IHMT

Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical

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2012

Pneumocystis jirovecii multilocus genotyping in pooled DNA samples: a new approach for clinical and epidemiological studies.

Specific single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are recognized as important DNA sequence variations influencing the pathogenesis of Pneumocystis jirovecii and the clinical outcome of Pneumocystis pneumonia, which is a major worldwide cause of illness among immunocompromised patients
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Meta-evaluation of health management: challenges for “new public health”.

O texto de Tanaka me seduziu pelo seu eco a algumas reflexões que tenho feito ao longo dos últimos cinco anos, iniciadas na 1ª oficina para construção do GT da Abrasco (“Da avaliação em saúde à saúde da avaliação”), e agora revisitadas ao escrever um capítulo de livro sobre “a nova saúde pública”, focalizando a avaliação de desempenho como contribuição ao Plano Nacional de Saúde em Portugal.
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Canine leishmaniosis. Modulation of macrophage/lymphocyte interactions by L. infantum.

Canine leishmaniosis, caused by Leishmania infantum, is a systemic disease with variable clinical signs and a progressive evolution. This disease is characterized by impaired T cell-mediated immune response, which has been associated with disease chronicity and high mortality. Protective immunity against leishmaniosis is thought to be mediated by T cell and cytokine production.
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Adequacy of prenatal care in the National Health System in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The persistence of negative perinatal outcomes in Rio de Janeiro suggests problems in the quality of prenatal care. The most recent study in the city showed that only 38% of prenatal care was adequate.
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Risk factors for canine leishmaniasis in an endemic Mediterranean region.

Human visceral leishmaniasis is an emergent/re-emergent parasitic zoonotic disease in Europe caused by Leishmania infantum, with domestic dog as its main reservoir host. This study presents the results of a canine epidemiological survey in a mediterranean region where human and canine leishmaniasis (CanL) are endemic – Portugal.
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Purchasing power of civil servant health workers in Mozambique.

BACKGROUND:
Health workers’ purchasing power is an important consideration in the development of strategies for health workforce development. This work explores the purchasing power variation of Mozambican public sector health workers, between 1999 and 2007. In general, the calculated purchasing power increased for most careers under study, and the highest percentage increase was observed for the lowest remuneration careers, contributing in this way for a relative reduction in the difference between the higher and the lower salaries.
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Health care for irregular migrants: pragmatism across Europe: a qualitative study.

BACKGROUND:
Health services in Europe face the challenge of delivering care to a heterogeneous group of irregular migrants (IM). There is little empirical evidence on how health professionals cope with this challenge. This study explores the experiences of health professionals providing care to IM in three types of health care service across 16 European countries.
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The added effect of thioridazine in the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis.

The review by Grosset et al. in a recent issue of the
Journal is highly interesting, and rightly pictures a
bright horizon for the improved treatment of tuberculosis. However, there are alternative compounds
that can already provide considerable relief in compassionate
application of treatment for multidrugr
esistant and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis
(MDR/XDR-TB) in the short term, and may offer an
important additional effect in treatment regimens due
to a special working mechanism, such as effl ux pump
inhibition.
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Analysis of HIV/AIDS DRG in Portugal: a hierarchical finite mixture model.

Inpatient length of stay (LOS) is an important measure of hospital activity, but its empirical distribution is often positively skewed, representing a challenge for statistical analysis. Taking this feature into account, we seek to identify factors that are associated with HIV/AIDS through a hierarchical finite mixture model.
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Conditional dependence diagnostic in the latent class model: A simulation study

The classical latent class model assumes the hypothesis of conditional independence. We explore tools commonly used to validate this hypothesis (correlation residual plot, log-odds ratio check plot, and known goodness of fit tests) to make practitioners aware of these tools’ shortcomings in correctly identifying local dependence.
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