In Astore valley, 26 species of plants under 17 genera and 13 families were found to be used as folkmedicine. The study reveals that the villagers from remote area use medicinal plants for the treatment of joint pain, bone fracture, urine problem, asthma, diabetes, blood pressure and for the treatment of other common ailments. The aborigines also use traditional herbal therapy for their live stocks. Because of high destruction pressure of anthropogenic origin, Ephedra gerardiana Wallich ex C.A.Meyer, Berberis spp., Rosa foetida Herrm. and Rhododendron hypenanthum Balf. f. were found threatened.

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In this paper, we present a speaker verification system based on the Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Normalized Least MeanSquare (NLMS) adaptive filtering. The aim of using NLMS adaptive filtering is to improve the HMMs performance in noisy environments. A Malay spoken digit database is used for the testing and validation modules. It is shown that, in a clean environment a Total Success Rate (TSR) of 89.97% is achieved using HMMs. For speaker verification, the true speaker rejection rate is 25.3% while the impostor acceptance rate is 9.99% and the equal error rate (EER) is 16.66%. In noisy environments without NLMS adaptive filtering TSRs of between 43.07%-51.26% are achieved for SNRs of 0-30 dBs. Meanwhile, after NLMS filtering, TSRs of between 55.18%-55.30% are achieved for SNRs 0-30 dB.

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Vegetables eating raw are a leading source of transmission of infective forms of pathogenic internal parasites among human beings. This research was conducted from April to October, 2017 to assess the parasitic contamination of vegetables sold at main vegetable markets in districts Lower Dir and Peshawar, Pakistan. Eight hundred specimens of different vegetables were purchased and soaked in physiological saline solution, shaken with a mechanical shaker for 20 minutes and processed by sedimentation concentration method. Results revealed that only 19.7% (n=158/800) of the vegetables were found to be contaminated with single or multiple parasite species. Ascaris lumbricoides (the large round worm) 12.3% (n=99/800) was the most commonly detected pathogen and Taenia saginata (the beef tapeworm) 1.62% (n=13/800) was the least frequently detected one. Interestingly, significant p value (p>0.05 at 95%CI) between the number of examined and contaminated for all the variables studied including education status of the vendors, markets location, type of vegetables, means of display, washed before display, washing source of water and market type. The findings of this study evidenced that consumption of raw vegetables possesses great risk of getting parasitic infections in Lower Dir and Peshawar districts, Pakistan. Instructing the sellers and the public about parasitic disease transfer and their hygiene can reduce the infection rate of parasites of human origin.