The effect of pre-lacteal feeding on full breastfeeding in Nairobi, Kenya

Objective: To assess the effect of pre-lacteal feeding on full breastfeeding in the first six months of life in selected hospitals, Nairobi Province. Pre-lacteal feeding has been internationally discouraged because of its negative effect on the duration of breastfeeding.Methods: A prospective cohort design was used with a sample of 692 mother-infant pairs recruited at birth and followed up until 6 months of age. The sample was drawn from five major hospitals in Nairobi. Data was analyzed using the SPSS computer software. Descriptive analysis was used on all variables. Chi-test was used for univariate analysis. Logistic regression analysis was used to determine the effect of pre-lacteal feeding on full breastfeeding.Results: Slightly more than half (58.8%) of the mothers were formally employed and their mean age was 28.3 ±4.9 years. The mean income was KES 26,360 ± 34,696. The mean birth weight of the infants was 3.24 ±0.43kg and 53.3% were males. The prevalence of pre-lacteal feeding was 26.8% (95% CI 23.5%-30.1%). The most common pre-lacteal feeds used at all hospitals were infant formula and glucose solution. There were significant (

Growth and Nutritional Status of the First Six Months of Life Among Selected Hospitals- Nairobi Province

Background: Exclusive breastfeeding for infants is recommended for the first six months for optimal health, development and growth. However, there is limited data on infant feeding practices and nutrition status of infants in Nairobi.Objective: To assess infant growth and nutritional status and compare with feeding practices in the first six months of life in selected hospitals, Nairobi Province.Design: Prospective cohort designSetting: Five major hospitals in Nairobi namely; The Aga Khan, Pumwani Maternity, Mater Misercordiae, St Mary’s Langata and Jamaa Hospitals.Subjects: A sample of 692 mother-infant pairs were recruited at birth and followed up until six months.Intervention: There was no direct experimental intervention, but there was observation of infant feeding practices, weight and height measurement was recorded every four weeks and determination of nutrition status of the infants for a period of six months.Main Outcome Measures: Nutritional status and infant feeding practices in the first six months.Results: Slightly more than half (58.8%) of the mothers were formally employed and the rest were self employed. The mean age of the mothers was 28.3 ±4.9 years. The mean income was KES 26,360 ± 34,696. The mean birth weight of infants was 3.24 ±0.43kg and 53.3% of all infants were male. Above 80% of infants were within normal weight based on weight for age Z-scores (WAZ) at 6, 10, 14 and 23 weeks. The prevalence of overweight based on WAZ was 9.5%, 11.6%, 11.9% and 11% at 6, 14, 19 and 23 weeks, respectively. There were no significant (P>0.05) differences in WAZ between infants on different feeding methods.Conclusions: There was no significant difference in weight or length gain among children that were fully breastfed in comparison to those who were given infant formula or had mixed feeding. However, there was concern over the proportion of overweight infants, as the condition may lead to long term health problems

Habitual physical activity reduces risk of ovarian cancer: a case–control Study in Southern China

Objective: To ascertain the relationship between habitual physical activity and the risk of ovarian cancer among southern Chinese women.Method: A case–control study was conducted in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, during 2006–2008. Information on physical activity exposure and lifestyle characteristics was obtained from 500 incident ovarian cancer patients and 500 hospital-based controls (mean age 59 years) using a validated and reliable questionnaire. Logistic regression analyses were performed to assess the association between physical activity levels and the ovarian cancer risk.Results: The control subjects reported significantly longer duration of strenuous sports and moderate activity in daily life than the ovarian cancer patients. Increased engagements in such leisure time activities were associated with reduced cancer risks after adjustment for confounding factors. A significant inverse dose–response relationship was also found for total physical activity exposure, with adjusted odds ratio 0.49 (95% confidence interval 0.35–0.68) for women engaged in 23 or more metabolic equivalent tasks (MET)-hours per week relative to those less than 12 MET-hours per week.Conclusion: The study provided evidence of an inverse association between habitual physical activity and the risk of ovarian cancer, which is important for the promotion and encouragement of leisure time exercise activities to prevent the disease

UHCR: A Cosmic Ray Mission to Study Nuclei in the Charge Range From 20 ≤Z ≤100

A definitive study of the elemental abundances of nuclei over the charge range of 20 ≤ Z ≤ 100 requires a satellite mission capable of obtaining high statistics and excellent charge resolution over the full charge range. Such a mission, utilizing an electronic instrument which is an evolution of the HEA0-3 Heavy Nuclei Experiment, is described here

Design and tests of the hard X-ray polarimeter X-Calibur

X-ray polarimetry promises to give qualitatively new information about high-energy astrophysical sources, such as binary black hole systems, micro-quasars, active galactic nuclei, and gamma-ray bursts. We designed, built and tested a hard X-ray polarimeter X-Calibur to be used in the focal plane of the InFOCuS grazing incidence hard X-ray telescope. X-Calibur combines a low-Z Compton scatterer with a CZT detector assembly to measure the polarization of 10-80 keV X-rays making use of the fact that polarized photons Compton scatter preferentially perpendicular to the electric field orientation. X-Calibur achieves a high detection efficiency of order unity.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, conference proceedings: SPIE 2011 (San Diego

Energy Dependence of the Fragmentation of UH-Nuclei

The fragmentation of 10.6 GeV/n Au in CH_2. C, Al, Cu, Sn, and Pb targets has been studied using an array of ion chambers, multi-wire proportional counters (MWPC), and Cherenkov counters. Total charge-changing cross sections were found to be monotonically increasing with target charge over cross sections measured and derived from lower energy data. Partial charge-changing cross sections yielding charge changes less than 1O were depressed from those measured at lower energy

Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201