3,723 research outputs found
Determinants of Child Mortality in Oyo State, Nigeria
This paper examined and identified some important determinants of infant and child mortality in Oyo state using Atiba Local Government as a case study. A total of 150 respondents were randomly selected from the entire populace in the metropolis. Logistic regression method was used to determine the factors that determine child mortality in the region. Findings reveals that out of the major determinants listed, Poverty, Malaria, Postnatal care, Health scheme and Breastfeeding are the major determinants of Child mortality in the state while HIV though catalyses child mortality was not a major determinant. It was therefore advised that policies should be revised for proper implementation and health intervention programmes that focus on mothers‟ and children‟s health should be strengthened to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of infant and child mortality in the remaining years. In addition, parents‟ economic conditions especially the father should be improved to encourage prolonged breast feeding.Key words: Infant mortality, child mortality, breastfeeding, Malaria, Povert
A national survey of rice (Oryza sativa L.) Grain quality in Sierra Leone II: Evaluation of physical grain quality
Rice is a very important item of food and commerce in Sierra Leone and so information on the quality of available rice grains can serve as a useful indicator for the technical status and level of competitiveness in the local rice industry. During this study an objective evaluation was conducted to measure and characterize the quality of rice grains available in the local markets of Sierra Leone. A total of 315 randomly selected rice samples from 45 markets selected from the four major cities of Sierra Leone (Makeni, Bo, Kenema and Freetown, representing urban communities from the northern, southern, eastern and western parts of the country, respectively) were evaluated. Quality evaluation involved measurement of moisture content, number of paddy (unmilled rice kernels) in 1 kg of milled rice and other quality factors normally used for the grading of milled rice. Rice samples were then graded based on criteria adapted from the Philippines Rice Grading Standards for milled rice grains. The results showed that the quality of all grain samples evaluated was generally poor, with 63.2% of the samples failing to meet the criteria set for Grade III rice quality (meaning that the quality level was worse than grade III). Quality measures obtained for imported samples appeared to be superior to that obtained for the local samples in terms of higher proportions of superior grades (grade II or better). Comparison of measures of grading factors revealed that among the four cities considered in this study, grains from Kenema were of the lowest quality. Further examination of grade limiting factors revealed that the most critical factors responsible for poor quality outcomes in grain sample were (i) the number of paddy in 1kg of milled rice and (ii) the moisture content of grains. The study provided quantitative measures of the quality status of rice grains available in Sierra Leone, as well as a means of identifying the major binding constraints to rice grain quality, in terms of the grade limiting factors. It is speculated that the low quality of rice grains observed in this study could be the result of avoidable quality defects that may be linked to an undeveloped national system for rice milling and handling.Keywords: Rice grading, grain quality attributes, physical characteristics, Sierra Leon
Campylobacter bacteremia in London: A 44-year single-center study.
PURPOSE: Campylobacter species are a well-recognized but rare cause of bloodstream infection. METHODS: Here we reviewed 41 cases of Campylobacter bloodstream infection occurring at a single center in London over 44years, comprising 0.2% of all recorded episodes during this time period. RESULTS: Patients had a mean age of 46years and, contrasting with previous reports, nearly 50% of our patients did not have significant comorbidities. Ciprofloxacin resistance increased over the study period with 35% of isolates overall being resistant compared with only 3% exhibiting macrolide resistance. Despite a minority of patients receiving appropriate empirical antibiotic therapy, overall mortality was only 7%. CONCLUSION: Campylobacter bacteremia remains a rare but significant cause of morbidity with a low associated mortality. Underlying immunosuppressive conditions are common but by no means universal. In our setting, macrolides would be favored as empirical agents to treat suspected Campylobacter enteritis, including cases with associated bacteremia
Organ procurement organizations Internet enrollment for organ donation: Abandoning informed consent
BACKGROUND: Requirements for organ donation after cardiac or imminent death have been introduced to address the transplantable organs shortage in the United States. Organ procurement organizations (OPOs) increasingly use the Internet for organ donation consent. METHODS: An analysis of OPO Web sites available to the public for enrollment and consent for organ donation. The Web sites and consent forms were examined for the minimal information recommended by the United States Department of Health and Human Services for informed consent. Content scores were calculated as percentages of data elements in four information categories: donor knowledge, donor consent reinforcement, donation promotion, and informed consent. RESULTS: There were 60 Web sites for organ donation enrollment serving the 52 states. The median percent (10 percentile-90 percentile) content scores of the Web sites for donor knowledge, donor consent reinforcement, and donation promotion were 33% (20–47), 79% (57–86), and 75% (50–100), respectively. The informed consent score was 0% (0–33). The content scores for donor knowledge and informed consent were significantly lower than donor consent reinforcement and donation promotion for all Web sites (P < .05). The content scores for the four categories were similar among the 11 regions of the United Network for Organ Sharing. CONCLUSION: The Web sites and consent forms for public enrollment in organ donation do not fulfill the necessary requirements for informed consent. The Web sites predominantly provide positive reinforcement and promotional information rather than the transparent disclosure of organ donation process. Independent regulatory oversight is essential to ensure that Internet enrollment for organ donation complies with legal and ethical standards for informed consent
A Linear Programming Formulation and Approximation Algorithms for the Metric Labeling Problem
We consider approximation algorithms for the metric labeling problem. This problem was introduced in a paper by Kleinberg and Tardos [J. ACM, 49 (2002), pp. 616–630] and captures many classification problems that arise in computer vision and related fields. They gave an O(log k log log k) approximation for the general case, where k is the number of labels, and a 2-approximation for the uniform metric case. (In fact, the bound for general metrics can be improved to O(log k) by the work of Fakcheroenphol, Rao, and Talwar [Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 2003, pp. 448–455].) Subsequently, Gupta and Tardos [Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing, 2000, pp. 652–658] gave a 4-approximation for the truncated linear metric, a metric motivated by practical applications to image restoration and visual correspondence. In this paper we introduce an integer programming formulation and show that the integrality gap of its linear relaxation either matches or improves the ratios known for several cases of the metric labeling problem studied until now, providing a unified approach to solving them. In particular, we show that the integrality gap of our linear programming (LP) formulation is bounded by O(log k) for a general k-point metric and 2 for the uniform metric, thus matching the known ratios. We also develop an algorithm based on our LP formulation that achieves a ratio of 2 + √2 ~= 3.414 for the truncated linear metric improving the earlier known ratio of 4. Our algorithm uses the fact that the integrality gap of the LP formulation is 1 on a linear metric
Framework For Improving Complex System Performance
This paper introduces a framework for improvement of complex system performance. Complex systems are besieged with conditions marked by increasing uncertainty, emergence, and ambiguity. Additionally, demands for increased productivity, resource efficiencies, and performance improvement make new approaches paramount for modern systems engineers. In response, a framework to improve complex system performance is developed. Following an introduction, the paper pursues four objectives: (1) introduction of Complex System Governance (CSG) as a foundation to describe essential system functions, (2) suggest system `pathologies\u27 as an explanation for deep system performance issues, (3) exploration of system performance improvement as a function of `requisite variety\u27 to compensate for deep system issues, and (4) introduce a framework for complex system performance improvement using system pathologies as `unab-sorbed variety\u27. The paper closes with some challenges for further development of the framework for deployment and application guidance for practitioners
Origin of bistability underlying mammalian cell cycle entry
Mammalian cell cycle entry is controlled at the restriction point by a bistable and resettable switch, which is shown to emerge from a minimal gene circuit containing a mutual-inhibition feedback loop between Rb and E2F modules, coupled with a feed-forward loop between Myc and E2F modules
Exploring the experiences of having Guillain‐Barré Syndrome: A qualitative interview study
Background: Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare inflammatory disorder affecting the peripheral nerves. Although typically there is full neurological recovery, some people continue to experience residual physical, psychological or social problems longer term. Evidence describing the experiences of people with GBS is limited.
Objective: We aimed to explore the experiences of people with GBS in the UK.
Design: We used qualitative (face-to-face and telephone) interviews to explore experiences of people with GBS. Audio-recorded data were transcribed verbatim and analysed using the Framework Method supported by NVivo 11.
Setting and Participants: We purposively recruited a sample of 16 volunteers with a prior diagnosis of GBS of varying age, sex, ethnicity, location, marital status, time since diagnosis and length of hospital stay to maximize differences in experience. Interviewees were required to have been discharged from hospital, able to give informed consent, able to speak and understand English and currently resident in the United Kingdom.
Results: The key themes arising from the analysis were as follows: the importance of early diagnosis; the experiences of inpatient care; the importance of active support for recovery; the need for communication throughout the course of the illness; the need for greater awareness, knowledge and provision of information by health-care staff; and path to achieving function.
Conclusion: This is the first qualitative study exploring experiences of people with GBS in the UK through their whole illness journey from onset to recovery. The findings contribute to our understanding of the experiences and support needs of people recovering from GBS
How Many Subpopulations is Too Many? Exponential Lower Bounds for Inferring Population Histories
Reconstruction of population histories is a central problem in population
genetics. Existing coalescent-based methods, like the seminal work of Li and
Durbin (Nature, 2011), attempt to solve this problem using sequence data but
have no rigorous guarantees. Determining the amount of data needed to correctly
reconstruct population histories is a major challenge. Using a variety of tools
from information theory, the theory of extremal polynomials, and approximation
theory, we prove new sharp information-theoretic lower bounds on the problem of
reconstructing population structure -- the history of multiple subpopulations
that merge, split and change sizes over time. Our lower bounds are exponential
in the number of subpopulations, even when reconstructing recent histories. We
demonstrate the sharpness of our lower bounds by providing algorithms for
distinguishing and learning population histories with matching dependence on
the number of subpopulations. Along the way and of independent interest, we
essentially determine the optimal number of samples needed to learn an
exponential mixture distribution information-theoretically, proving the upper
bound by analyzing natural (and efficient) algorithms for this problem.Comment: 38 pages, Appeared in RECOMB 201
3D molecule generation by denoising voxel grids
We propose a new score-based approach to generate 3D molecules represented as
atomic densities on regular grids. First, we train a denoising neural network
that learns to map from a smooth distribution of noisy molecules to the
distribution of real molecules. Then, we follow the neural empirical Bayes
framework (Saremi and Hyvarinen, 19) and generate molecules in two steps: (i)
sample noisy density grids from a smooth distribution via underdamped Langevin
Markov chain Monte Carlo, and (ii) recover the "clean" molecule by denoising
the noisy grid with a single step. Our method, VoxMol, generates molecules in a
fundamentally different way than the current state of the art (ie, diffusion
models applied to atom point clouds). It differs in terms of the data
representation, the noise model, the network architecture and the generative
modeling algorithm. Our experiments show that VoxMol captures the distribution
of drug-like molecules better than state of the art, while being faster to
generate samples
- …