Nutrition: Basis for Healthy Children and Mothers in Bangladesh

Recent data from the World Health Organization showed that about 60% of all deaths, occurring among children aged less than five years (under-five children) in developing countries, could be attributed to malnutrition. It has been estimated that nearly 50.6 million under-five children are malnourished, and almost 90% of these children are from developing countries. Bangladesh is one of the countries with the highest rate of malnutrition. The recent baseline survey by the National Nutrition Programme (NNP) showed high rates of stunting, underweight, and wasting. However, data from the nutrition surveillance at the ICDDR, B hospital showed that the proportion of children with stunting, underweight, and wasting has actually reduced during 1984–2005. Inappropriate infant and young child-feeding practices (breastfeeding and complementary feeding) have been identified as a major cause of malnutrition. In Bangladesh, although the median duration of breastfeeding is about 30 months, the rate of exclusive breastfeeding until the first six months of life is low, and practice of appropriate complementary feeding is not satisfactory. Different surveys done by the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and Bangladesh Breastfeeding Foundation (BBF) showed a rate of exclusive breastfeeding to be around 32-52%, which have actually remained same or declined over time. The NNP baseline survey using a strict definition of exclusive breastfeeding showed a rate of exclusive breastfeeding (12.8%) until six months of age. Another study from the Abhoynagar field site of ICDDR, B reported the prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding to be 15% only. Considerable efforts have been made to improve the rates of exclusive breastfeeding. Nationally, initiation of breastfeeding within one hour of birth, feeding colostrum, and exclusive breastfeeding have been promoted through the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) implemented and supported by BBF and UNICEF respectively. Since most (87-91%) deliveries take place in home, the BFHI has a limited impact on the breastfeeding practices. Results of a few studies done at ICDDR, B and elsewhere in developing countries showed that the breastfeeding peer-counselling method could substantially increase the rates of exclusive breastfeeding. Results of a study in urban Dhaka showed that the rate of exclusive breastfeeding was 70% among mothers who were counselled compared to only 6% who were not counselled. Results of another study in rural Bangladesh showed that peer-counselling given either individually or in a group improved the rate of exclusive breastfeeding from 89% to 81% compared to those mothers who received regular health messages only. This implies that scaling up peer-counselling methods and incorporation of breastfeeding counselling in the existing maternal and child heath programme is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of improving child survival. The recent data showed that the prevalence of starting complementary food among infants aged 6-9 months had increased substantially with 76% in the current dataset. However, the adequacy, frequency, and energy density of the complementary food are in question. Remarkable advances have been made in the hospital management of severely-malnourished children. The protocolized management of severe protein-energy malnutrition at the Dhaka hospital of ICDDR, B has reduced the rate of hospital mortality by 50%. A recent study at ICDDR, B has also documented that home-based management of severe protein-energy malnutrition without follow-up was comparable with a hospital-based protocolized management. Although the community nutrition centres of the NNP have been providing food supplementation and performing growth monitoring of children with protein-energy malnutrition, the referral system and management of complicated severely-malnourished children are still not in place

Leveraging machine learning to analyze sentiment from COVID-19 tweets: A global perspective

Since the advent of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing public sentiment has become one of the major concerns for policy and decision-makers. While the priority is to curb the spread of the virus, mass population (user) sentiment analysis is equally important. Though sentiment analysis using different state-of-the-art technologies has been focused on during the COVID-19 pandemic, the reasons behind the variations in public sentiment are yet to be explored. Moreover, how user sentiment varies due to the COVID-19 pandemic from a cross-country perspective has been less focused on. Therefore, the objectives of this study are: to identify the most effective machine learning (ML) technique for classifying public sentiments, to analyze the variations of public sentiment across the globe, and to find the critical contributing factors to sentiment variations. To attain the objectives, 12,000 tweets, 3000 each from the USA, UK, and Bangladesh, were rigorously annotated by three independent reviewers. Based on the labeled tweets, four different boosting ML models, namely, CatBoost, gradient boost, AdaBoost, and XGBoost, are investigated. Next, the top performed ML model predicted sentiment of 300,000 data (100,000 from each country). The public perceptions have been analyzed based on the labeled data. As an outcome, the CatBoost model showed the highest (85.8 %) F1-score, followed by gradient boost (84.3%), AdaBoost (78.9 %), and XGBoost (83.1 %). Second, it was revealed that during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, the sentiments of the people of the three countries mainly were negative, followed by positive and neutral. Finally, this study identified a few critical concerns that impact primarily varying public sentiment around the globe: lockdown, quarantine, hospital, mask, vaccine, and the like

Consumption-Based CO2 Emissions on Sustainable Development Goals of SAARC Region

Consumption-based CO2 emission (CBE) accounting shows the possibility of global carbon leakage. Very little attention has been paid to the amount of emissions related to the consumption of products and services and their impact on sustainable development goals (SDGs), especially in the SAARC region. This study used a CBE accounting method to measure the CO2 emissions of five major SAARC member countries. Additionally, a Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS) and a causality model were used to investigate the long-term effects of the CBE and SDG variables between 1972 and 2015. The results showed that household consumption contributed more than 62.39% of CO2 emissions overall in the SAARC region. India had the highest household emissions, up to 37.27%, and Nepal contributed the lowest, up to 0.61%. The total imported emissions were the greatest in India (16.88 Gt CO2) and Bangladesh (15.90 Gt CO2). At the same time, the results for the long-term relationships between the CBEs and SDGs of the SAARC region showed that only the combustible renewables and waste (CRW) variable is significant for most of these countries. The sharing of the responsibility for emissions between suppliers and customers could encourage governments and policymakers to make global climate policy and sustainable development decisions,which are currently stalled by questions over geographical and past emission inequities

Combined application of foliar fertilizer with basal NPK enhances mulberry leaf yield and silkworm cocoon productivity in calcareous soil

One of the reason of low Mulberry plant (Morus spp.) production in calcareous soils is due to the low efficiency of soil applied fertilizers. Thus, in search of an alternative efficient fertilizer application method, field experiments were conducted at Bangladesh Sericulture Research and Training Institute (BSTRI), Rajshahi, Bangladesh in consecutive two years for achieving higher productivity of mulberry leaf and silkworm cocoon, Bombyx mori L. Four fertilizer management practices such as Control, Basal, Basal + Urea (B+U) and Basal + Foliar fertilizer (FF) were followed for mulberry plant production. Result showed that 3 times FF spray with basal application of NPK (305 kg N, 105 kg K and 66 kg P ha-1 yr-1 in 4 splits doses enhances biochemical constituents in mulberry leaf, leaf yield, silkworm growth as well as cocoon parameters. This study concluded that this treatment was regarded as the best fertilizer management practice which increased the mulberry leaf and cocoon productivity by 17.0 and 52.8 %, respectively over the control. Leaf quality of mulberry in terms of moisture, crude protein, soluble carbohydrate, reducing sugar and total mineral was increased by 14.0, 57.6, 85.8, 140.4 and 60.5 %, respectively in comparison with the control. Thus, foliar spray of foliar fertilizer had a good impact on sericultural productivity