Russia and a few other Eurasian countries have been home to the fastest-growing epidemics of HIV in the world over the last several years. A study published by the U.S. National Intelligence Council in 2002 identified Russia among five "second wave" countries likely to experience explosive further increases in HIV/AIDS over the next decade if appropriate measures are not taken. It is widely acknowledged that HIV/AIDS is evolving as a serious epidemiological, social, political, and national security problem throughout the Eurasian region. Yet each of these countries confronts a unique set of challenges and strategies for facing those challenges. This volume offers country-specific accounts, authored by the leading players in the analysis of the situation and the fight against the virus.

This textbook addresses postgraduate students in applied mathematics, probability, and statistics, as well as computer scientists, biologists, physicists and economists, who are seeking a rigorous introduction to applied stochastic processes. Pursuing a pedagogic approach, the content follows a path of increasing complexity, from the simplest random sequences to the advanced stochastic processes. Illustrations are provided from many applied fields, together with connections to ergodic theory, information theory, reliability and insurance. The main content is also complemented by a wealth of examples and exercises with solutions.

This book comprehensively reviews the disease dynamics, distribution, surveillance, epidemiology, diagnosis, control strategies, and management of the desert malaria. It highlights the potential risks of unstable but often exacerbated malaria conflagration as epidemics in the middle of duned desert, a desert oasis, and desert-fringe regions. Further, it reveals the factors inveigled into desert environments due to extensive anthropogenic activities such as canalized irrigation projects, high-yielding new agriculture practices, human concentration, and increased trade. It addresses the impact of irrigation on the malarial dynamics and its coupling to the climate forcing. The book also offers a model for desert transformation into malaria heaven under the changed climatic conditions including high rainfall, humidity, and depletion in temperature. Lastly, it offers insight into malaria epidemiology and disease control in the desert's arid environments. This book is an essential resource for medical entomologists, parasitologists, epidemiologists, and public health researchers.

This edited volume presents current research in biostatistics with emphasis on biopharmaceutical applications. Featuring contributions presented at the 2017 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium held in Chicago, IL on June 25 to 28, 2017, this book explores timely topics that have a high potential impact on statistical methodology and future research in biostatistics and biopharmaceuticals. The theme of this conference was Statistics for a New Generation: Challenges and Opportunities, in recognition of the advent of a new generation of statisticians. The conference attracted statisticians working in academia, government, and industry; domestic and international statisticians. From the conference, the editors selected 28 high-quality presentations and invited the speakers to prepare full chapters for this book. These contributions are divided into four parts: Part I Biostatistical Methodology, Part II Statistical Genetics and Bioinformatics, Part III Regulatory Statistics, and Part IV Biopharmaceutical Research and Applications.Featuring contributions on topics such as statistics in genetics, bioinformatics, biostatistical methodology, and statistical computing, this book is beneficial to researchers, academics, practitioners and policy makers in biostatistics and biopharmaceuticals.

What is the prevalence of insomnia in a particular age group, in men and women, or in Caucasians and African Americans? What is the average total sleep time among normal sleepers among these groups? How does the sleep of Caucasians and African Americans differ? These are just some of the questions addressed in The Epidemiology of Sleep. This new book presents the most detailed and comprehensive archive of normal and abnormal sleep patterns. Based on a landmark study supported by the National Institute on Aging, 772 subjects from a host of populations including men, women, and various age and ethnic groups, prepared detailed sleep diaries for a two-week period. The use of these sleep diaries yielded a plethora of data on such characteristics as normal sleep patterns, various forms of insomnia, fatigue, depression, anxiety, and daytime sleepiness differentiated by age, sex, and ethnicity. The results generated by these data, charted in the book's numerous tables and graphs, provide a critical methodological advance in the sleep literature. The Epidemiology of Sleep opens with an overview of the rationale and unique characteristics of the study. This is followed by a comprehensive review of the existing epidemiological literature on sleep. Chapter three presents a detailed description of the methods used in the survey followed by meticulous information on the epidemiology of normal and insomnia sleep, that is unparalleled in the literature. Chapter six provides an archive of sleep patterns among African Americans. The book concludes with a discussion and interpretation of the most interesting findings. This insightful study, coupled with the comprehensive review of the existing literature on the epidemiology of sleep, make this volume an invaluable resource for sleep researchers, clinicians, health and clinical psychologists, gerontologists, epidemiologists, and advanced students.

This book is useful for administrators of different levels involved in counteracting COVID-19, surveillance professionals, clinicians, researchers specializing in epidemiology, microbiology, and infectious diseases, and politicians / legislators engaged in public health sector. We use an innovative approach of combining both epidemiological and sociological analyses, as the very problem is mainly an issue of correct governance. A team of authors from Europe, Russia and China summarizes their experience and knowledge useful for containing SARS-CoV-2 and overcoming social and managerial consequences of the pandemic. The editors are sure that sharing our different experience would help to elaborate necessary strategies, protocols, and principles that may be effectively applied in the future to avoid dramatic consequences of not only COVID-19 but also any possible epidemiological hazards for people and medicine.

Our understanding, prevention, and treatment of HIV have made remarkable strides in the past two decades, but the way has not been smooth or straight. Part history, part narrative, and mainly "scientific autopsy," this book is an insider's account of the errors, controversies, and corrections that have marked the first 25 years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States. The author discusses the sources of these errors and controversies and provides many examples. These range from the scientifically contentious and protracted-- such as laboratory contaminations that lead to identifying HTLV-III and HTLV-IV, or arguments that there were HIV patients who were "silently infected," and not detectable by standard HIV tests--to controversies that the scientific community quickly evaluated and discarded--such as the belief that HIV is spread by mosquitoes, or that one AIDS-associated cancer is caused by "poppers," nitrates inhaled for sexual stimulation. This book describes how these many scientific errors occurred, how they got propagated, how they distracted researchers and the public, and how they got corrected. Holmberg, a longtime past Chief of Epidemiology in the CDC's Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, shows us how scientific errors and controversies inevitably occur in the absence, ignorance, or dismissal of good data, and the promotion of bad data or analyses. He suggests reforms of governmental processes, medical and scientific journal review, and in graduate education that may help scientists recognize and correct errors faster, and so deal with future epidemics more efficiently.

From the President of the Research Society on Alcoholism In the last decade research concerning the causes and consequences of alcohol abuse and alcoholism has come of age. We have witnessed a plethora of sci entific findings that have shed light on some of the actions of alcohol at the molecular level. Interesting new data have been forthcoming on the complexi ties of the development of tolerance to alcohol. It is becoming increasingly appropriate to consider that tolerance to alcohol involves biological as well as psychological factors. New scientific insights have been gained concerning the treatment of with drawal as well as the presence of persistent withdrawal signs that may possibly be involved with relapse. More recently, new and compelling data indicating that alcoholism is a common familial disorder have appeared. Clinical studies indicate that alcoholism is a heterogeneous disorder with multiformity in clin ical symptomatology and genetic heterogeneity. The heterogeneity of the clin ical features and the heritability of the predisposing factors of alcoholism are currently under vigorous scientific investigation. In the past several years sophisticated psychosocial studies have provided fundamental information on subjects at high risk for alcoholism. Psychosocial and biological studies of families including alcoholics and subjects at high risk are likely to bring new insights to our understanding of etiological factors. Moreover, as a result of these studies we stand to develop better prevention initiatives and treatment approaches."

This book focuses on the meaning of statistical inference and estimation. Statistical inference is concerned with the problems of estimation of population parameters and testing hypotheses. Primarily aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students of statistics, the book is also useful to professionals and researchers in statistical, medical, social and other disciplines. It discusses current methodological techniques used in statistics and related interdisciplinary areas. Every concept is supported with relevant research examples to help readers to find the most suitable application. Statistical tools have been presented by using real-life examples, removing the "fear factor" usually associated with this complex subject. The book will help readers to discover diverse perspectives of statistical theory followed by relevant worked-out examples. Keeping in mind the needs of readers, as well as constantly changing scenarios, the material is presented in an easy-to-understand form.

Ideas about the transmission of disease have long formed the core of modern biology and medicine. Heredity and Infection examines their development over the last century. Two scientific revolutions - the bacteriological revolution of the 1890s and the genetic revolution at the start of the twentieth century - acted as the catalysts of major change in our understanding of the causes of illness. As well as being great scientific achievements, these were social and political watersheds that reconfigured the medical and administrative means of intervention. By establishing a clear distinction between transmission by infection and genetic transmission, this shift was instrumental in separating hygiene from eugenism.
The authors argue that the popular perception of such a sharp divide stabilized only after 1945 when the use of antibiotics to end epidemics became commonplace. For health professionals the separation has never become an absolute one, and the book examines the various blends of heredity and infection that have preoccupied biology, medicine and the social sciences. Heredity and Infection recontructs the changing epidemiology of such historically important pathologies as tuberculosis , cancer and AIDS. In doing so, it demonstrates the role of experimental models, medical practices and cultural images in the making of contemporary biochemical knowledge.

Serious congenital malformations are a major contributor to the infant death rate worldwide. Their nonhereditary causes are multiple and complex, and include infectious and metabolic dangers, disease medication, nutritional inadequacy, medicinal products, environmental agents and pollutants, among them. The cause of many however is still unknown. The wide range of these causes makes the defects of interest to those of a wide range of medical and investigatory backgrounds, especialy clinicians, fundamental scientists, and environmentalists.

Visceral leishmaniasis (VL), (also known as black fever or Kala-azar) is a life-threatening disease first reported from the Indian subcontinent. VL ranks as the world's second largest parasitic disease killer and is a neglected tropical disease. Most of those infected by this life-threatening disease are uneducated daily wagers working to support their families, and vectors easily disseminate the disease to their neighbors. Owing to recent involvement of stakeholders, the number of patients is decreasing, but eradication remains a distant goal. This second edition presents latest reports of visceral Leishmaniasis by specialists working at the forefront of the endemic areas in Indian subcontinent. It also introduces vaccine development and inhibitors to Trypanosomatidae; some of them describing feasibility studies in visceral Leishmaniasis for the first time. Recent progress of the Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development (SATREPS) is also reviewed and the contents share this collaborative research from the forefront of endemic sites in Bangladesh. Widely covering basic, clinical, epidemiological and entomological aspects, this volume will be of great interest to dedicated researchers interested inLeishmaniasis and to experts of NTDs in global health. There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of disease control is bound in shallows and in miseries. ~modified from Shakespeare ~

This book describes appropriate statistical models that are commonly utilized in neuropsychology. The book discusses such issues as developing normative data for neuropsychological measures, assessing the validity of neuropsychological tests, and quantifying change "over time" through longitudinal analyses. The rationale for and allure of the volume is the fact that there are no publications that dovetail the two subdisciplines of applied statistics and neuropsychology. The overall objective of this book is to provide a pragmatic and concrete source for applying methodological and statistical techniques in research studies whose emphasis includes neuropsychology. Since there are a plethora of technique to arrive at similar answers, each method with its strengths and weaknesses will be delineated. The beauty of the book will be that it will hopefully demystify commonly encountered issues faced with researchers. More specifically, it will provide a "how to do it" approach.

Mendelian Randomization: Methods For Causal Inference Using Genetic Variants provides thorough coverage of the methods and practical elements of Mendelian randomization analysis. It brings together diverse aspects of Mendelian randomization from the fields of epidemiology, statistics, genetics, and bioinformatics. Through multiple examples, the first part of the book introduces the reader to the concept of Mendelian randomization, showing how to perform simple Mendelian randomization investigations and interpret the results. The second part of the book addresses specific methodological issues relevant to the practice of Mendelian randomization, including robust methods, weak instruments, multivariable methods, and power calculations. The authors present the theoretical aspects of these issues in an easy-to-understand way by using non-technical language. The last part of the book examines the potential for Mendelian randomization in the future, exploring both methodological and applied developments. Features Offers first-hand, in-depth guidance on Mendelian randomization from leaders in the field Makes the diverse aspects of Mendelian randomization understandable to newcomers Illustrates technical details using data from applied analyses Discusses possible future directions for research involving Mendelian randomization Software code is provided in the relevant chapters and is also available at the supplementary website This book gives epidemiologists, statisticians, geneticists, and bioinformaticians the foundation to understand how to use genetic variants as instrumental variables in observational data. New in Second Edition: The second edition of the book has been substantially re-written to reduce the amount of technical content, and emphasize practical consequences of theoretical issues. Extensive material on the use of two-sample Mendelian randomization and publicly-available summarized data has been added. The book now includes several real-world examples that show how Mendelian randomization can be used to address questions of disease aetiology, target validation, and drug development

Explores text mining and IoT applications for monitoring and controlling smart industrial systems Describes the key principles and techniques for Big-data analytics, security, and optimization for industrial applications. Provides context-aware insights, human-centric industry, smart computing for next-generation industry

HIV/AIDS is but one of a number of new and deadly diseases which threaten communities throughout the world. Together with the resurgence of diseases once thought to have been 'conquered', the human costs and social implications have begun to engage a diverse range of practitioners and scholars. The premise behind this collection of distinguished essays in that the causal relations, impacts and consequences of this disturbing trend are as much political as medical or scientific. This book is an excellent introduction to a field of growing importance.

This volume investigates the links between the incidence of diet-related cancers and dietary patterns within Europe. It presents current understanding of the major cancers thought to be caused by diet alongside detailed data on regional variations in dietary composition, and collates these sets of information to illustrate associations between foods and nutrients and the risk of cancer at specific sites. There is particular discussion of the role of fat, meat, fibre, cereals and fresh vegetables. The importance of the "Mediterranean diet", and regional variance in this diet within Europe, is examined. Japanese and US dietary evidence is also considered. This book highlights the debate on cancer and diet, and points the way ahead for important new research.

This book provides an overview of the theories and applications on subgroups in the biopharmaceutical industry. Drawing from a range of expert perspectives in academia and industry, this collection offers an overarching dialogue about recent advances in biopharmaceutical applications, novel statistical and methodological developments, and potential future directions. The volume covers topics in subgroups in clinical trial design; subgroup identification and personalized medicine; and general issues in subgroup analyses, including regulatory ones. Included chapters present current methods, theories, and case applications in the diverse field of subgroup application and analysis. Offering timely perspectives from a range of authoritative sources, the volume is designed to have wide appeal to professionals in the pharmaceutical industry and to graduate students and researchers in academe and government.

Arising from firm foundations laid by mathematical population genetics, clinical genetics, and statistical epidemiology, genetic epidemiology attempts to identify the many components of risk

attributable to genes, environments, and interactions, and the course of its research can follow many diverse paths. In "Genetic Epidemiology," the success of genome-wide association studies in their identification of hundreds of disease susceptibility loci has inspired renowned experts to contribute thorough methodologies, which aim to bring together bioinformaticians, geneticists, clinicians, statisticians, and epidemiologists in the study of this vital field. The volume opens with chapters covering the basics; however, it quickly moves on to coverage of more specialist topics such as twin studies, Mendelian randomization, genetic association studies, more advanced areas, as well as case studies. As a part of the highly successful "Methods in Molecular Biology " series, this work provides the detailed description of the application and analysis of the most commonly employed methods that are necessary for a firm grounding in the field.

Authoritative and cutting-edge, "Genetic Epidemiology" aims to provide a basic framework for crucial interdisciplinary communication and understanding suited to newcomers to the field as well as experienced researchers and graduate level students."

Epidemiology, the study of population health by means of group comparisons, is of increasing importance to health policy and medicine, but it has never before received sustained philosophical attention. This book is the first comprehensive philosophical treatment of the science of epidemiology, drawing together material on causation, causal inference, prediction, the interpretation of effect measures, the nature of disease, and legal uses of epidemiological evidence. Old philosophical problems are seen from new angles, especially general causation, causal explanation, and the use of causal knowledge to predict. The conceptual development of epidemiology is invigorated by a critical examination of foundational doctrines. Causal inference, interaction, the interpretation of measures of attributability, risk relativism, and the notion of multifactorial disease are all scrutinized. The attempted use of epidemiological evidence in legal context is also analyzed, along with the philosophical problems it throws up. This book is essential reading for any professional or lay reader with an interest in understanding the conceptual and methodological foundations of epidemiology, as well as its difficulties.

This book provides salient information on all aspects of influenza/flu viruses affecting animals and humans. It specifically reviews the properties and replication of influenza viruses; their evolution and emergence; epidemiology; role of migratory birds in disease transmission; clinical signs in humans, animals, and poultry; pathogenesis and pathogenicity; public health importance and potential threats; diagnosis; prevention and control measures; and pandemic preparedness. Influenza/flu viruses evolve continuously and jump species causing epidemics as well as pandemics in both human and animals. During the past 150 years, various strains of influenza virus like the Spanish flu, Asian flu, Hong Kong flu, bird flu, and swine flu were responsible for high mortality in humans as well as birds. High mutation rates, antigenic shifts, drifts, reassortment phenomena, and the development of antiviral drug resistance all contribute to ineffective chemotherapy and vaccines against influenza viruses. Due to their devastating nature, high zoonotic implications, and high mortality in humans and poultry, they have a severe impact on the socioeconomic status of countries. Disease awareness, rapid and accurate diagnosis, surveillance, strict biosecurity, timely adoption of appropriate preventive and control measures, and pandemic preparedness are crucial to help in decreasing virus transmission, thus reducing clinical cases, deaths, and pandemic threats.

Applying research into assessments of community theatre, epidemiology, and young people's shared and private stories using a wide range of methodologies, this book explores the potential efficacy of community theatre to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS in Tanzania with reference to several other comparable sites in Africa.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a very general and flexible multivariate technique that allows relationships among variables to be examined. The roots of SEM are in the social sciences. In writing this textbook, the authors look to make SEM accessible to a wider audience of researchers across many disciplines, addressing issues unique to health and medicine. SEM is often used in practice to model and test hypothesized causal relationships among observed and latent (unobserved) variables, including in analysis across time and groups. It can be viewed as the merging of a conceptual model, path diagram, confirmatory factor analysis, and path analysis. In this textbook the authors also discuss techniques, such as mixture modeling, that expand the capacity of SEM using a combination of both continuous and categorical latent variables. Features: Basic, intermediate, and advanced SEM topics Detailed applications, particularly relevant for health and medical scientists Topics and examples that are pertinent to both new and experienced SEM researchers Substantive issues in health and medicine in the context of SEM Both methodological and applied examples Numerous figures and diagrams to illustrate the examples As SEM experts situated among clinicians and multidisciplinary researchers in medical settings, the authors provide a broad, current, on the ground understanding of the issues faced by clinical and health services researchers and decision scientists. This book gives health and medical researchers the tools to apply SEM approaches to study complex relationships between clinical measurements, individual and community-level characteristics, and patient-reported scales.