Magnitude and Pattern of Disease Presentation among Students in Federal University of Technology Owerri Nigeria 1*

Abstract: Students' wellbeing is paramount to their effective participation in academic and extracurricular activities. This study described the prevalence and pattern of disease presentation among students attending Federal University of Technology Medical Centre, Owerri, Nigeria. A descriptive cross-sectional hospital based study of consecutive 552 students who gave their informed consent. Data were extracted through clerking, examination and laboratory investigations and they included socio-demographic information and diagnoses. These data were entered into Microsoft Excel 2016 and transported to Xlstat 2015 for analysis. The age distribution of the students revealed that majority of the students (46.4%) were within the age bracket of 17-23years. The mean age of the students was 24 years. The majority of the students (22.6%) were drawn from the School of Engineering and Engineering Technology. The disease pattern of students showed that typhomalaria fever was most prevalent (33.5%), malaria (28.9%), upper respiratory tract infection (21.3%), hypertension (7.3%), peptic ulcer disease (5.7%) and typhoid (3.6%). Malaria was most prevalent during the rainy season in the months of June and July, 36.5% and 35.1% respectively. Strengthening of the primary health care system, application of the principles of integrated vector management and investing substantially in specialist care model will lessen the burden of diseases in the University community

Test method for measuring non-visible set-off from inks and lacquers on the food-contact surface of printed packaging materials

The main objective was to develop a technique to expose spots of invisible set-off of inks and lacquers on the food-contact surface of food-packaging materials. Set-off is the unintentional transfer of components of printing inks from the outer printed surface onto the food-contact surfaces. The target sensitivity was 20 μg cm-2 and the technique should be capable of examining large areas of printed substrate for no more than 4% coverage by set-off. These requirements equate to an ability to detect a worst-case migration potential of less than 50 μg kg-1. Other objectives were the industrial requirements that the equipment should be inexpensive, should be easy to use by existing personnel and should preferably be non-destructive with a clear criterion for pass or fail. The approaches investigated included chemical analysis of solvent extracts, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy and microbeam analytical techniques, but these were found to be cumbersome and had only limited success. The objectives were achieved using an optical approach to excite and observe luminescence from invisible set-off. In model experiments, resins were applied to different substrates (plastic, paper and cartonboard). For a given resin on a given material, the key to success was to maximize the discrimination between the luminescence from the resin and that from the substrate by selecting the optimal combination of exciting wavelength and viewing goggles with selective wavelength filters. The required level of detection (20 μg cm-2) was achieved or exceeded for all ten resins tested on three different plastics. It was also achieved for two different papers and in all but four cases of the resins on three different cartonboards. Quantitation was achieved by the use of a calibration palette prepared using different quantities of resin spotted onto the relevant blank packaging material

Petromin: the slow death of statist oil development in Saudi Arabia

The paper recounts the history of Saudi Arabia's first national oil company, Petromin, which was originally supposed to take the place of foreign-owned Aramco. As a result of Petromin's inefficiency and personal rivalries among the Saudi elite, however, Petromin was progressively relegated to the sidelines in favour of a gradually 'Saudiised' Aramco. As a result, the organisation of the Saudi oil sector today is very different from - and more efficient than - that of most other oil exporters in the developing world. The paper concludes with a tentative taxonomy of national oil companies, based on the circumstances of nationalisation