Species of Lecithocladium Luhe, 1901 (Digenea, Hemiuridae) from Australian marine fishes, with a description of a new species from various hosts off eastern Australia

Lecithocladium moretonense sp. nov. is described from Monodactylus argenteus (type-host), Abudefduf sordidus, A. whitleyi, Herklotsichthys castelnaui, Lutjanus russelli, Platycephalus indicus, Rhabdosargus sarba, Siganus nebulosus and Scorpis lineolata from Moreton Bay, southern Queensland, and Acanthopagrus australis from off northern New South Wales. It differs from most Lecithocladium species in having a subglobular oral sucker and pharynx. Other distinguishing features are the thin-walled recurved seminal vesicle and the pars prostatica coiling over the seminal vesicle to the level of the anterior testis. Lecithocladium megalaspis Yamaguti, 1953 from Alepes apercna, Moreton Bay and L. angustiovum Yamaguti, 1953 from Scomber australasicus, Fremantle, Western Australia, are also reported, illustrated and measured.

Social inequalities in male mortality, and in male mortality from smoking: indirect estimation from national death rates in England and Wales, Poland, and North America

Background There are substantial social inequalities in adult male mortality in many countries. Smoking is often more prevalent among men of lower social class, education, or income. The contribution of smoking to these social inequalities in mortality remains uncertain. Methods The contribution of smoking to adult mortality in a population can be estimated indirectly from disease-specific death rates in that population (using absolute lung cancer rates to indicate proportions due to smoking of mortality from certain other diseases). We applied these methods to 1996 death rates at ages 35-69 years in men in three different social strata in four countries, based on a total of 0.6 million deaths. The highest and lowest social strata were based on social class (professional vs unskilled manual) in England and Wales, neighbourhood income (top vs bottom quintile) in urban Canada, and completed years of education (more than vs less than 12 years) in the USA and Poland. Results In each country, there was about a two-fold difference between the highest and the lowest social strata in overall risks of dying among men aged 35-69 years (England and Wales 21% vs 43%, USA 20% vs 37%, Canada 21% vs 34%, Poland 26% vs 50%: four-country mean 22% vs 41%, four-country mean absolute difference 19%). More than half of this difference in mortality between the top and bottom social strata involved differences in risks of being killed at age 35-69 years by smoking (England and Wales 4% vs 19%, USA 4% vs 15%, Canada 6% vs 13%, Poland 5% vs 22%: four-country mean 5% vs 17%, four-country mean absolute difference 12%). Smoking-attributed mortality accounted for nearly half of total male mortality in the lowest social stratum of each country. Conclusion In these populations, most, but not all, of the substantial social inequalities in adult male mortality during the 1990s were due to the effects of smoking. Widespread cessation of smoking could eventually halve the absolute differences between these social strata in the risk of premature death.

Towards more personalized web: Extraction and integration of dynamic content from the Web

Information and content integration are believed to be a possible solution to the problem of information overload in the Internet. The article is an overview of a simple solution for integration of information and content on the Web. Previous approaches to content extraction and integration are discussed, followed by introduction of a novel technology to deal with the problems, based on XML processing. The article includes lessons learned from solving issues of changing webpage layout, incompatibility with HTML standards and multiplicity of the results returned. The method adopting relative XPath queries over DOM tree proves to be more robust than previous approaches to Web information integration. Furthermore, the prototype implementation demonstrates the simplicity that enables non-professional users to easily adopt this approach in their day-to-day information management routines.