Epidemiologic data on esophageal cancer in Asia are extremely limited. We examined temporal trends in the incidence of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and esophageal adenocarcinoma (EA) in Taiwan. Patients with esophageal cancer were identified from the Taiwan Cancer Registry between 1979 and 2003. Age-standardized incidences of ESCC and EA were calculated based on the national census and world standard population. Trends in incidence rates were estimated by calculating the annual percentage change (APC). The age-standardized incidence of ESCC increased progressively (from 1979-1983 to 1999-2003: 2.63 to 4.37 per 100,000-year), with an APC higher in male (3.27%, P < 0.0001) than that in female (1.23%, P = 0.03). Though the crude incidence of EA progressively increased in both gender (male: 0.28-0.49 per 100,000-year; female 0.07-0.11 per 100,000-year), the age-standardized incidence of EA is similar along the study period with an APC of 0.72% (P = 0.20) in male and 1.59% (P = 0.30) in female. In Taiwan, the incidence of ESCC significantly increased from 1979 to 2003, whereas the incidence of EA remained unchanged. Although EA incidence has not recently increased, it could in the future.

Sustainability certification labels have become an important tool for aiding consumers in evaluating food safety, health concerns, and environmental friendliness. Few studies have explored the attributes of consumers’ environmental consciousnesses from the perspective of environmental concerns; hence, we focus on that lack. Our study contributes to the need to better understand consumer attention to sustainability information when making coffee certification attribute choices. We aimed to explore the importance that consumers attach to coffee certification attributes paid to these attributes while choosing and to willingness to pay (WTP). There were 650 questionnaires completed by those who had purchased coffee beans habitually in Taiwan; after factoring out the invalid questionnaires (i.e., those with omitted answers, incomplete answers, or those in which answers to all the questions received the same scale points were all deemed as invalid and removed), 568 valid ones were collected with a recovery rate of 87.4%. The results indicate that the respondents’ WTP attributes ranked from highest to lowest are traceability, organic, graded, environmentally friendly, and fair-trade certifications. This study provides insights into how consumers’ preferences relate to selection of coffee certification attributes.

Recently, environmental protection and regulations such as WEEE, ELV, and RoHS are rapidly emerging as an important issue for business to consider. The trend of swinging from end-of-pipe control to product design, green innovation, and even the establishment of image or brand has affected corporations in almost every corner in the world, and enlarged to the all modern global production network. Corporations must take proactive environmental strategies to response the challenges. This study adopts balanced scorecard structure and aim at automobile industries to understand the relationships of internal and external, financial and non-financial, and outcome and driving factors. Further relying on these relationships to draw the "map of environment strategy" to probe and understand the feasibility of environmental performance evaluation and environmental strategy control.

Objective: To examine prospectively whether irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or other variables-that is, psychiatric profiles, health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and clinical features-are associated with negative appendectomy (NA). Design: Longitudinal study. Setting: Inpatient and emergency service in a university-affiliated teaching hospital. Patients: 430 consecutive patients underwent emergent surgery for suspected appendicitis. Main outcome measures: Rome-II IBS questionnaire; the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale; the ShortForm 36 survey; the clinical, pathological and CT findings. Results: The NA group (n = 68, 15.8%) was younger, with female predominance, higher prevalence of Rome-II IBS, higher anxiety/depression scores and lower levels of HRQoL than the positive appendectomy group. The patients with NA tended to have atypical presentations (absence of migration pain/fever/muscle guarding), lower white cell count and percentage of polymorphonuclear cells (PMNC) and lower rate of CT scan usage than the positive group. After multiple logistic regression, IBS (OR 2.17; 95% CI 1.14 to 4.24), degree of anxiety (OR 1.12; 95% CI 1.02 to 1.49), absence of migrating pain (OR 3.43; 95% CI 1.90 to 5.95)/muscle guarding (OR 3.72; 95% CI 2.07 to 6.70), a lower PMNC percentage (,75%; OR 3.05; 95% CI 1.69 to 5.51) and no CT scan usage (OR 2.32; 95% CI 1.27 to 4.26) were found to be the independent factors in predicting NA. Conclusion: Both patient (IBS, anxiety, atypical presentation) and physician (low CT scan usage) factors are the independent determinants predicting NA. Physicians should be cautious before operating on or referring patients with IBS for appendectomy. CT scan should be considered in patients with suspected appendicitis, particularly in those with IBS and atypical clinical presentations.A cute appendicitis is the most common cause of an acute abdomen with at least 250 000 cases per year in the US. 1The life-time risk of appendectomy is 12.0% for men and 23.1% for women.2 Although clinical symptoms are often characteristic, a high rate of misdiagnosis, often referred to as negative appendectomy (NA), suggests otherwise. Several studies have shown that over 15% of appendectomies performed revealed no pathological evidence of appendicitis. [3][4][5][6]

In recent years, as competition among international ports has intensified, the impartial and objective evaluation of port operational efficiency has become increasingly important in enabling each individual port to understand its peculiar strengths and weaknesses, as well as any immediate threats or opportunities that may affect its competitive environment. This study applies CCR model, BCC model and 3-stage DEA model to evaluate the changes in efficiency that have taken place between 1998 and 2001 in 10 ports in the Asia-Pacific region using cross-period data. The empirical results show that different model will lead to different result. On average, the efficiency estimated by 3-stage DEA procedure is the highest, while CCR efficiency is the lowest. It should be noted that the efficiencies based on CCR and BCC model are somewhat lower than the 3-stage DEA approaches, because they do not take the environmental factors, managerial inefficiency and statistical noises into account.