Poor infant feeding practices and high prevalence of malnutrition in urban slum child care centres in nairobi: a pilot study

Little is known about the style and quality of feeding and care provided in child day-care centres in slum areas. This study purposively sampled five day-care centres in Nairobi, Kenya, where anthropometric measurements were collected among 33 children aged 6–24 months. Mealtime interactions were further observed in 11 children from four centres, using a standardized data collection sheet. We recorded the child actions, such as mood, interest in food, distraction level, as well as caregiver actions, such as encouragement to eat, level of distraction and presence of neutral actions. Of the 33 children assessed, with a mean age of 15.9 ± 4.9 months, 14 (42%) were female. Undernutrition was found in 13 (39%) children with at least one Z score <−2 or oedema (2): height for age <−2 (11), weight for age <−2 (11), body mass index for age <−2 (4). Rates of undernutrition were highest (9 of 13; 69%) in children aged 18–24 months. Hand-washing before the meal was lacking in all centres. Caregivers were often distracted and rarely encouraged children to feed, with most children eating less than half of their served meal. Poor hygiene coupled with non-responsive care practices observed in the centres is a threat to child health, growth and development

MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages

African languages are severely under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets covering several NLP tasks. While there are individual language specific datasets that are being expanded to different tasks, only a handful of NLP tasks (e.g. named entity recognition and machine translation) have standardized benchmark datasets covering several geographical and typologically-diverse African languages. In this paper, we develop MasakhaNEWS -- a new benchmark dataset for news topic classification covering 16 languages widely spoken in Africa. We provide an evaluation of baseline models by training classical machine learning models and fine-tuning several language models. Furthermore, we explore several alternatives to full fine-tuning of language models that are better suited for zero-shot and few-shot learning such as cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning (like MAD-X), pattern exploiting training (PET), prompting language models (like ChatGPT), and prompt-free sentence transformer fine-tuning (SetFit and Cohere Embedding API). Our evaluation in zero-shot setting shows the potential of prompting ChatGPT for news topic classification in low-resource African languages, achieving an average performance of 70 F1 points without leveraging additional supervision like MAD-X. In few-shot setting, we show that with as little as 10 examples per label, we achieved more than 90\% (i.e. 86.0 F1 points) of the performance of full supervised training (92.6 F1 points) leveraging the PET approach.Comment: Accepted to IJCNLP-AACL 2023 (main conference

Health Worker and Community Experiences in Using the Toll Free Line to Access Maternal and Newborn Health Services in Central Uganda: A Qualitative Study

Save The Mother Conference and Reunion Presentations, 2018.Background: Maternal mortality remains a significant public health challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa which has the highest number of maternal deaths by region. However, most of these deaths are preventable and can be addressed with low cost, effective interventions with an understanding of the three delays associated with maternal morbidity and mortality. In order to address these deadly delays. Save the Mothers (STM) through the Mother Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative (MBFHI) program operates the Toll Free Line (TFL) service that has been influential in addressing the first delay in seeking care. The service, which has been piloted within four health facilities connects vulnerable mothers with quality healthcare facilities at no cost to them. Objective: This study aimed to explore the experiences of health workers and community members in utilising the TFL to access maternal and newborn health services in four health facilities in central Uganda. Method: This qualitative study design employed focus group discussions (FGDs) each with 11 participants. At each of the four pilot health centres, two FGDs were held: one with health workers and another with community members. Each session lasted 45-60 minutes moderated by one STM researcher who utilised a discussion guide with a set of predetermined open-ended questions to facilitate flow of discussion. Interviews were transcribed and translated to English from audio recordings. Data analysis was performed using the framework method and QDA DATA Miner Lite software Results: A total of ten focus group discussions were conducted; two health worker, four female, and four mixed gender. The TFL service was pivotal in improving health worker and community relations, relaying timely health advice, ensuring prompt response to emergency obstetric complications, acted as a referral system and facilitated inquiries on availability of vital medications. However, the service was also hindered by several mischiefs: un-answered calls, language differences, poor connectivity/network and misuse/abuse. Conclusion: The TFL service is a low-cost, high-impact intervention which increases the capacity for health care delivery and can be duplicated in other low resource settings. It empowers community members to make an informed decision to seek care and allows health workers to prepare for incoming emergent labouring mothers thus saving many lives

Experiences of Using the Toll Free Telephone Line to Access Maternal and Newborn Health Services in Central Uganda: A Qualitative Study

<p>Maternal mortality remains a significant public health challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa. Most of these deaths are preventable and can be addressed with low cost, effective interventions with an understanding of the <i>three delays</i> associated with maternal morbidity and mortality. This qualitative study used Focused Group Discussions (FGDs) to collect data in four health facilities. A total of 10 FGDs were conducted; two with health workers, four with women, and another four with both men and women. Each session lasted 45-60 minutes and had a moderator, observer and note taker. All discussions were audio recorded after obtaining consent from the participants. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and translated to English from audio recordings. Data analysis was performed using the thematic analysis with major themes determined appriori while sub themes emerge using QDA DATA Miner software. This data comprises of 10 full text transcripts from the group discussion sessions</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p

Intake, ingesta retention, particle size distribution and digestibility in the hippopotamidae

Although several aspects of the digestive physiology of the hippopotamidae-non-ruminating foregut fermenters-have been described, ingesta kinetics and passage characteristics of these species are not well understood. The most outstanding feature of the hippo digestive physiology reported so far is the very long mean ingesta retention times (MRTs) measured by Foose [Foose, T., 1982. Trophic strategies of ruminant versus nonruminant ungulates. PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago.]. Since those data had been investigated with animals without water access, we intended to measure MRT in hippos which were allowed to enter water pools during the night. MRT parameters as well as dry matter (DM) digestibility were determined in four common (Hippopotamus amphibius) and four pygmy hippos (Hexaprotodon liberiensis) on two different diets each using cobalt ethylendiamintetraacetate (Co-EDTA) as a fluid, chromium (Cr)-mordanted fibre (<2 mm) as a particle and acid detergent lignin (ADL) as an internal digestibility marker. Four of the animals additionally received cerium (Ce)-mordanted fibres (2-10 mm) as particle markers. Total MRTs for fluids and particles ranged between 20-35 and 48-106 h in the common and between 13-39 and 32-107 h in the pygmy hippos. The difference between fluid and particle retention was greater than usually reported in ruminants. Excretion patterns of the markers differed from those usually observed in ruminants but resembled those reported for macropods (kangaroos), indicating a plug-flow reactor-like physiology in the hippo forestomach (FRST). This finding complements other described similarities between the macropod and the hippo forestomach. The measurements of larger particle retention profiles suggest that in the hippo, larger particles might be excreted either faster or at the same rate as smaller particles, indicating a general difference between ruminants and hippos with respect to differential particle retention. The digestive physiology of hippos is characterised by a generally low food intake, long ingesta retention times and dry matter digestibilities lower than reported in ruminants. Moderate digestibilities in spite of long retention times might be the result of the generally high average ingesta particle size in hippos. The comparatively easy management of pygmy hippos, together with the significant correlations between food intake, MRT and digestibility in the pygmy hippos of this study, recommends this species for further studies on the interplay of these parameters in herbivore digestive physiology