Poverty among households living in slum area of Hlaing Tharyar Township, Yangon City, Myanmar

Background: Slums can be regarded as physical manifestations of urban poverty. Although the world has made dramatic improvement in reducing poverty since 1990, poverty still persists at an unacceptable level. Although current situations highlights the importance of slum areas to be given priority in poverty alleviation, there are limited data on poverty level among people living in urban slums of Myanmar.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among households living in slum areas of Hlaing Tharyar Township, Yangon City, Myanmar during 2016. Multi-staged systematic random sampling and face-to-face interview were applied in selecting the samples and collecting the data, respectively. The new global poverty line (1.9 USD per person per day) was used as a threshold in determining the poverty. Chi-squared test and multivariate logistic regression analysis were utilized in data analysis.Results: Altogether 254 participants were recruited after getting informed consent. The occurrence of poverty among households was 54.3% (95% CI: 48.2%, 60.5%). Head counts of poverty among study population was 58.8%. The education status of household’s head, size of household and the presence of less than 15 years old children in the household were detected as significant determinants of being poor household.Conclusions: Poverty among households living in slum area of Hlaing Tharyar Township, Yangon City was high. Measures to alleviate poverty in urban slums should be intensified. Education level of household’s heads should be improved. Family planning or birth spacing programme should also be strengthened, especially in urban slums.

Correlation between Body Mass Index (BMI) and Waist to Hip Ratio (WHR) among undergraduate students

Body mass index (BMI) is a common, inexpensive and simple method to categorize individuals as underweight, normal weight, overweight, obese I and obese II. However, this method does not reflect body shape and fat distribution. Waist to hip ratio (WHR) is a more recent and accurate method to measure body fat distribution and can be used routinely. The purpose of this study was to compare BMI and WHR of Malaysian undergraduate medical students. The weight, height, waist line and hip line of 82 undergraduate medical students studying at SEGi University, Malaysia were measured and used to calculate BMI and WHR using the standard formula. For males, the highest mean BMI was recorded for Indian students followed by those for Malay and Chinese. However, for males, the highest mean WHR was recorded for Malay followed by those for Chinese and Indian. For females, both mean BMI and WHR were highest for Malay, followed by those for Indian and Chinese. No correlation was found between BMI and WHR among the overall and male participants respectively. However significant correlation was present between BMI and WHR among female participants (r value = 0.623). In conclusion, in this research, there was correlation between BMI and WHR in female population. Therefore the Malaysian females, specially Malay females should be more aware of their health, their food intake and they should take better care of their health, do more physical activity in order to have healthier life and get less exposed to diseases caused by high BMI and WHR