Chemical leucoderma, a disease of mostly industrial origin in developed countries, may be induced by common domestic products in developing countries. Diagnosis and differentiation from other causes of hypopigmentation can be done confidently by following the clinical criteria as proposed. The therapeutic response of chemical leucoderma is better than that of vitiligo.

Background:Fibroadenomas and phyllodes tumors may have similar cytological appearances. However, a detailed study of cytomorphology of stromal elements may be helpful in differentiation.Aim:To evaluate the cytological features of phyllodes tumor in our study with special reference to features that can help distinguishing it from fibroadenoma.Materials and Methods:The archival materials of our hospital were searched from January 2006 to January 2009 for histopathologically-diagnosed cases of phyllodes tumor. The cases in which previous cytopathology smears were available were included in the study. The cytomorphology of 10 such cases were compared with 25 cytologically-diagnosed and histopathologically-confirmed cases of fibroadenoma.Results:The size, cellularity of stromal fragments, and the proportion of spindle cells in the background are important features in such differentiation.

Rainfall exerts a controlling influence on the availability and quality of vegetation and surface water for herbivores in African terrestrial ecosystems. We analyse temporal trends and variation in rainfall in the Maasai Mara ecosystem of East Africa and infer their implications for animal population and biodiversity dynamics. The data originated from 15 rain gauges in the Mara region (1965–2015) and one station in Narok Town (1913–2015), in Kenya’s Narok County. This is the first comprehensive and most detailed analysis of changes in rainfall in the region of its kind. Our results do not support the current predictions of the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) of very likely increases of rainfall over parts of Eastern Africa. The dry season rainfall component increased during 1935–2015 but annual rainfall decreased during 1962–2015 in Narok Town. Monthly rainfall was more stable and higher in the Mara than in Narok Town, likely because the Mara lies closer to the high-precipitation areas along the shores of Lake Victoria. Predominantly deterministic and persistent inter-annual cycles and extremely stable seasonal rainfall oscillations characterize rainfall in the Mara and Narok regions. The frequency of severe droughts increased and floods intensified in the Mara but droughts became less frequent and less severe in Narok Town. The timings of extreme droughts and floods coincided with significant periodicity in rainfall oscillations, implicating strong influences of global atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns on regional rainfall variability. These changing rainfall patterns have implications for animal population dynamics. The increase in dry season rainfall during 1935–2015 possibly counterbalanced the impacts of resource scarcity generated by the declining annual rainfall during 1965–2015 in Narok Town. However, the increasing rainfall extremes in the Mara can be expected to create conditions conducive to outbreaks of infectious animal diseases and reduced vegetation quality for herbivores, particularly when droughts and floods persist over multiple years. The more extreme wet season rainfall may also alter herbivore space use, including migration patterns.

Summary. Estimation of long-term exposure to air pollution levels over a large spatial domain, such as the mainland UK, entails a challenging modelling task since exposure data are often only observed by a network of sparse monitoring sites with variable amounts of missing data. The paper develops and compares several flexible non-stationary hierarchical Bayesian models for the four most harmful air pollutants, nitrogen dioxide and ozone, and PM 10 and PM 2:5 particulate matter, in England and Wales during the 5-year period 2007-2011. The models make use of observed data from the UK's automatic urban and rural network as well as output of an atmospheric air quality dispersion model developed recently especially for the UK. Land use information, incorporated as a predictor in the model, further enhances the accuracy of the model. Using daily data for all four pollutants over the 5-year period we obtain empirically verified maps which are the most accurate among the competition. Monte Carlo integration methods for spatial aggregation are developed and these enable us to obtain predictions, and their uncertainties, at the level of a given administrative geography. These estimates for local authority areas can readily be used for many purposes such as modelling of aggregated health outcome data and are made publicly available alongside this paper.

In the United Kingdom, air pollution is linked to around 40000 premature deaths each year, but estimating its health effects is challenging in a spatio-temporal study. The challenges include spatial misalignment between the pollution and disease data; uncertainty in the estimated pollution surface; and complex residual spatio-temporal autocorrelation in the disease data. This article develops a two-stage model that addresses these issues. The first stage is a spatio-temporal fusion model linking modeled and measured pollution data, while the second stage links these predictions to the disease data. The methodology is motivated by a new five-year study investigating the effects of multiple pollutants on respiratory hospitalizations in England between 2007 and 2011, using pollution and disease data relating to local and unitary authorities on a monthly time scale.