Assessment of childhood domestic injuries among joint and nuclear families of Karachi

To assess the frequencies and factors of domestic injuries among children aged less than 5 years. This is a cross sectional study, in which parents who have child less than 5 years of age were targeted. A total of 246 participants had provided satisfactory information and they were approached by non-probability purposive sampling technique from January 2016 to June 2016. The data was entered in Excel and then imported to SPSS 19.0 for inferential analysis. In this study, 89.8% (n = 221) mothers and 10.2% (n = 25) father who had participated. 52.08% (n = 123) parents were from joint family. The different types of domestic injuries faced by children were fall (52%), sharp cut (36%), and burn (31%) and Temporary fever, rashes and scratches were the most common consequence of domestic injury as experienced by 57% children. No any significant difference (p \u3e 0.05) in the storage practices of different household hazardous item was observed among the parents living in joint and nuclear family system. Protecting children from domestic injury is a multi-dimensional approach. It needs parent’s education, manufacturer guidance, Government regulation and joint community efforts for proper and safe storage of household items. These measures will aid in reducing the burden of childhood domestic injuries

Knowledge and Practices on the Prevention and management of diarrhea in children under-2 years among women dwelling in urban slums of Karachi, Pakistan

Background: Diarrhea is the second leading cause of death especially among children. The age-proportionate mortality of diarrheal disease in infants under 2 years is 72%, among children under 5 years of age. Children living in urban slums are more prone to develop diarrhea. Although the disease can be prevented by many simple cost-effective interventions, i.e. proper sanitation and hygiene, appropriate feeding, and timely vaccination, poverty and lack of basic life amenities often potentiate diarrhea mortality. Gadap town is the largest town of Karachi with a deprived health system. This study aims to assess pediatric diarrhea prevalence and related knowledge-practice gaps in the slums of Gadap Town, Karachi, Pakistan. Method: A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted from November 2016 to May 2017 among mothers of children under 2 years, who were residents of Gadap Town, Karachi, Pakistan. The participants were approached by a multistage sampling method. A validated dichotomous questionnaire, piloted on 40 participants, translated into local language Urdu was used for data collection and the data was analyzed by SPSS® version 20.0. Results: 51.8% (n = 199) of participants were aged between 25 and 34 years. Among all participants, 68% (n = 261) had primary level education or less, compared to 4.7% (n = 18) of women who had graduate-level education. The mean number of children per woman was 2.52 ± 1.62. Self-reported pediatric diarrhea incidence was 72.1% (n = 277). More than half (55.2% n = 149) of participants reported frequent diarrhea episodes during the 2nd year of their child\u27s life. In this survey, we found the knowledge of women regarding diarrhea management and how to reduce diarrhea morbidity to be inadequate (p \u3e 0.05). However, many women reported appropriate practices which can significantly reduce diarrhea morbidity (p \u3c 0.05). Conclusion: While the knowledge among women on preventive measures for pediatric diarrhea was insufficient, the translation of the right knowledge into appropriate practices showed promising outcomes for reducing diarrhea morbidity. An integrated approach for improving feeding, sanitation, and hygiene practices along with continuous health education could curtail the burden of diarrhea among infants living in urban slum

Missed immunization opportunities among children under 5 years of age dwelling In Karachi city

Background: Immunization is the safest and effective measure for preventing and eradicating various communicable diseases. A glaring immunization gap exists between developing and industrialized countries towards immunization, because the developing countries including Pakistan are still striving to provide basic immunization to their children. The purpose of this study was to access the prevalence and factors of missing immunization among under 5-year children of Karachi.Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted from June 2015 to October 2015 among different outpatient clinics of Karachi. Parents who had child less than 5 year of age were approached by non-probability purposive sampling. Data was analysed by using Statistical Package of Social Sciences.Results: There were around 59.09% (n=156) and 64.43% (n=165) parents who have correctly responded regarding the number of essential immunization visit during the first and second year of their child life respectively. About 28.12% (n=108) parents responded that they do not know about the name and number of missed doses of vaccines. 31.78% (n=122) parents responded that their children have missed either one or more than one doses of routine immunization vaccines. Of which 34.42% (n=42) children have missed more than one vaccine. Lack of knowledge regarding immunization schedule 28.68% (n=34), concern about vaccine side effects 21.31%, (n=26), child sickness 17.21% (n=21), and lack of trust about government 10.65%, (n=13) were the major barriers identified by parents for missed immunization opportunities.Conclusion: Parents have inadequate knowledge regarding routine immunization visits, immunization schedule and vaccine doses. The practices of parents for routine childhood immunization are also poor. Parents refuse to immunize their child because of lack of immunization visit knowledge and also because of their doubts regarding vaccine potency and side effects. A proper system of immunization promotion, advocacy and reminder systems with proper follow-up mechanism need to be developed by all healthcare centres

Topology control for harvesting enabled wireless sensor networks: a design approach

While there has been a lot of research on energy efficient topology control protocols destined for different applications, topology control has never been explored in the presence of harvesting enabled sensors. Largely, researchers in this domain have considered a fixed battery design. We argue that arrival of harvesting enabled sensors necessitates rethink of topology control. The objective of topology control in this context should not be to minimize the spent energy and maintain a reduced topology, but to maximize fault tolerance in the network and increase the sensing coverage region. In this work, we first describe a taxonomy of existing topology control schemes and analyze the impact of reduced topology over fault tolerance and sensing coverage. We then describe the necessity of new design parameters in the presence of harvest-able ambient energy. We also outline guiding principles for designing a harvesting enabled topology control scheme. To cater for whether such a scheme is feasible or not, an insight is also provided onto the solar energy availability from solar radiations for near perpetual operation—as an example of available ambient energy. Based on the insight gained from the solar radiations availability, we explain why new design parameters are required for performance measurement of harvesting enabled sensors. The mathematical and empirical findings reveal that the topology control strategies, which do not take into account harvesting opportunity, are unable to provide better results in terms of fault tolerance and sensing coverage

Assessment of Determinants of Paediatric Diarrhoea Case Management Adherence in Pakistan

Worldwide, diarrhoea in children under five years of age is the second leading cause of death. Despite having high morbidity and mortality, diarrhoeal diseases can be averted by simple and cost-effective interventions. The Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) has proposed the use of Oral Rehydration Salt (ORS) and zinc together with adequate food and fluid intake for the management of acute non-dysenteric watery diarrhoea in children. In the past, few studies examined the determinants of adherence to diarrhoea case management. Therefore, this study measured the determinants of therapeutic and dietary adherence to diarrhoea case management using the third and fourth wave of Pakistan Demographics and Health Surveys (PDHS) datasets. Data from 4068 children between 0 to 59.9 months with positive history of diarrhoea were included, while data on children with dysentery, severe dehydration, and co-morbid condition was excluded. This study reported therapeutic adherence in less than 10% of children in Pakistan, while dietary adherence was reported in 39.2% of children (37.7% in 2012–2013 and 40.7% in 2017–2018). A significant improvement in therapeutic (0.8% in 2012–2013 and 8.1% in 2017–2018) and dietary adherence (37.7% in 2012–2013 and 40.7% in 2017–2018) was reported in the 2017–2018 survey compared to the 2012–2013 survey. In general, children over the age of one year (compared to children <1 year) and of the richer/richest socioeconomic class (compared to poorest/poorer socioeconomic class) showed higher therapeutic and dietary adherence. Therapeutic and dietary adherence among diarrhoeal children can be improved by increasing the awareness and accessibility of ORS, zinc, and essential foods

Variable rate adaptive modulation (VRAM) for introducing small-world model into WSNs

Data communication has a strong impact on the design of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), since the data transmission energy cost is typically higher than the data processing cost. In order to reduce the data transmission cost, small world phenomenon is introduced into WSNs. Networks that do not have the small world structure can be converted to achieve a small world property by the addition of few extra links. The problem is that most large scale WSNs are inherently unstructured and a node has no precise information of the overall model of the network and thus has to rely on the knowledge of its neighbor. For this reason, in most unstructured networks, information is propagated using gossiping. In this paper, we exploit this information propagation mechanism and use Neighbor Avoiding Walk (NAW), where the information is propagated to node that has not been visited previously and which is not the neighbor of a previously visited node. Using this, a novel approach is presented, in which nodes with highest betweenness centrality form a long distance relay path by using a lower order modulation scheme and therefore resulting in a relatively reduced data rate, but maintaining the same bit error rate. Our empirical and analytical evaluations demonstrate that this leads to a significant reduction in average path length and an increase in node degree

Interference and estimation of economic threshold level of Alternanthera philoxeroides in maize (Zea mays L.)

Knowledge of economic threshold of emerging invasive weed Alternanthera philoxeroides (alligatorweed) is important to implement timely, efficientand economical weed control method for profitable maize production. Two-year field study consisting  fivedensity levels of A. philoxeroides viz. 0, 1, 2, 4 and 8 plants m-2 was conducted  to estimate the maize grain yield losses at different density levels and to determine  economic threshold level (ETL) of A. philoxeroides . Maximum weed dry biomass (44.28 g m-2), N (9.02 kg ha-1), P (7.91-6.86 kg ha-1) and K (7.99 kg ha-1) were observed at 8 plants m-2 A. philoxeroides density. The same weed density caused highest reduction maize plant height, number of grains per cob, 100 grain weight, grain weight per cob and biological yield of maize. Higher A. philoxeroides density also caused up to 62% reduction in maize grain yield and 21% reduction in grain protein contents as compared to weed free. ETL of A. philoxeroides was estimated to be 0.47 plants m-2, if this weed controlled chemically. Based on current finings complete control of this weed using chemical weed control is suggested to tackle yield losses in grain maize

A lightweight blockchain based two factor authentication mechanism for LoRaWAN join procedure

Recently, there has been increasing interest in employing blockchain in different applications, other than crypto-currencies. Blockchains allow a peer to peer distributed network where different nodes communicate with each other, in a trustless manner. Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is an Internet of Things (IoT) technology, which enables long range communication. Although LoRaWAN networks are secure, the LoRaWAN join procedure is susceptible to replay and jamming attacks. Moreover, trust between network server and LoRa end device is the basic foundation of LoRaWAN network however, the centralized nature of network servers raise trust issues between network operators and customers. To solve this problem, we propose a lightweight two factor authentication mechanism for LoRaWAN join procedure, based on blockchain technology. The proposed blockchain based framework provides an extra layer of security for LoRaWAN join procedure and build trust among LoRaWAN network components. The proposed framework is validated using the Ethereum blockchain. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework provides efficient system performance in terms of throughput and latency. The proposed blockchain architecture is a cost effective solution, which can be utilized in the LoRaWAN network with few network servers and LoRa end device, having no strict requirement of throughput and latency

Energy management in harvesting enabled sensing nodes: prediction and control

Energy efficient transmission rate regulation of wireless sensing nodes, is a critical issue when operating in an energy harvesting (EH) enabled environment. In this work, we view the energy management problem as a queue control problem where the objective is to regulate transmission such that the energy level converges to a reference value. We employ a validated non-linear queuing model to derive two non-linear robust throughput controllers. A notable feature of the proposed scheme is its capability of predicting harvest-able energy. The predictions are generated using the proposed Accurate Solar Irradiance prediction Model (ASIM) whose effectiveness in generating accurate both long and short term predictions is demonstrated using real world data. The stability of the proposed controllers is established analytically and the effectiveness of the proposed strategies is demonstrated using simulations conducted on the Network Simulator (NS-3). The proposed policy is successful in guiding the energy level to the reference value, and outperforms the Throughput Optimal (TO) policy in terms of the throughput achieved

A review of toolkits and case definitions for detecting enteric fever outbreaks in Asian and African countries from 1965-2019

Background: This review assessed the case definitions, diagnostic criteria, antimicrobial resistance, and methods used for enteric fever outbreaks and utilization of any unified outbreak score or checklist for early identification and response in Asia and Africa from 1965-2019.Methods: We searched enteric fever outbreaks using PubMed, Google Scholar, and the Cochrane library. Studies describing a single outbreak event of enteric fever in Asia and Africa from 1965-2019 were reviewed. We excluded case reports, letter to editors, studies reporting typhoid in conjunction with other diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) trip reports, the World Health Organization (WHO) bulletins report, data from mathematical modeling and simulation studies, reviews and ProMed alert. Also, non-typhoidal salmonella outbreaks were excluded.Results: A total of 5063 articles were identified using the key terms and 68 studies were selected for data extraction. Most (48, 71%) outbreaks were from Asian countries, 20 (29%) were reported from Africa. Only 15 studies reported the case definition used for case identification during an outbreak and 8 of those were from Asia. A third (20, 29%) of the studies described antibiotic resistance pattern. 43 (63%) studies contained information regarding the source of the outbreak. Outcomes (hospitalization and deaths) were reported in a quarter of studies. Only 23 (29%) of the studies reported outbreak control strategies while none reported any unified outbreak score or a checklist to identify the outbreak.Conclusion: This review highlights the variability in detection and reporting methods for enteric fever outbreaks in Asia and Africa. No standardized case definitions or laboratory methods were reported. Only a few studies reported strategies for outbreak control. There is a need for the development of a unified outbreak score or a checklist to identify and report enteric fever outbreaks globally