As a devastating Ebola outbreak in West Africa continues, non-pharmaceutical control measures including contact tracing, quarantine, and case isolation are being implemented. In addition, public health agencies are scaling up efforts to test and deploy candidate vaccines. Given the experimental nature and limited initial supplies of vaccines, a mass vaccination campaign might not be feasible. However, ring vaccination of likely case contacts could provide an effective alternative in distributing the vaccine.

The term drug reimbursement describes the policy system that determines whether or not a drug is entitled to reimbursement within the healthcare system. Countries make different decisions regarding which cancer treatments to routinely provide. As a result, depending on the cancer drug-indication and the country assessing it, the decision can be Favourable, Favourable with restrictions or Non-Favourable. The main objective of this paper is to describe the differences in drug reimbursement decisions on cancer drugs across ten European countries.

Aimed at reducing deficiencies in representing the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) in general circulation models (GCMs), a global model evaluation project on vertical structure and physical processes of the MJO was coordinated. In this paper, results from the climate simulation component of this project are reported. It is shown that the MJO remains a great challenge in these latest generation GCMs. The systematic eastward propagation of the MJO is only well simulated in about one fourth of the total participating models.

On 27 May 1937, after one week of sustained heavy rainfall, a voluminous flood caused the death of at least 300 people and the destruction of the historic El Carmen church and several neighborhoods in the mining region of Tlalpujahua, Michoacán, central Mexico. This destructive flood was triggered by the breaching of the impoundment of the Los Cedros tailings and the sudden release of circa 16 Mt of water-saturated waste materials.

In this study, we apply a glacier mass balance and ice redistribution model to examine the sensitivity of glaciers in the Everest region of Nepal to climate change. High resolution temperature and precipitation fields derived from gridded station data, and bias-corrected with independent station observations, are used to drive the historical model from 1961 to 2007.

Rotational harvesting is one of the oldest management strategies applied to terrestrial and marine natural resources, with crop rotations dating back to the time of the Roman Empire. The efficacy of this strategy for sessile marine species is of considerable interest given that these resources are vital to underpin food security and maintain the social and economic wellbeing of small-scale and commercial fishers globally.

The massive Mw = 7.8 earthquake which rocked the Nepal Himalaya on 25 April 2015 is the largest to have occurred in this region in the past 81 years. This event occurred by slip on a ~150 km long and 55 km wide, shallow dipping (~5) segment of the Main Himalayan Thrust (MHT), causing the Himalaya to lurch southwestward by 4.8  1.2 m over the Indian plate. The main shock ruptured the frictionally locked segment of the MHT, initiating near the locking line and rupturing all the way updip close to its surface expression near the foothills of the Himalaya.

Understanding the changing nature of the intraseasonal oscillatory (ISO) modes of Indian summer monsoon manifested by active and break phase, and their association with extreme rainfall events are necessary for probabilistic estimation of flood-related risks in a warming climate.

Bushmeat hunting threatens biodiversity and increases the risk of zoonotic pathogen transmission. Nevertheless, limited information exists on patterns of contact with wildlife in communities that practice bushmeat hunting, especially with respect to social drivers of hunting behavior.

Vector-borne transmission of Trypanosoma cruzi is seen exclusively in the Americas where an estimated 8 million people are infected with the parasite. Significant research in southern Peru has been conducted to understand T. cruzi infection and vector control, however, much less is known about the burden of infection and epidemiology in northern Peru.