ABSTRACT
After the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, many international airport quarantine stations conducted fever-based screening to identify infected passengers using infrared thermography for preventing global pandemics. Due to environmental factors affecting measurement of facial skin temperature with thermography, some previous studies revealed the limits of authenticity in detecting infectious symptoms. In order to implement more strict entry screening in the epidemic seasons of emerging infectious diseases, we developed an infection screening system for airport quarantines using multi-parameter vital signs. This system can automatically detect infected individuals within several tens of seconds by a neural-network-based discriminant function using measured vital signs, i.e., heart rate obtained by a reflective photo sensor, respiration rate determined by a 10-GHz non-contact respiration radar, and the ear temperature monitored by a thermography. In this paper, to reduce the environmental effects on thermography measurement, we adopted the ear temperature as a new screening indicator instead of facial skin. We tested the system on 13 influenza patients and 33 normal subjects. The sensitivity of the infection screening system in detecting influenza were 92.3%, which was higher than the sensitivity reported in our previous paper (88.0%) with average facial skin temperature.
Subject(s)
Body Temperature , Ear/physiopathology , Heart Rate , Hospitals, Isolation/methods , Mass Screening , Respiratory Rate , Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome/physiopathology , Adult , Airports/methods , Female , Humans , Male , Mass Screening/instrumentation , Mass Screening/methods , Quarantine/methods , Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome/prevention & controlABSTRACT
La sensibilidad aumentada de los detectores en los aeropuertos, el aumento del número de pruebas isotópicas y la globalización de la sociedad han dado lugar a varias falsos positivos en las alarmas de radioactivos de los aeropuertos y lugares públicos. Este trabajo presenta dos nuevos casos de pacientes que alertaron las alarmas de seguridad en el aeropuerto después de haber recibido 740MBq de 131I en bocio no-tóxico. Los intentos de comparar la literatura son sorprendentemente limitados en relación a este problema. Un hombre de 57 años desencadenó una alarma en tres aeropuertos diferentes durante los días 17, 28 y 31 después de haber recibido exposición a yodo radioactivo. Curiosamente, mientras tanto, en los días 18 y 22, no se detectó la radiación en el aeropuerto, donde fue detenido dos veces más adelante como fuente de radiación. El segundo caso presenta una mujer de 45 años que activó los detectores de la alama de seguridad cuando cruzó una frontera en un viaje en autobús después de haber recibido yodo radioactivo(AU)
An increased sensitivity of airport detectors, a growing number of isotopic tests, and globalization of the society have raised a number of false positive radioactive alarms at airports and public places. This paper presents two new cases of patients who triggered airport security alarms after receiving 740MBq of 131I for non-toxic goitre and attempts to compare surprisingly limited literature concerning this problem. A 57-year-old man triggered a security alarm at three different airports on the 17th, 28th, and 31st day after radioiodine exposure. Interestingly enough, in the meantime, on the 18th and 22nd day, no radiation was detected in him at the airport where he was twice detained as a source of radiation later on. The second case presents a 45-year-old woman who activated security alarm detectors while crossing a border on her coach trip 28 days after radioiodine administration(AU)
Subject(s)
Humans , Male , Middle Aged , Iodine Radioisotopes/analysis , Sanitary Control of Airports and Aircrafts , Airports/legislation & jurisprudence , Airports/methods , Airports/trends , Goiter, Endemic/drug therapy , Radiation , Safety/standards , Airports/instrumentation , Airports/standards , Radioactive Waste/analysis , Goiter, Endemic/therapyABSTRACT
A quantitative knowledge of the fate of deicing chemicals in the subsurface can be provided by joint analysis of lab experiments with numerical simulation models. In the present study, published experimental data of microbial degradation of the deicing chemical propylene glycol (PG) under flow conditions in soil columns were simulated inversely to receive the parameters of degradation. We evaluated different scenarios of an advection-dispersion model including different terms for degradation, such as zero order, first order and inclusion of a growing and decaying biomass for their ability to explain the data. The general break-through behavior of propylene glycol in soil columns can be simulated well using a coupled model of solute transport and degradation with growth and decay of biomass. The susceptibility of the model to non-unique solutions was investigated using systematical forward and inverse simulations. We found that the model tends to equifinal solutions under certain conditions.
