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Many large organizations accomplish their various functions through interactions across their major components. Components refers to functional entities within a large complex organization, such as business sectors, academic departments, or regional divisions. The dependency between the various components can cause risk to propagate through their overall system. This article presents a risk assessment framework that integrates risk across a diverse set of components to the overall organization functions. This project addresses three major challenges: aggregating risk, estimating component interdependencies including cycles of dependencies, and propagating risk across components. The framework aggregates risk assessments through a value function for severity that is evaluated at the expected outcome of accomplishing planned goals in terms of performance, schedule, and resources. The value function, which represents risk tolerance, scales between defined points corresponding to failure and success. Different risk assessment may be aggregated together. This article presents a novel approach to establishing relationships between the various components. This article develops and compares three network risk propagation models that characterize the overall organizational risk. The U.S. Air Force has applied this risk framework to evaluate success in hypothetical future wars. The analysts employing this risk framework have informed billions of dollars of strategic investment decisions.

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: Physically demanding occupations (ie, military, firefighter, law enforcement) often use fitness tests for job selection or retention. Despite numerous individual studies, the relationship of these tests to job performance is not always clear. : This review examined the relationship by aggregating previously reported correlations between different fitness tests and common occupational tasks. : Search criteria were applied to PUBMED, EBSCO, EMBASE and military sources; scoring yielded 27 original studies providing 533 Pearson correlation coefficients (r) between fitness tests and 12 common physical job task categories. Fitness tests were grouped into predominant health-related fitness components and body regions: cardiorespiratory endurance (CRe); upper body, lower body and trunk muscular strength and muscular endurance (UBs, LBs, TRs, UBe, LBe, TRe) and flexibility (FLX). Meta-analyses provided pooled r's between each fitness component and task category. : The CRe tests had the strongest pooled correlations with most tasks (eight pooled r values 0.80-0.52). Next were LBs (six pooled r values >0.50) and UBe (four pooled r values >0.50). UBs and LBe correlated strongly to three tasks. TRs, TRe and FLX did not strongly correlate to tasks. : Employers can maximise the relevancy of assessing workforce health by using fitness tests with strong correlations between fitness components and job performance, especially those that are also indicators for injury risk. Potentially useful field-expedient tests include timed-runs (CRe), jump tests (LBs) and push-ups (UBe). Impacts of gender and physiological characteristics (eg, lean body mass) should be considered in future study and when implementing tests.

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Noise exposure is a known occupational health hazard to those serving in the military. Previous military epidemiology studies have identified military occupations at risk of noise induced hearing loss (NIHL); however, musicians have not been specifically mentioned. The focus of military NIHL studies is usually on those service members of the combat arms occupations. This project was a preliminary examination of Department of Defense (DoD) active duty military musicians in regard to their noise exposure, annual hearing test rates, and hearing injury rates using available data sources. The analysis concluded that DoD military musicians are an underserved population in terms of hearing conservation efforts. Noise surveillance data extracted from the Defense Occupational and Environmental Health Readiness System-Industrial Hygiene showed that every musician similar exposure group (SEG) with noise survey data from 2009 to 2013 exceeded the occupation exposure level adopted by DoD Instruction 6055.12. However, only a small percentage of all DoD active duty military musicians (5.5% in the peak year of 2012) were assigned to a SEG that was actually surveyed. Hearing test data based on Current Procedural Terminology coding extracted from the Military Health System revealed that the percentage of musicians with annual hearing tests increased over the 5 years studied in all services except the Air Force. During 2013, the data showed that the Navy had the highest percentage of musicians with annual hearing tests at 70.9%, and the Air Force had the lowest at 11.4%. The Air Force had the highest percentage of hearing injuries of those musicians with annual hearing tests for all 5 years analyzed. Although noise surveillance and annual hearing tests are being conducted, they occur at a much lower rate than required for a population that is known to be overexposed to noise.

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Social housing of nonhuman primates (NHP) in an infectious disease setting presents unique challenges, and individual housing is often scientifically justified. At our institute, we recognized an opportunity to limit individual housing to the minimal period necessary by pair-housing NHP after quarantine and separating them just before they are moved into holding rooms for infectious disease studies. To alleviate concerns that pair-housing followed by separation affects the immune system of NHP and makes them unfit as research candidates, we designed a short-term pair-housing study. After a 3-wk baseline period, juvenile rhesus macaques (age, 3 to 4 y) were paired for 7 wk and then separated for 7 wk. During the study, serum cortisol, lymphocyte subsets, and proinflammatory cytokines were measured. The average values for all parameters were significantly lower after separation than during the baseline period. We conclude that short-term pair housing is a viable option at our institute for social housing of NHP.

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A 2010 study exposed Staphylococcus aureus to ultraviolet (UV) radiation and thermal heating from pulsed xenon flash lamps. The results suggested that disinfection could be caused not only by photochemical changes from UV radiation, but also by photophysical stress damage caused by the disturbance from incoming pulses. The study called for more research in this area. The recent advances in light-emitting diode (LED) technology include the development of LEDs that emit in narrow bands in the ultraviolet-C (UV-C) range (100-280 nm), which is highly effective for UV disinfection of organisms. Further, LEDs would use less power, and allow more flexibility than other sources of UV energy in that the user may select various pulse repetition frequencies (PRFs), pulse irradiances, pulse widths, duty cycles and types of waveform output (e.g. square waves, sine waves, triangular waves, etc.). Our study exposed Escherichia coli samples to square pulses of 272 nm radiation at various PRFs and duty cycles. A statistically significant correlation was found between E. coli's disinfection sensitivity and these parameters. Although our sample size was small, these results show promise and are worthy of further investigation. Comparisons are also made with pulsed disinfection by LEDs emitting at 365 nm, and pulsed disinfection by xenon flash lamps.

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The growing-complexity of the United States Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule has resulted in as many as five required injections during a single well-baby office visit. To reduce this number, vaccine manufacturers have developed combination vaccines that immunize against several diseases in a single injection. At the same time, a growing number of parents are challenging the safety and effectiveness of vaccinating children. They are also particularly concerned about the use of combination vaccines, since they believe that injecting a child with multiple antigens simultaneously may overwhelm a child's immune system. Moreover, combination vaccines make it more likely that extraimmunization (i.e., administering more than the required amount of vaccine antigens) occurs, resulting in greater concerns by parents and vaccine wastage costs borne by an already strained healthcare system. This paper formulates an integer programming model that solves for the maximum number of vaccines that can be administered without any extraimmunization. An exact dynamic programming algorithm and a randomized heuristic for the integer programming model is formulated and the heuristic is shown to be a randomized xi-approximation algorithm. Computational results are reported on three sets of test problems, based on existing and future childhood immunization schedules, to demonstrate their computational effectiveness and limitations. Given that future childhood immunization schedules may need to be solved for each child, on a case-by-case basis, the results reported here may provide a practical and valuable tool for the public health community.

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