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Background : Although the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe (DRSTP) has undertaken school children-based deworming programs against intestinal parasitic infections (IPIs) using a single dose of mebendazole annually since 2005, it remains unclear as to the outcome to date. The present study intends to investigate the recent IPIs status among school children living in capital areas of the DRSTP. Methods : A total of 252 school children (121 boys and 131 girls) of grades 4 and 5 from 4 primary schools located in the capital areas participated in the present study and their fresh fecal specimens were examined for the presence of any parasites using the merthiolate- iodine-formaldehyde concentration method as conducted. Results : The overall prevalence of IPIs was 64.7% (163/ 252). No significant gender difference in prevalence between boys (67.8%) and girls (61.8%) was found (p = 0.3). The majority of school children were infected with a single species of parasite (55.8%). Altogether, 12 different intestinal parasite species were identified in DRSTP school children, of which 9 species were pathogenic and the remaining 3 were non-pathogenic. Conclusion: Improving the detection method, sanitation facilities and personal hygiene as well as utilizing combined drugs are all important measures to greatly reduce IPIs in DRSTP school children. Keywords : Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, school children, intestinal parasitic infections

Background Toxocariasis, which is predominantly caused by Toxocara canis (T. canis) infection, is a common zoonotic parasitosis worldwide; however, the status of toxocariasis endemicity in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) remains unknown. Methods A seroepidemiological investigation was conducted among 166 primary school children (PSC) aged 7–12 years from the capital area of the RMI. Western blots based the excretory-secretory antigens of larval T. canis (TcES) was employed, and children were considered seropositive if their serum reacted with TcES when diluted at a titer of 1:64. Information regarding demographic characteristics of and environmental risk factors affecting these children was collected using a structured questionnaire. A logistic regression model was applied to conduct a multivariate analysis. Results The overall seropositive rate of T. canis infection was 86.75% (144/166). In the univariate analysis, PSC who exhibited a history of feeding dogs at home (OR = 5.52, 95% CI = 1.15–26.61, p = 0.02) and whose parents were employed as nonskilled workers (OR = 2.86, 95% CI = 1.08–7.60, p = 0.03) demonstrated a statistically elevated risk of contracting T. canis infections. Cleaning dog huts with gloves might prevent infection, but yielded nonsignificant effects. The multivariate analysis indicated that parental occupation was the critical risk factor in this study because its effect remained significant after adjusting for other variables; by contrast, the effect of dog feeding became nonsignificant because of other potential confounding factors. No associations were observed among gender, age, consuming raw meat or vegetables, drinking unboiled water, cleaning dog huts with gloves, or touching soil. Conclusions This is the first serological investigation of T. canis infection among PSC in the RMI. The high seroprevalence indicates the commonness of T. canis transmission and possible human risk. The fundamental information that the present study provides regarding T. canis epidemiology can facilitate developing strategies for disease prevention and control.

This paper formally presents the resident physician scheduling problem, which is one of the most important scheduling problems in hospital. The resident physician scheduling problem is characterized as satisfying the fair schedule constraint, the physician specification constraint and the safe schedule constraint simultaneously. To minimize the penalties from violating the constraints, this study adopts the evolutionary approach to propose a genetic algorithm for solving the problems. In addition the well-known genetic operators, this study proposed a new mutation operator called dynamic mutation for solving the resident physician scheduling problem. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs well in searching optimal schedules.

Emergency medicine is an important link in healthcare system. There is high complexity about the medical process across with different organizations because the care operation including multiple procedures and it's hard to pre-scheduling when there are many random emergencies happened in the chaotic environment. The bottleneck of emergency medicine system is hard to integrate the virtual data and physical object in emergency medical service (EMS) in real time with limited resource. The research describes an empirical experience about how Wan-Fang hospital in Taiwan implements RFID technology in EMS at the first stage, and how we integrate with the existent EMS architecture and legacy system. We develop an RFID EMS system, and evaluate the benefit from the implementation by quantity and quality methodology. The research can be referred to practice and academic in medical informatics related fields.