To understand some of the factors involved in weaning and growth faltering in rural China, a cross-sectional positive deviance study was undertaken among 389 rural 4-12-month-old infants from two townships of a county in Sichuan. The infants' mothers were interviewed about their child-feeding practices and other sociodemographic information, and anthropometric measurements were made on their infants. Positive deviant infants (those growing adequately in environments in which the majority of the children suffer from growth retardation and malnutrition) were identified from the Chinese WAZ-scores calculated from the anthropometric measurements. Feeding practices found to be associated with the better growth of the positive deviant infants included breastfeeding through age 12 months, feeding soybean milk, liver and pork blood products on a more than weekly basis during the ages of 7-9 months, not feeding rice flour (mifen) before age 7 months, and not giving supplements or tonics. Mothers' nutrition knowledge was also associated with positive deviance status. The relevance of the findings is discussed with respect to designing nutrition education interventions for rural Sichuan.

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have become increasingly important as human therapeutic agents. Yet, current research concentrates on technology itself and pays attention to developed countries. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of mAbs development in China through systematic analysis of drug registry, patent applications, clinical trials, academic publication, and ongoing R&D projects. The trends in therapeutic areas and industrialization process are also highlighted. Development and research trends of mAbs are analyzed to provide a future perspective of mAbs as therapeutic agents in China.

No abstract

As an alternative to the traditional structural analysis adopting computer-aided modeling and evaluation, this pedagogical research provided an integrated teaching and learning approach by mapping cognitive domains defined in Bloom's Taxonomy Theory in the newly launched course named Woodwork Fabrication and Analysis for second-year students. The course incorporated ancient Chinese woodwork tradition into the integrated learning activities involving engineering graphics, mechanics of materials, hands-on fabrication, and structural modeling/analysis. Aiming to compare the traditional and new courses in terms of their effectiveness in enhancing student learning of structural engineering subjects, both courses were designed to achieve consistent learning outcomes (e.g., to develop structural analysis skills). This study demonstrated student work in engineering drawing and structural analysis reflecting their critical thinking and active learning in the new course. Afterwards, students from both traditional and new courses were surveyed in terms of the overall satisfaction of their selected course, perceptions of the course effectiveness in enhancing civil engineering-related skills, and expectations of the course to their further study and work. With the student sample from the traditional course as the control group, the comparative study revealed that the integrated teaching and learning approach in the new course could lead to students' higher overall satisfaction and more positive perceptions of the course effectiveness in enhancing structural analysis-related skills. This pedagogical study would serve as a reference for other civil engineering educators in adopting integrated teaching and learning in lower-years' undergraduate education.