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Throughout China's history widespread famine has been a frequent occurrence. While natural calamities have been primarily responsible for its appearance, there is no doubt that consistent lack of communications has always been a serious obstacle to the relief of famine areas. During, for example, the great drought famine of 1877–78, which affected Shensi, Shansi, Honan and Hopei, efforts to get food into the Shansi plateau foundered because of the difficulty in sending supplies up the only direct track from the eastern ports, where food was arriving in abundance. As a consequence of these conditions up to thirteen million people may have lost their uves. Since then there have been a number of other severe droughts and floods, but with the introduction of railways and gradual improvement of the existing system of communications, distribution of relief has undoubtedly become more effective and loss of life less widespread. This brief survey will accordingly examine China's present transportation system and its ability to alleviate the hardship caused by last year's natural calamities.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction: Saving Lives in the Context of Disease, Poverty and War -- 1. Epidemics, Wars and Public Healthcare Advocacy in Republican China, 1911–1928 -- 2. Advances and Setbacks in Nationalist China's Public Health Management, 1928–1937 -- 3. Red Army Health Services in Jiangxi and on the Long March, 1927–1936 -- 4. Japanese Invasion, Army Medicine, and the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps (CRCMRC), 1937–1942 -- 5. How Rigidity, Disease and Hunger Undermined Nationalist China's Military Medical Reformers -- 6. Public Health Amid the Turmoil of War, 1938–1949 -- 7. Yan'an's Health Services under Mao Zedong's Leadership, 1937–1945 -- 8. Saving Lives in Wartime China: Why It Mattered -- Bibliography -- Index of Names -- Index of Subjects.

Air conditioning boosts man's efficiency no less than his comfort. Air-conditioned homes, offices, and factories unmistakably raise human productivity and reduce absenteeism, turnover, mistakes, accidents and grievances, especially in summer. Accordingly, many employers every year cool workrooms and offices to raise summer profits. Employees in turn find cool homes enhancing not only comfort and prestige but also personal efficiency and income. With such economic impetus, low-cost summer cooling must irresistibly spread to all kinds of occupied buildings. Refrigeration provides our best cooling, serving well where people are closely spaced in well-constructed, shaded, and insulated structures. However, its first and operating costs bar it from our hottest commercial, industrial, and residential buildings. Fortunately, evaporative cooling is an economical substitute in many regions. First used in Southwest homes and businesses and in textile mills, it soon invaded other fields and climates. In 1946, six firms produced 200,000 evaporative coolers; in 1958, 25 firms produced 1,250,000, despite the phenomenal sale of refrigerating window air conditioners. Though clearly secondary to refrigeration, evaporative cooling is 60 to 80 percent is economical for moderate income groups and cheaper to buy and operate. Thus, it climates where summers are short. Moreover, it cheaply cools hot, thinly constructed mills, factories, workshops, foundries, powerhouses, farm buildings, canneries, etc., where refrigerated cooling is prohibitively expensive

Republican China is generally regarded as a period during which warlords prevailed until displaced by civil war and foreign invasion. This political lens understandably influences our thinking. But from an epidemiological perspective a parallel story emerges in which the key negative forces are armies of microbes and parasites, disease gods and demons, dangerously unhygienic traditional midwives, and armies and generals indifferent to the value of ordinary lives. This presentation focuses on the epidemiological as well as military crises of Republican China during 1920-1945 and the efforts by highly trained medical and public health specialists to mitigate these crises. These specialists are found in both the civilian and military sectors. By focusing on preventive strategies they found ways to lessen the impact of gastrointestinal diseases, smallpox, typhus and malaria, and to train and organize thousands of healthcare workers to teach hygiene and sanitation and administer prophylactic treatments. Coping with disease gods and traditional midwives proved more challenging, but both Nationalist and Communist health leaders made considerable progress in improving delivery of military healthcare. After war came in 1937, Japanese bombs and bayonets took their toll, as did the errors of Nationalist China's leaders, so that Nationalist China ended the war weakened by widespread army malnutrition and a conscription system wasteful of human life. But by then thousands of trained healthcare workers were available to serve the needs of postwar China.

U.S.-China relations are changing so rapidly that it is hard to establish a critical position about their long-range implications. It is pleasant to think of the enmities of the past retreating into well-deserved oblivion. Looking ahead, it is tempting to see the Coca-Cola contract as a spearhead into the world's most populous common market. A billion people—eager to modernize, ready at last for Western everything, from technology to tourism. The prospect is enough to drive considerations of prudence out of sight.

Risk matrices are commonly encountered devices for rating hazards in numerous areas of risk management. Part of their popularity is predicated on their apparent simplicity and transparency. Recent research, however, has identified serious mathematical defects and inconsistencies. This article further examines the reliability and utility of risk matrices for ranking hazards, specifically in the context of public leisure activities including travel. We find that (1) different risk assessors may assign vastly different ratings to the same hazard, (2) even following lengthy reflection and learning scatter remains high, and (3) the underlying drivers of disparate ratings relate to fundamentally different worldviews, beliefs, and a panoply of psychosocial factors that are seldom explicitly acknowledged. It appears that risk matrices when used in this context may be creating no more than an artificial and even untrustworthy picture of the relative importance of hazards, which may be of little or no benefit to those trying to manage risk effectively and rationally.

While there is evidence linking informational cue processing ability to effective decision‐making on the fireground, only a few studies have actually attempted detailed description and categorization of the cues sought by fireground commanders when managing real fires. In this study, thirty experienced firefighters were interviewed across various fire stations in the UK and Nigeria using the critical decision method protocol. Forty‐one different cues were identified, which were then categorized into five distinct types, namely safety cues, cues that indicate the nature of problem, environmental cues, emotive cues and incident command and control cues. The article concluded by evaluating the role of expertise in cue utilization, drawing on evidence from the naturalistic decision‐making (NDM) literature.