Prevalence of Intestinal Parasitic Infection and Associated Factors among Pediatric Patients at Shenen Gibe Hospital, Ethiopia

Background: Intestinal parasites are either helminths or protozoan that inhabit in gastrointestinal tract. The prevalence and severity of intestinal parasites are high in developing countries where health and sanitary facilities are under development. The parasitic infections mainly affect physical, mental development and nutritional status of young children by transmitting through   feco-oral route and penetration of skin.Objective: The  objective of this study  was to determine the prevalence of intestinal parasites and its predisposing factors among pediatric patients in Shenen Gibe Hospital, Jimma zone south west Ethiopia Method: A cross-sectional study was employed from April to May, 2014 among pediatric patients at Shenen Gibe Hospital. A socio-demographic data was collected by predesigned questionnaires and microscopic results of intestinal parasites were collected by direct wet mount. Stool specimens were examined microscopically for the presence of parasite eggs, larva, cyst and trophozoite using direct saline thin smear methodResult: out of the total 371 study participants; 123(33.1%) had one or more intestinal parasitic infections. Seven species of intestinal parasite was identified in this study. The most prevalent intestinal parasite was Giardia lamblia (42.3%) followed by Ascaris lumbericoides (31.7%) and E.histolytica/dispar (13.0%). The prevalence of intestinal parasitic infection from participant who wash their hands before meal and after defecation with frequency of always, sometimes and not at all were 5(1.35%), 88(23.7%) and (8.08%) respectively The prevalence of intestinal parasitic infection of participants who use pipe, spring and well water as the source of drinking water was 19.4%,  6.4%, and 7.3% respectively. Conclusion and Recommendation: There was significant prevalence of pediatric intestinal parasitosis due to protozoan or helimenthic infection in the study area. There was statistically significant association between intestinal parasitic infections and waste disposal pit, water source,  finger nail status of patients. Appropriate prevention and control strategies should be employed to tackle the problem. Keywords: intestinal parasitic infection, pediatric patient, risk factor

Factors that Influence Persistence of Biology Majors at a Hispanic-Serving Institution

To promote diversity within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, we must identify factors that influence or hinder historically underrepresented minority (URM) students’ persistence to degrees in STEM. We documented potential factors that influence students’ persistence in an undergraduate biology program and created a 14-item, Likert-scale instrument. We recruited 137 undergraduate biology majors at a Hispanic-serving institution in Texas to report which factors they found influential in their decision to remain enrolled in their degree programs. We used a modified social cognitive career theory model of career choice to guide interpretation of the reported influences and identify patterns in responses. We documented three highly influential factors for all students: personal motivation, potential learning experiences, and job opportunities with the job opportunities showing a significant difference (P=0.036) between White and URM student groups. We also found a trend (P=0.056) indicating White students were more influenced by role models and mentors than URM students. Our findings suggest that personal motivation and potential job opportunities are the most influential factors driving students to seek educational opportunities that could lead to STEM careers. However, access to a diverse pool of role models also has the potential to provide positive impacts on student persistence in STEM

DEPAS: A Decentralized Probabilistic Algorithm for Auto-Scaling

The dynamic provisioning of virtualized resources offered by cloud computing infrastructures allows applications deployed in a cloud environment to automatically increase and decrease the amount of used resources. This capability is called auto-scaling and its main purpose is to automatically adjust the scale of the system that is running the application to satisfy the varying workload with minimum resource utilization. The need for auto-scaling is particularly important during workload peaks, in which applications may need to scale up to extremely large-scale systems. Both the research community and the main cloud providers have already developed auto-scaling solutions. However, most research solutions are centralized and not suitable for managing large-scale systems, moreover cloud providers' solutions are bound to the limitations of a specific provider in terms of resource prices, availability, reliability, and connectivity. In this paper we propose DEPAS, a decentralized probabilistic auto-scaling algorithm integrated into a P2P architecture that is cloud provider independent, thus allowing the auto-scaling of services over multiple cloud infrastructures at the same time. Our simulations, which are based on real service traces, show that our approach is capable of: (i) keeping the overall utilization of all the instantiated cloud resources in a target range, (ii) maintaining service response times close to the ones obtained using optimal centralized auto-scaling approaches.Comment: Submitted to Springer Computin

Prevalence and intensity of Schistosoma mansoni infections among schoolchildren attending primary schools in an urban setting in Southwest, Ethiopia

OBJECTIVE: To determined both prevalence and intensity of Schistosoma mansoni infections among schoolchildren attending primary schools in Jimma town, an urban setting, Southwest, Ethiopia. RESULTS: The prevalence of S. mansoni infections was 8.4%. S. mansoni infections were found in all 17 schools, but the school prevalence ranged from 1.7 to 26.7%. This variation in prevalence could be explained by the proximity of the schools to the river crossing the town and water bodies near the schools. Boys were more infected compared to girls (χ 2 = 31.587, P value = 0.001; 95% CI), and the infection rate increased as a function of age (χ 2 = 21.187; P value = 0.001; 95 %CI). The majority of the infection intensities were of low intensity (57%), the mean number of eggs per stool equal to 17 eggs per gram of stool. Based on the prevalence (8.4%) school children in Jimma Town is considered as a low risk of morbidity caused by S. mansoni (prevalence ≤ 10% according to WHO threshold), for which it is recommended to implement MDA once every 3 years which should be supplemented with health information to create awareness about Schistosomiasis transmission. Male students were more infected than females with majority of the infection intensity were low