Birthing practices of traditional birth attendants in South Asia in the context of training programmes

Traditional Birth Attendants (TBA) training has been an important component of public health policy interventions to improve maternal and child health in developing countries since the 1970s. More recently, since the 1990s, the TBA training strategy has been increasingly seen as irrelevant, ineffective or, on the whole, a failure due to evidence that the maternal mortality rate (MMR) in developing countries had not reduced. Although, worldwide data show that, by choice or out of necessity, 47 percent of births in the developing world are assisted by TBAs and/or family members, funding for TBA training has been reduced and moved to providing skilled birth attendants for all births. Any shift in policy needs to be supported by appropriate evidence on TBA roles in providing maternal and infant health care service and effectiveness of the training programmes. This article reviews literature on the characteristics and role of TBAs in South Asia with an emphasis on India. The aim was to assess the contribution of TBAs in providing maternal and infant health care service at different stages of pregnancy and after-delivery and birthing practices adopted in home births. The review of role revealed that apart from TBAs, there are various other people in the community also involved in making decisions about the welfare and health of the birthing mother and new born baby. However, TBAs have changing, localised but nonetheless significant roles in delivery, postnatal and infant care in India. Certain traditional birthing practices such as bathing babies immediately after birth, not weighing babies after birth and not feeding with colostrum are adopted in home births as well as health institutions in India. There is therefore a thin precarious balance between the application of biomedical and traditional knowledge. Customary rituals and perceptions essentially affect practices in home and institutional births and hence training of TBAs need to be implemented in conjunction with community awareness programmes

Not Available

Not AvailableA field experiment with sunnhemp (Crotalaria juncea L.) -wheat (Triticum aestivum L. emend. Fiori & Paol.) cropping system was conducted during 2004 and 2005 to study the effect of phosphorus and farmyard manure levels on yield and nutrient uptake of sunnhemp and their residual effect on wheat and changes in soil fertility status. Application of farmyard manure @ 5 tonnes/ha recorded an increase of 13.9% in fibre yield over the no farmyard manure. Fertilizer phosphorus significantly increased the fibre yield of sunnhemp by 14.69% over the no phosphorus at 40 kg P2O5/ha. The highest fibre yield (0.90 tonne/ha) was recorded with combined application of 60 kg P 2O5 and 7.5 tonnes farmyard manure/ ha which was 45.2% higher than the yield of without phosphorus and farmyard manure. The total nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium uptake by sunnhemp increased significantly with applied phosphorus up to the maximum level of 60 kg P2O 5/ha but the favourable effect with farmyard manure was recorded up to 5 tonnes/ha only. The increase in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium uptake with 60 kg P2O5/ha were 20.5, 44.0 and 54.9% respectively over no phosphorus. Grain and straw yield of wheat increased significantly with farmyard manure at 5 and 7.5 tonnes/ha applied in sunnhemp over no farmyard manure although the yield recorded with 5 and 7.5 tonnes farmyard manure/ ha were at par. The increase in grain and straw yield under 5 tonnes farmyard manure/ha was 6.60 and 14.05% respectively. Combined dose of 60 kg P 2O5 with 7.5 tonnes farmyard manure/ha applied in sunnhemp recorded highest grain yield of wheat (4.55 tonnes/ha) which was 21.3% higher than that of without phosphorus and farmyard manure. The nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium uptake by wheat crop increased significantly due to the residual effect of farmyard manure and phosphorus applied in sunnhemp crop. Application of phosphorus and farmyard manure had significantly improved the organic carbon and available nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium status in post-harvest soil after 2 years of cropping.Not Availabl

Discovery of a very young high-mass X-ray binary associated with the supernova remnant MCSNR J0513-6724 in the LMC

International audienceWe report the discovery of a very young high-mass X-ray binary (HMXB) system associated with the supernova remnant (SNR) MCSNR J0513-6724 in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), using XMM–Newton X-ray observations. The HMXB is located at the geometrical centre of extended soft X-ray emission, which we confirm as an SNR. The HMXB spectrum is consistent with an absorbed power law with spectral index ∼1.6 and a luminosity of 7 × 10^33 erg s^−1 (0.2–12 keV). Tentative X-ray pulsations are observed with a periodicity of 4.4 s and the OGLE I-band light curve of the optical counterpart from more than 17.5 yr reveals a period of 2.2324 ± 0.0003 d, which we interpret as the orbital period of the binary system. The X-ray spectrum of the SNR is consistent with non-equilibrium shock models as expected for young/less evolved SNRs. From the derived ionization time-scale we estimate the age of the SNR to be <6 kyr. The association of the HMXB with the SNR makes it the youngest HMXB, in the earliest evolutionary stage known to date. An HMXB as young as this can switch on as an accreting pulsar only when the spin period has reached a critical value. Under this assumption, we obtain an upper limit to the magnetic field of <5 × 10^11 G. This implies several interesting possibilities including magnetic field burial, possibly by an episode of post-supernova hyper-critical accretion. Since these fields are expected to diffuse out on a time-scale of 10^3–10^4 yr, the discovery of a very young HMXB can provide us the unique opportunity to observe the evolution of the observable magnetic field for the first time in X-ray binaries

A Comparison of 2-D Moment-Based Description Techniques

Moment invariants are properties of connected regions in binary images that are invariant to translation, rotation and scale, They are useful because they define a simply calculated set of region properties that can be used for shape classification and part recognition, Orthogonal moment invariants allow for accurate reconstruction of the described shape. Generic Fourier Descriptors yield spectral features and have better retrieval performance due to multi-resolution analysis in both radial and circular directions of the shape. In this paper we first compare various moment-based shape description techniques then we propose a method that, after a previous image partition into classes by morphological features, associates the appropriate technique with each class, i.e. the technique that better recognizes the images of that class, The results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of this new method regard to described techniques