at 15 months.

Möbius: an integrated discrete-event modeling environment.

Unlabelled: Möbius has found numerous applications in computational biology to build and solve stochastic models of biological processes. It provides the user with a modeling workflow and several sophisticated features that are not available in the simulation tools commonly used by computational biologists.

Availability: Möbius is free for academic users.

Dynamic partitioning for hybrid simulation of the bistable HIV-1 transactivation network.

Motivation: The stochastic kinetics of a well-mixed chemical system, governed by the chemical Master equation, can be simulated using the exact methods of Gillespie. However, these methods do not scale well as systems become more complex and larger models are built to include reactions with widely varying rates, since the computational burden of simulation increases with the number of reaction events. Continuous models may provide an approximate solution and are computationally less costly, but they fail to capture the stochastic behavior of small populations of macromolecules.