Gender Difference in Perception and Care- Seeking for Illness among Under Five Children in Rural Areas of Bijapur District, Karnataka

"Background: Gender is a common term where as gender discrimination is meant for women, because females are more often the victims..Gender discrimination is due to the attitude and behaviour of the society towards the girl child. Objective: To assess the Perception and Care- Seeking for Illness among under five children by the parents in the rural areas of Bijapur district. Materials and Methods: A Cross Sectional Study was conducted across the ten Villages of Bijapur District from January 2013 to November 3013.A total of 1046 children were included in the study. Data was collected in a Pre tested, Pre designed, Semi structured Questionnaire by interview technique. Results: Around 41% (42% Male and 39.2% Female) of children had suffered from illness in the past one month. Parents spent higher amount for the treatment of male children. Conclusion : The time lag to avail treatment was less for male children and the amount spent for the treatment was also higher for Male children shows the affinity of the Parents towards the Male children. " [Natl J Community Med 2016; 7(1.000): 44-48

Exposing concerns about vaccination in low- and middle-income countries : a systematic review

Concerns about vaccination lead to under- and no-vaccination. Our objective is to synthesise and expose evidence on individuals' and communities' concerns about vaccination to influence current debates on strategies to improve vaccination coverage in low- and middle-income countries.; Systematic literature review till February 2014, following standard methods. Published and grey literature that focused on individuals and community concerns on childhood vaccinations were selected.; 44 quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods studies were included. Main reported concerns referred to perceptions of vaccine harms (e.g. attribution of fatal events). Other concerns included programme distrust (mainly due to rumours and conspiracies) and health system unfriendliness.; Concerns about vaccination are widespread and further worsen the challenges related to programmatic and health system barriers to vaccination. There is a disconnection between qualitative and quantitative research which misses the opportunity to quantify what is reported in the former. Strikingly, there is a wealth of evidence on concerns but much lesser evidence on interventions to address them. We welcome World Health Organization initiative to tackle vaccine hesitancy and call for the synthesis of evidence and production of guidance on strategies to address concerns on vaccination