HIV self-testing practices among Health Care Workers: feasibility and options for accelerating HIV testing services in Ethiopia

Introduction: HIV is still an enormous global burden and it is also causing loss of huge health care workers (HCWs) on the already limited human resource capacity in health care services in Sub-Saharan Africa. Variety of methods of accelerating HIV testing is required to increase the rate of HIV testing and expand treatment services. Therefore, this study was aimed to find out the prevalence, feasibility and options of HIV self-testing practices in Ethiopia. Methods: A cross-sectional study design triangulated with qualitative method was conducted from February to May, 2012. The data was collected using a semi-structured pretested questionnaire and in-depth interview, at government and private health centers or clinics and hospitals. During the data collection all the available healthcare workers (HCWs) which encompass the internship students including: Medical, Health Officer, Nurses, Midwives and Laboratory students, and health professionals working in the selected health institutions were involved.Results: A total of 307 HCWs were included in the analysis and we found that 288(94.4%) of them were ever tested for HIV, of which majority 203 (70.5%) were tested by themselves though 244(80%) of the HCWs had motivation or interest to be tested by themselves. Generally, of the ever tested only 85(29.5%) were tested by the help of health care providers/counselors other than self. Regarding the place where the HCWs had the test, majority 136 (69.4%) tested by themselves at the health facility and the rest were tested at their home, office, market and church. The main reason stated for self-testing was the need for confidentiality for the test result, which was mentioned by 205(82%). Moreover, 35(14.0%) claims lack of time to access the ordinary counseling and testing services. Conclusion: This study depicts high rate of HIV self-testing practice among HCWs. This shows that HIV self-testing can be considered as one pillar to increase the HIV-testing services and a means for the HIV prevention and control policy, through increasing HIV testing uptake and awareness of HIV status. However, the implementation may require the role of different stakeholders and decision makers with further study to extend the options.Key words: HIV, VCT, self-test, health care workers, Ethiopi

Artemisia annua l. As an alternative potential weed control option

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Integrated Care for Chronic Diseases – State of the Art

Chronic diseases represent a high cost for healthcare systems, for individuals, families, businesses and governments. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that an increase of 10% of chronic diseases is associated with a reduction of 0.5% of annual economic growth. Primary care has proven to ensure high levels of efficiency, effectiveness, equity, safety, timely and centrality of the patient achieving better health outcomes and lower costs. The Chronic Care Model (CCM) proposes a proactive approach in assisting the empowerment of patients and their community. The CCM contributes to improving the quality of care and health outcomes and the reduction of inequalities (e.g., ethnicity, social status) too

Modeling the impact of climate change on the hydrology of Andasa watershed

This paper was aimed to study the impact of climate change on the hydrology of Andasa watershed for the period 2013–2099. The soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) was calibrated and validated, and thereby used to study the impact of climate change on the water balance. The future climate change scenarios were developed using future climate outputs from the Hadley Center Climate Model version 3 (HadCM3) A2 (high) and B2 (low) emission scenarios and Canadian Earth System Model version 2 (CanESM2) Representative concentration pathways (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios. The large-scale maximum/minimum temperature and rainfall data were downscaled to fine-scale resolution using the Statistical Downscaling Model (SDSM). The mean monthly temperature projection of the four scenarios indicated an increase by a range of 0.4–8.5 °C while the mean monthly rainfall showed both a decrease of up to 97% and an increase of up to 109%. The long-term mean of all the scenarios indicated an increasing temperature and decreasing rainfall trends. Simulations showed that climate change may cause substantial impacts in the hydrology of the watershed by increasing the potential evapotranspiration (PET) by 4.4–17.3% and decreasing streamflow and soil water by 48.8–95.6% and 12.7–76.8%, respectively. The findings suggested that climate change may cause moisture-constrained environments in the watershed, which may impact agricultural activities in the watershed. Appropriate agricultural water management interventions should be implemented to mitigate and adapt to the plausible impacts of climate change by conserving soil moisture and reducing evapotranspiration

Transition probabilities for general birth-death processes with applications in ecology, genetics, and evolution

A birth-death process is a continuous-time Markov chain that counts the number of particles in a system over time. In the general process with $n$ current particles, a new particle is born with instantaneous rate $\lambda_n$ and a particle dies with instantaneous rate $\mu_n$. Currently no robust and efficient method exists to evaluate the finite-time transition probabilities in a general birth-death process with arbitrary birth and death rates. In this paper, we first revisit the theory of continued fractions to obtain expressions for the Laplace transforms of these transition probabilities and make explicit an important derivation connecting transition probabilities and continued fractions. We then develop an efficient algorithm for computing these probabilities that analyzes the error associated with approximations in the method. We demonstrate that this error-controlled method agrees with known solutions and outperforms previous approaches to computing these probabilities. Finally, we apply our novel method to several important problems in ecology, evolution, and genetics