Taiwan has long made efforts to increase community emergency response capability, due to its vulnerability to earthquakes, typhoons, landslides and debris flows. Not until recent major natural disasters, such as the 1999 Chi-Chi Earthquake, Typhoon Toraji and Typhoon Nari, has the government reformed its policy toward empowering the community to take actions in hazard mitigation, emergency preparedness and emergency response. A new initiatve, Integrated Community-Based Disaster Management Program (ICBDM), was launched in 2001 by the Executive Yuan to achieve the goal of strengthening community resistance. The paper, taking Shang-An Village as an example, describes Taiwan's new community-based disaster management program. Through a participatory process, community residents have learned how to analyze vulnerable conditions, discover problems, develop solutions and establish an organization to implement disaster management tasks. Further, basic response training courses and a disaster scenario were held in order to improve their emergency response capability. Based on the case study, a phased process, including initiation, assessment, planning and practice, is generalized.

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BackgroundDrug resistance has now posed more severe and emergent threats to human health and infectious disease treatment. However, wet-lab approaches alone to counter drug resistance have so far still achieved limited success due to less knowledge about the underlying mechanisms of drug resistance. Our approach apply a heuristic search algorithm in order to extract active network under drug treatment and use a random walk model to identify potential co-targets for effective antibacterial drugs.ResultsWe use interactome network of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and gene expression data which are treated with two kinds of antibiotic, Isoniazid and Ethionamide as our test data. Our analysis shows that the active drug-treated networks are associated with the trigger of fatty acid metabolism and synthesis and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH)-related processes and those results are consistent with the recent experimental findings. Efflux pumps processes appear to be the major mechanisms of resistance but SOS response is significantly up-regulation under Isoniazid treatment. We also successfully identify the potential co-targets with literature confirmed evidences which are related to the glycine-rich membrane, adenosine triphosphate energy and cell wall processes.ConclusionsWith gene expression and interactome data supported, our study points out possible pathways leading to the emergence of drug resistance under drug treatment. We develop a computational workflow for giving new insights to bacterial drug resistance which can be gained by a systematic and global analysis of the bacterial regulation network. Our study also discovers the potential co-targets with good properties in biological and graph theory aspects to overcome the problem of drug resistance.

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In the developing countries of Asia local authorities rarely use risk analysis instruments as a decision-making support mechanism during planning and development procedures. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a methodology to enable planners to undertake such analyses. We illustrate a case study of seismic risk-benefit analysis for the city of Taipei, Taiwan, using available land use maps and surveys as well as a new tool developed by the National Science Council in Taiwan--the HAZ-Taiwan earthquake loss estimation system. We use three hypothetical earthquakes to estimate casualties and total and annualised direct economic losses, and to show their spatial distribution. We also characterise the distribution of vulnerability over the study area using cluster analysis. A risk-benefit ratio is calculated to express the levels of seismic risk attached to alternative land use plans. This paper suggests ways to perform earthquake risk evaluations and the authors intend to assist city planners to evaluate the appropriateness of their planning decisions.