Crowding: risk factor or protective factor for lower respiratory disease in young children?

BACKGROUND: To study the effects of household crowding upon the respiratory health of young children living in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. METHODS: Case-control study with children aged from 2 to 59 months living within the boundaries of the city of São Paulo. Cases were children recruited from 5 public hospitals in central São Paulo with an acute episode of lower respiratory disease. Children were classified into the following diagnostic categories: acute bronchitis, acute bronchiolitis, pneumonia, asthma, post-bronchiolitis wheezing and wheezing of uncertain aetiology. One control, crudely matched to each case with regard to age (<2, 2 years old or more), was selected among healthy children living in the neighborhood of the case. All buildings were surveyed for the presence of environmental contaminants, type of construction and building material. Plans of all homes, including measurements of floor area, height of walls, windows and solar orientation, was performed. Data were analysed using conditional logistic regression. RESULTS: A total of 313 pairs of children were studied. Over 70% of the cases had a primary or an associated diagnosis of a wheezing illness. Compared with controls, cases tended to live in smaller houses with less adequate sewage disposal. Cases and controls were similar with respect to the number of people and the number of children under five living in the household, as well the number of people sharing the child's bedroom. After controlling for potential confounders, no evidence of an association between number of persons sharing the child's bedroom and lower respiratory disease was identified when all cases were compared with their controls. However, when two categories of cases were distinguished (infections, asthma) and each category compared separately with their controls, crowding appeared to be associated with a 60% reduction in the incidence of asthma but with 2 1/2-fold increase in the incidence of lower respiratory tract infections (p = 0.001). CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that household crowding places young children at risk of acute lower respiratory infection but may protect against asthma. This result is consistent with the hygiene hypothesis

National prevalence survey in Brazil to evaluate the quality of microbiology laboratories: the importance of defining priorities to allocate limited resources

This report describes a survey of microbiology laboratories (n = 467) serving Brazilian hospitals with = 10 intensive care beds and/or involved in the government health care adverse event reporting system. Coordinators were interviewed and laboratories classified as follows: Level 0 (no minimal functioning conditions-85.4% of laboratories); Level 1 (minimal functioning conditions but inadequate execution of basic routine-6.7%); Level 2 (minimal functioning conditions and adequate execution of basic routine but no adequate procedures for quality control-5.8%); Level 3 (minimal functioning conditions, adequate execution of basic routine, and adequate procedures for quality control, but no direct communication with the infection control department-0.9%); Level 4 (minimal functioning conditions, adequate execution of basic routine, adequate procedures for quality control, and direct communication with infection control, but no available advanced resources-none); and Level 5 (minimal functioning conditions, adequate execution of basic routine, adequate procedures for quality control, direct communication with infection control, and available advanced resources-0.9%). Twelve laboratories did not perform Ziehl-Neelsen staining; 271 did not have safety cabinets; and >30% without safety cabinets had automated systems. Low quality was associated with serving hospitals not participating in government adverse-event program; private hospitals; nonteaching hospitals; and those outside state capitals. Results may reflect what occurs in many other countries where defining priorities is important due to limited resources.331737

Cough sound analysis can rapidly diagnose childhood pneumonia

Pneumonia annually kills over 1,800,000 children throughout the world. The vast majority of these deaths occur in resource poor regions such as the sub-Saharan Africa and remote Asia. Prompt diagnosis and proper treatment are essential to prevent these unnecessary deaths. The reliable diagnosis of childhood pneumonia in remote regions is fraught with difficulties arising from the lack of field-deployable imaging and laboratory facilities as well as the scarcity of trained community healthcare workers. In this paper, we present a pioneering class of technology addressing both of these problems. Our approach is centred on the automated analysis of cough and respiratory sounds, collected via microphones that do not require physical contact with subjects. Cough is a cardinal symptom of pneumonia but the current clinical routines used in remote settings do not make use of coughs beyond noting its existence as a screening-in criterion. We hypothesized that cough carries vital information to diagnose pneumonia, and developed mathematical features and a pattern classifier system suited for the task. We collected cough sounds from 91 patients suspected of acute respiratory illness such as pneumonia, bronchiolitis and asthma. Non-contact microphones kept by the patient's bedside were used for data acquisition. We extracted features such as non-Gaussianity and Mel Cepstra from cough sounds and used them to train a Logistic Regression classifier. We used the clinical diagnosis provided by the paediatric respiratory clinician as the gold standard to train and validate our classifier. The methods proposed in this paper could separate pneumonia from other diseases at a sensitivity and specificity of 94 and 75% respectively, based on parameters extracted from cough sounds alone. The inclusion of other simple measurements such as the presence of fever further increased the performance. These results show that cough sounds indeed carry critical information on the lower respiratory tract, and can be used to diagnose pneumonia. The performance of our method is far superior to those of existing WHO clinical algorithms for resource-poor regions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in the world to diagnose pneumonia in humans using cough sound analysis. Our method has the potential to revolutionize the management of childhood pneumonia in remote regions of the world

Prevalência e características de mulheres com aborto provocado - Favela México 70, São Vicente - São Paulo Prevalence and characteristics of women with induced abortion - Favela México 70, São Vicente - São Paulo

No Brasil, o aborto está entre as principais causas de mortalidade materna. Pesquisas mostram que o aborto é praticado clandestinamente por mulheres de todas as classes sociais; no entanto, tem consequências desiguais, dependendo da inserção social, produzindo riscos à vida de mulheres pobres. Embora o tema venha sendo amplamente explorado nos últimos 20 anos, observou-se escassez de dados sobre mulheres de baixa renda. Desta forma, o presente estudo tem por objetivo estimar a prevalência de mulheres com aborto provocado. Arrolaram-se mulheres por inquérito domiciliar de base populacional em setores de baixa renda de São Vicente, São Paulo. Eram elegíveis as mulheres em idade fértil de 15 a 49 anos. A avaliação das razões de prevalência de mulheres com aborto provocado foi realizada por meio de modelos lineares generalizados, usando-se a regressão de Poisson com função de ligação logarítmica e variância robusta para aproximar a binomial. As variáveis que demonstraram ter maior influência no relato de aborto foram: "aceitar sempre esta prática" (IC95% 2,98 - 11,02), seguida de "não ter filho nascido vivo" (IC95% 1,35 - 19,78), ter de "dois a cinco nascidos vivos" (IC95% 1,42 - 14,40) e ter de "seis ou mais nascidos vivos" (IC 95% 1,35 - 19,78), "idade no momento da entrevista" (IC 95% 1,01 - 1,07) e "renda" < R$484,97 (IC 95$ 484.97' (95% CI 1.04 - 2.96). A widespread campaign about the practice of abortion, which can raise awareness among women in favor of the cause, especially among those in low-income strata is necessary to prevent unnecessary deaths