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As an important remote sensing technology, satellite altimetry provides a large amount of observations of sea surface height over the global ocean. In coastal areas, the accuracy of satellite altimetry data decreases greatly due to issues arise in the vicinity of land, related to poorer geophysical corrections and artifacts in the altimeter reflected signals linked to the presence of land within the instrument footprint. To improve the application of HY-2B altimetry data in coastal areas, this study proposes a coastal waveform retracking strategy for HY-2B altimetry mission, which depends on the effective trailing edge and the leading edge, which are less affected by coastal ‘contamination’, to retrieve accurate waveform information. The HY-2B pass 323 and pass 196 data are reprocessed, and the accuracy of the reprocessing results in the range of 0–40 km offshore is validated against the tide gauge data and compared with the HY-2B standard SGDR data. According to the analysis conclusion, the accuracy of the reprocessed data is higher than that of the SGDR data and has good performance within 15 km offshore. For the pass 323, the mean value of correlation coefficient and RMS of the reprocessed data against the corresponding tide gauge data are 0.893 and 45.1 cm, respectively, in the range within 0–15 km offshore, and are 0.86 and 33.6 cm, respectively, in the range beyond 15 km offshore. For the pass 196, the mean value of correlation coefficient and RMS of the reprocessed data against the corresponding tide gauge data in the range within 0–12 km offshore are 0.84 and 33.0 cm, respectively, and in the range within 0–5 km offshore to the island are 0.90 and 29.3 cm, respectively, and in the range beyond 5 km offshore to the island are 0.92 and 36.2 cm, respectively, which are all better than the corresponding values of the SGDR data, especially in the range closed to the land. The results indicate that the proposed coastal waveform retracking strategy for HY-2B altimetry greatly improves the quality of HY-2B altimetry data in coastal areas.

In mainland China, most avian influenza A(H7N9) cases in the spring of 2013 were reported through the pneumonia of unknown etiology (PUE) surveillance system. To understand the role of possible underreporting and surveillance bias in assessing the epidemiology of subtype H7N9 cases and the effect of live-poultry market closures, we examined all PUE cases reported from 2004 through May 3, 2013. Historically, the PUE system was underused, reporting was inconsistent, and PUE reporting was biased toward A(H7N9)-affected provinces, with sparse data from unaffected provinces; however, we found no evidence that the older ages of persons with A(H7N9) resulted from surveillance bias. The absolute number and the proportion of PUE cases confirmed to be A(H7N9) declined after live-poultry market closures (p

OBJECTIVE: To understand the changes of the nutrition labeling of packaged food in China two years after the promulgation of the Regulation for Food Nutrition Labeling, which encourages food manufacturers to identify nutrition labeling. METHODS: Investigators copied out the nutrition information panel, nutrition claim and nutrient function claim of packaged food in a supermarket with prepared questionnaire and finished normative judgment in 2008 and 2010. RESULTS: 4693 and 5526 kinds of packaged food were investigated separately. Nutrition information panel, nutrition claim and nutrient function claim were found on the food label of 27.6%, 13.0% and 1.9% of packaged food respectively in 2008, while 35.1%, 7.7% and 2.3% in 2010. The nutrition information panel which labeled energy, protein, fat, carbohydrate and sodium was 597 (43.8%) and 1661 (85.9%) in 2008 and 2010, only 134 (9.8%) and 985 (51.0%) nutrition information panel were totally normalized. Nutrition claim and nutrient function claim focused on vitamin, mineral and dietary fiber. The total qualified proportions for nutrition claim were increased significantly for most of the nutrients, except for cholesterol. There were 6 (6.4%) and 5 (3.9%) nutrient function claims with hinting of therapeutic effects on diseases separately. CONCLUSION: Although the voluntary regulation remarkably improved the level of normalization for nutrition labeling, its role on the prevalence was minus. It's imperative to enforce nutrition labeling for not only China but also other countries, and furthermore, health education on nutrition labeling should be initiated to support the policy.

The article discusses a study which examined the epidemiologic characteristics of avian influenza A(H7N9) cases in China identified as of December 1, 2013. Topics discussed include the verification of a case of H7N9 virus by means of real-time reverse-transcriptase-polymerase-chain-reaction assay (RT-PCR), the death of patients after a median duration of illness of 21 days and the development of respiratory symptoms in 28 patients.