Feature Article

Sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), fruit juice, and milk are components of diet of major public health interest. To-date, assessment of their global distributions and health impacts has been limited by insufficient comparable and reliable data by country, age, and sex. The objective of the study was to quantify global, regional, and national levels of SSB, fruit juice, and milk intake by age and sex in adults over age 20 in 2010.

Original Source

Extinction events typically represent extended processes of decline that cannot be reconstructed using short-term studies. Long-term archives are necessary to determine past baselines and the extent of human-caused biodiversity change, but the capacity of historical datasets to provide predictive power for conservation must be assessed within a robust analytical framework.

An analysis of the climate impact of various forms of beef production is carried out, with a particular eye to the comparison between systems relying primarily on grasses grown in pasture ('grass-fed' or 'pastured' beef) and systems involving substantial use of manufactured feed requiring significant external inputs in the form of synthetic fertilizer and mechanized agriculture ('feedlot' beef). The climate impact is evaluated without employing metrics such as ${\mathrm{CO}}_{2}{\rm{e}}$ or global warming potentials. The analysis evaluates the impact at all time scales out to 1000 years.

Unauthorized use of natural resources is a key threat to many protected areas. Approaches to reducing this threat include law enforcement and integrated conservation and development (ICD) projects, but for such ICDs to be targeted effectively, it is important to understand who is illegally using which natural resources and why. The nature of unauthorized behavior makes it difficult to ascertain this information through direct questioning.

Energy consumption of residential buildings and offices adds up to about 30% of total carbon dioxide emissions; and occupant behaviour contributes to 80% of the variation in energy consumption. Indoor climate regulations are based on an empirical thermal comfort model that was developed in the 1960s. Standard values for one of its primary variables—metabolic rate—are based on an average male, and may overestimate female metabolic rate by up to 35%. This may cause buildings to be intrinsically non-energy-efficient in providing comfort to females.

In the rural area of the Tibetan Plateau (RATP), the characteristics of domestic waste, people’s environmental awareness, people’s willingness to pay and their influence factors were firstly studied by questionnaires, field samplings and laboratory tests. The results showed that, in the RATP, the generation of domestic waste was 85 g•d-1 per capita and it was mainly composed of plastics, inert waste, kitchen waste, glass and paper. The waste bulk density, moisture content, ash, combustible and low calorific value were 65 kg•m-3, 19.25%, 44.90%, 35.85% and 10,520 kJ•kg-1 respectively.

Non-communicable chronic diseases (NCDs), such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity and type 2 diabetes, are clearly the leading public health problems facing the world in the 21st century. The causes of NCDs are predominately unhealthful lifestyles such as physical inactivity, poor diets, smoking, unhealthful sleep habits and not managing stress effectively.1 In recent years, obesity rates have increased in most countries, and this problem receives enormous attention, in both the popular media and scientific press.

Brucellosis is a common bacterial zoonotic infection but data on the prevalence among humans and animals is limited in Kenya. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in three counties practicing different livestock production systems to simultaneously assess the seroprevalence of, and risk factors for brucellosis among humans and their livestock (cattle, sheep, camels, and goats). A two-stage cluster sampling method with random selection of sublocations and households was conducted.

Tropical mountain regions contain the main headwaters of important rivers in Central America. We selected 2 contrasting catchments located in a mountainous region to evaluate the precision of daily flow estimates based on the Hydrological Land Use Change (HYLUC) and Nedbør-Afstrømnings Model (NAM) hydrological models. A second objective was to simulate the impact of expected climate change for the year 2050 on stream flows and seasonal distribution of rainfall.

The researchers investigated general working conditions in the carpet manufacturing industry and assessed the health risk factors of weavers working in this industry. Noise level, light intensity, temperature and humidity were measured with the help of sound level meter, lux meter and thermohygrometer, respectively at the workplace and the result were subjected to One Way Analysis of Variance. A pretested questionnaire was used to evaluate the health problems among different weavers working in the carpet industry.