Suchergebnisse

The majority of drugs prescribed have not been tested in children and safety and efficacy of children's medicines are frequently supported by low quality of evidence. Therefore, a large percentage of prescriptions for children in the clinical daily practice are used off label. Despite the several recent legislation and regulatory efforts performed worldwide, they have not been successful in increasing availability of medicines adapted to children. Moreover, if we consider that 30% of the prescribed drugs for children are for the respiratory field and only 4% of new investigation projects for children research were proposed to access drugs for respiratory and allergy treatment, there is a clear imbalance of the children needs in this therapeutic area. This narrative review aimed to describe and discuss the off-label use of medicines in the treatment and control of respiratory and allergic diseases in children. It was recognized that a large percentage of prescriptions performed for allergy treatment in daily clinical practice are off label. The clinicians struggle on a daily basis with the responsibility to balance risk-benefits of an off-label prescription while involving the patients and their families in this decision. It is crucial to increase awareness of this reality not only for the clinician, but also to the global organizations and competent authorities. New measures for surveillance of off-label use should be established, namely through population databases implementation. There is a need for new proposal to correct the inconsistency between the priorities for pediatric drug research, frequently dependent on commercial motivations, in order to comply to the true needs of the children, especially on the respiratory and allergy fields.

We examine the decentralized provision of an impure public good by regional governments in a federation similar in certain respects to both the European Union and the United States. The central authority redistributes income and provides matching grants on a per rate basis after it observes the regions' contributions to the impure public good. Imperfectly mobile workers react to regional and central governments' policies by establishing residence in their most preferred region. Despite imperfect labor mobility, we show that the allocation of the impure public good and the interregional income redistribution policy are generally efficient in a federation with decentralized leadership.

There is a fast increase of information and data generation in virtual environments due to microblogging sites such as Twitter, a social network that produces an average of 8, 000 tweets per second, and up to 550 million tweets per day. That's why this and many other social networks are overloaded with content, making it difficult for users to identify information topics because of the large number of tweets related to different issues. Due to the uncertainty that harms users who created the content, this study proposes a method for inferring the most representative topics that occurred in a time period of 1 day through the selection of user profiles who are experts in sports and politics. It is calculated considering the number of times this topic was mentioned by experts in their timelines. This experiment included a dataset extracted from Twitter, which contains 10, 750 tweets related to sports and 8, 758 tweets related to politics. All tweets were obtained from user timelines selected by the researchers, who were considered experts in their respective subjects due to the content of their tweets. The results show that the effective selection of users, together with the index of relevance implemented for the topics, can help to more easily find important topics in both sport and politics.

Abstract. Seismic risk mitigation comprises of land-use planning policies that enable risk reduction in areas exposed to earthquakes. Thus, the assessment of land-use plans regarding urban growth in seismic prone areas is very important. This article analyses the urban expansion of Vila Franca do Campo (island of S. Miguel, Azores, Portugal) from 1994 to 2005 based on ortophotomaps interpretations and simulates a scenario of urban growth for the year 2016 with a Land-use and Cover-Change (LUCC) model (Geomod). The goal is to evaluate the potential impact of land-use plans in managing urban growth and promoting seismic risk mitigation. Results indicate that the urban expansion, between 1994 and 2005, was done according to the Municipal Master Plan (MMP) restrictions. The scenario modelled for the year 2016 is potentially stricter for urban growth because it adds to the previous plan the constraints defined by the South Coast Management Plan (SCMP) that entered into force in 2007. In both time periods, a continuing urban growth towards seismic areas was identified. The absence of seismic risk mitigation policies and measures on both plans may contribute to increase the seismic hazard exposure and vulnerability. The results of this study strongly suggest the reformulation of future land-use plans to include seismic risk mitigation goals and policies.

Particulate composites of ferrite and ferroelectric polymer phases with general formula [xCoFe2O4]/[(1-x) PVDF] were prepared for x = 0, 3, 11 and 20 wt.% by solution casting. The dielectric constant, dielectric loss and saturation magnetization of the polymer composite films increase with increasing CoFe2O4 (CFO) content, being 13, 0.13 and 13 emu.g-1 respectively, for x=20. The magnetodielectric (MD) coupling also depend on the CFO content, the change in the dielectric response (MDE(%)) being the highest for the x=20 sample (4.2%). On the other hand, the highest value of the MD coefficient (γ) is higher on the x=3 sample (0.015 emu-2g2). Those values are favourably compared with the ones found in the ceramic-based MD materials, being the highest reported for polymer composites. These facts, together with the flexibility and scalable production of the composites, leads to their large application potential in areas such as filters, magnetic field sensors and actuators, among others. ; The authors thank the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) for financial support under projects PTDC/EEI-SII/5582/2014 and PTDC/CTM-ENE/5387/2014.P. M. and M. Silva acknowledges also support from FCT (SFRH/BPD/96227/2013 and SFRH/BD/70303/2010 grants respectively). Financial support from the Basque Government Industry Department under the ELKARTEK Program is also acknowledged. SLM thanks the Diputación Foral de Bizkaia for financial support under the Bizkaia Talent program; European Union's Seventh Framework Programme; Marie Curie Actions – People; Grant agreement nº ...

Despite a scarcity of pertinent information, it has been possible to reconstruct time series of marine fisheries catches for Equatorial Guinea from 1950 to 2010 using per capita fish consumption and population numbers for small-scale fisheries, catch rates and number of vessels for industrial fisheries and discard rates to estimate the discarded bycatch. Small-scale fisheries, industrial large-scale fisheries, domestic and legal and illegal foreign fisheries and their discards are all included. Total catches were estimated at 2.7 million tonnes over the time period considered, of which 653 000 t were caught domestically compared to 187 000 t reported by FAO. This shows that fisheries have more importance for Equatorial Guinea's food security than the official data suggest. In contrast to what is suggested by official figures, fisheries were shown to be strongly impacted by civil and political unrest; notably, they declined overall because of civil and political conflicts, socio-demographic dynamics, and a growing role of the newly discovered oil resources, which directly and indirectly threaten the food security of the people of Equatorial Guinea.