Rising trend in maternal mortality at the university of Maiduguri Teaching hospital

Context: Various interventions have been introduced to reduce the very high maternal mortality ratio in our environmentbut to date the success is only marginal at best.Objective: To determine the trend in maternal mortality in University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH).Methods: Analysis of records of all women who died in pregnancy, labour and puerperium[up to 42 days after a pregnancy event] in UMTH between January, 2006 and December, 2010 was conducted.Results: The maternal mortality ratio (MMR) was 1074/100,000 live births. The main causes of maternal mortality were eclampsia in 34.6% of cases, haemorrhage (9.1%), HIV(17.8%) and puerperal infections (7.5%). There was rising trend in maternal mortality ratio over the study period. Factors contributing to maternal death included advanced maternal age, grand-multiparity, illiteracy, non-utilization of antenatal care services and late presentation to hospital.Conclusion: The maternal mortality ratio in UMTH is in in the upward trend and many of the causes of maternal death are avoidable. HIV appears to be an emerging major contributor to maternal deaths. There istherefore the need to strengthen the existing maternal health care services in Maiduguri, Borno state.Key words:Maternal mortality, trends, causes, Maidugur

On automatic age estimation from facial profile view

YesIn recent years, automatic facial age estimation has gained popularity due to its numerous applications. Much work has been done on frontal images and lately, minimal estimation errors have been achieved on most of the benchmark databases. However, in reality, images obtained in unconstrained environments are not always frontal. For instance, when conducting a demographic study or crowd analysis, one may get profile images of the face. To the best of our knowledge, no attempt has been made to estimate ages from the side-view of face images. Here we exploit this by using a pre-trained deep residual neural network (ResNet) to extract features. We then utilize a sparse partial least squares regression approach to estimate ages. Despite having less information as compared to frontal images, our results show that the extracted deep features achieve a promising performance

Impact of weeding frequency in controlling flea beetles (Podagrica spp.) and yield of three varieties of okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L. Moench) in Gombe State, Nigeria

Field studies were carried out at School of Agricultural Technology Teaching and Research Farm of Federal College of Horticulture, Dadin Kowa, Gombe State, Nigeria during 2014 and 2015 cropping seasons to assess the impact of weeding frequencies in controlling flea beetles (Podagrica spp.) using three varieties of Okra. Three varieties of Okra  (NGAE-96-1; NHAE-47-4 and Challawa) and four  weeding frequencies (no weeding, one weeding at 3 WAS, two weedings at 3 and 6 WAS and three weedings at 3, 6 and 9 WAS) were assessed using split plot laid out in randomized complete block design replicated three times. Results showed that the flea beetle (Podagrica spp.) populations, leaves and fruit damaged weight were significantly (P≤0.05) reduced while okra plant height and fruit yield were improved on plots that were weeded three times compared to other weeding frequencies. The result further showed that NGAE-96-1 and NHAE-47-4 reduced flea beetle (Podagrica spp.) populations, leaves and fruit damage than challawa. The results indicated that flea beetle control could be effectively achieved and okra production improved through the manipulation of weeding frequencies and selecting the appropriate okra varieties in the study area

Individualised model of facial age synthesis based on constrained regression

YesFaces convey much information. Interestingly we humans have a remarkable ability of identifying, extracting, and interpreting this information. Recently automatic facial ageing (AFA) has gained popularity due to its numerous applications which include search for missing people, biometrics, and multimedia. The problem of AFA is faced with various challenges, including incomplete training datasets, unrestrained environments, ethnic and gender variations to mention but a few. This work presents a new approach to automatic facial ageing which involves the development of a person specific facial ageing system. A color based Active Appearance Model (AAM) is used to extract facial features. Then, regression is used to model an age estimator. Age synthesis is achieved by computing a solution that minimises the distance from the original face with the use of constrained regression. The model is tested on a challenging database of single image per person. Initial results suggest that plausible images can be rerendered at different ages, automatically using the AAM representation. Using the constrained regressor we are guaranteed to get estimated ages that are exact for an individual at a given age

Analysis of Resource-Use Efficiency in Tomato Production in Jere, Borno State, Nigeria

The study investigated the resource use efficiency of dry season tomato production among small scale farmers in Lake Alau of Jere Local Government Area of Borno state. Primary data for the study was collected using structured questionnaires and oral interviews from 60 tomato farmers. Four villages notable for tomato production were purposively selected, and from each village, 15 farmers were randomly selected. The data collected were analyzed using production function analysis. The results of the double-log production function showed that seed, herbicides, fertilizer and farm size were positively related to the output and it is significant at 1% while labour was negatively related. And the farmers were inefficient in the use of all resources, with inputs being over-utilised. This may be due to the severe nature of land fragmentation occurring around Maiduguri and Jere, being among the few relatively secure areas in the state. The study suggests that introduction of modern methods like greenhouse cultivation of tomatoes coupled with drip irrigation systems, will enable year-round cultivation and allow farmers to optimize resource use. Keywords: Resource-use, efficiency, production function, agribusiness, Jere, tomat

Phytochemical screening and antibacterial activity of leaf extracts of Senna siamea (LAM) on Pseudomonas aeruginosa

The anti-pseudomonal activities of aqueous, chloroform and ethanolic extracts of leaf of Senna siamea (LAM) were evaluated by agar disc diffusion method. This was with the aim of substantiating the ethnomedicinal use of the plant as anti-bacterial. All the extracts were not active to Ps. aeruginosa at the concentration levels of 100μg/disc and 200μg/disc, however the extracts were active at high concentration levels of 500μg/disc and 1000μ/disc revealing a dose – dependent antibacterial activity. Aqueous extract was the most active with zone diameter of inhibitions of 16mm and 30mm followed by ethanolic extract which had zones of inhibition of 10mm and 16mm and the least was chloroform extract which has zone diameter of inhibitions of 08mm and 14mm, all at 500μg/disc and 1000μg/disc concentrations respectively. Ciprofloxacin (oxoid) as positive control had zone diameter of inhibition of 35mm in all the test plates. The antipsedomonal potential of the leaves of Senna siamea Lam leaf may be due to the phytochemical compounds present in the leaf extracts, which were found to be tannins, saponnins and steroids. However aqueous extract proved to be a more suitable candidate for use in the treatment of diseases cause by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Hence, antimicrobial evaluation and biotechnological study of the whole plant are thus recommended. Keywords: Antipseudomonal, Senna siamea, Phytochemicals. Screening, Pseudomonas aeruginos

Automatic age and gender classification using supervised appearance model

YesAge and gender classification are two important problems that recently gained popularity in the research community, due to their wide range of applications. Research has shown that both age and gender information are encoded in the face shape and texture, hence the active appearance model (AAM), a statistical model that captures shape and texture variations, has been one of the most widely used feature extraction techniques for the aforementioned problems. However, AAM suffers from some drawbacks, especially when used for classification. This is primarily because principal component analysis (PCA), which is at the core of the model, works in an unsupervised manner, i.e., PCA dimensionality reduction does not take into account how the predictor variables relate to the response (class labels). Rather, it explores only the underlying structure of the predictor variables, thus, it is no surprise if PCA discards valuable parts of the data that represent discriminatory features. Toward this end, we propose a supervised appearance model (sAM) that improves on AAM by replacing PCA with partial least-squares regression. This feature extraction technique is then used for the problems of age and gender classification. Our experiments show that sAM has better predictive power than the conventional AAM

Review on biogas production processess

No Abstract

Hysterosalpingographic findings in infertile women: A seven year review

Objectives: To review the hysterosalpingographic (HSG) findings in women investigated for infertility in a tertiary center in north eastern Nigeria.Materials and Methods: A retrospective review of HSG films of 272 women investigated for infertility between January 2000 and December 2006 were reviewed.Results: One hundred and thirty (47.8%) were investigated for primary infertility, while 142 (52.2%) were investigated for secondary infertility. Most of the women investigated for infertility by HSG had abnormal findings 192(70.6%). The most common pathology revealed among the infertile women was tuboperitoneal factor in 196 (72.1%) followed by uterine synechia in 35(12.9%). Seventeen (6.3%) had bilateral tubal block and 5 (1.8%) had bicornuate uterus.Conclusion: HSG is helpful in the investigation of infertile women

Oral health practices among pregnant women in North Eastern Nigeria

Objective: The objective of this study was to document oral health practices of pregnant women in two tertiary institutions in North-eastern Nigeria.Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study of pregnant women seen at the antenatal clinics of the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital and Federal Medical Centre Yola from May 1, 2009 to July 1, 2009.Results: A total of 294 women were interviewed. They were aged 15-46 with a mean of 27.42 ± 5.97 years. The parity ranged from 1 to 9 with a mean of 2.23 ± 1.65. Twelve (4.1%) women gave a history of symptomatic oral lesion in index pregnancy. Forty-four (15%) had had previous encounter with a dentist, while the highest frequency of oral care was twice a day in 164 (55.8%) of respondents. The majority, 264 (89.9%), used toothbrush/toothpaste as a form of oral care while 2 (0.7%) used charcoal. Women of low parity tended to have better oral care than those of high parity (P = 0.002). Women who are employed had better oral care than housewives (x2 = 27.749, P = 0.001). There was no significant relationship between oral complaints and trimester of pregnancy (x2 = 4.271, P = 0.118).Conclusion: Oral healthcare among the respondents was encouraging but involvement of the dental surgeon in preventive oral care in pregnancy is rather dismal