Aim To investigate epidemiological characteristics of the measles epidemic (risk factors and reasons for its emergence) in order to establish better control and prevention of future epidemics as well as to determine an influence of poor collective immunization of children against measles on appearance of epidemic disease. Methods An open retrospective epidemiological study of measles infection was conducted during the epidemic in Zenica-Doboj Canton (ZDC) in the period 2014-2015. Disease reports, Disease Reporting Forms for measles and rubella cases and the Bulletin of the Institute for Health and Food Safety Zenica were used for data collection. Results A total of 325 patients with the diagnosis of measles were registered, 262 (80.61%) in 2014 and 63 (19.39%) in 2015 resulting in overall incidence of 81.25/100.000. The majority of patients were aged 0-6 (p<0.05). Of the total number of patients, only 13 (4.73%) were orderly vaccinated (p <0.05). In the period 2009- 2015 in ZDC 25.444 (83.34%) children (p <0.05) were vaccinated with measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine. Conclusion Results of the study show that the low level of vaccination of children continues to a risk of the emergence of epidemics of measles and other infectious diseases. Therefore, in order to prevent the disease there is a need for a better vaccination campaign.

Aim To determine most common factors making patients with high blood pressure seek professionally unacceptable treatment of hypertension at the Emergency Department. Methods The survey was conducted at the Emergency Department of the Primary Health Care in Gradačac on randomly selected 207 patients who requested medical help because of high blood pressure. For all patients arterial blood pressure and body mass index (BMI) were measured. A survey about knowledge and attitudes regarding habits that affect high blood pressure as well as the socio-economic conditions was made. Results Prevalence of 10.3% was found with regard to visits to emergency care by patients due to high blood pressure. Most patients, 127(61.4 %), were overweight and 36(17.4%) were obese. Patients who rarely controlled their blood pressure were more frequent visitors of emergency medical services. Stressful situation occurs as a factor in a variety of forms. The survey showed that 76 (36.7%) patients sought medical help even though they had no blood pressure values that required emergency care. Conclusion Poorly organized health care system with no continuous and comprehensive preventive promotional programs caused by inappropriate use of resources in health care. The reorganization of primary care with full implementation of family medicine and greater integration of family medicine with other levels of the health care system should provide a better control and treatment of other diseases such as hypertension.

A sensitive phosphate sensor has been prepared by constructing a solid membrane disk consisting of variable mixtures of silver phosphate, silver sulfide, and PTFE (Type 1 membrane) or silver phosphate, silver sulfide and nanotube (Type 2 membrane). The ternary membranes exhibit greater selectivity over the wide range of concentration. The membrane with the composition of 50.00% PTFE ; 41.66% Ag3PO4 and 8.33% Ag2S was selected as our preferred membrane. The membranes exhibited linear potential response in the concentration range of 1×10–1 to 1×10–5 M. Their detection limit is about 5×10–6 M. The membranes have a long lifetime and can be stored in air when they are not in use. The best performance for nanocomposite sensor was obtained with membrane of the following composition: 78.00% Ag3PO4 ; 20.00% Ag2S, and 2.00% carbon nanoparticles. The membrane had a slope of 32.6 mV toward HPO42- ions in the range between 1×10-1 and 1×10-5 M with a detection limit of 5.45×10–6 M. The proposed sensors were found to be applicable over a pH range between 3 and 7.

Cervical auscultation is a method for assessing swallowing performance. However, its ability to serve as a classification tool for a practical clinical assessment method is not fully understood. In this study, we utilized neural network classification methods in the form of Deep Belief networks in order to classify swallows. We specifically utilized swallows that did not result in clinically significant aspiration and classified them on whether they originated from healthy subjects or unhealthy patients. Dual-axis swallowing vibrations from 1946 discrete swallows were recorded from 55 healthy and 53 unhealthy subjects. The Fourier transforms of both signals were used as inputs to the networks of various sizes. We found that single and multi-layer Deep Belief networks perform nearly identically when analyzing only a single vibration signal. However, multi-layered Deep Belief networks demonstrated approximately a 5% to 10% greater accuracy and sensitivity when both signals were analyzed concurrently, indicating that higher-order relationships between these vibrations are important for classification and assessment.