Pregnancy outcome among adolescents and non-adolescents delivering at Kiambu Country Hospital, Kenya

Objective: To determine the pregnancy outcome among adolescents and non-adolescents.Design: A retrospective cross sectional study.Setting: Kiambu County Hospital, Kenya.Subjects: Three hundred and thirty six patients who delivered at Kiambu County Hospital.Main outcome measures: Maternal and foetal morbidity and mortality.Results: More adolescent were single and of lower level of education than the nonadolescents with a statistical significance of 0.025 and 0.031 respectively. Anaemia occurred in 16.0% of adolescents compared to 2.4% among the non-adolescents with a statistical significance of p(<0.001). Cepholopelvic Disproportion (CPD) occurred in 8% of the adolescents vs.1.6% among the non-adolescents vs. 1.6% among the non –adolescents with a statistical significance (P<0.018). Preterm deliveries occurred in 5.6% of the adolescents compared to 0.8% with a statistical significance of 0.031. Postpartum haemorrhage occurred in 7.2% of the adolescents compared to 0.8% of the non-adolescents with a statistical significance of P<O.O1. Puerperal sepsis occurred in 7.2% of the adolescent vs 1.6% among the non-adolescents (P<0.031). The mean birthweight of the adolescents was 2.9 kgs compared to 3.1 kgs with the difference being statistically significant with a P-value of 0.015.Conclusion: Socio-economic status was worse among the adolescents. Intra-partum complications like malpresentation, cephalopelvic disproportion and preterm deliveries were more common among the adolescents than the non-adolescents. Mean birth weight was lower for the adolescents. Post-partum complications like haemorrhage and sepsis were also more common in the group. Adolescent pregnancy is high risk and should be prevented but if it occurs, comprehensive antenatal follow-up is mandator

The embryo as moral work object: PGD/IVF staff views and experiences

Copyright @ 2008 the authors. This article is available in accordance with the Creative Commons Deed, Attribution 2.5, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/deed.en_CA.We report on one aspect of a study that explored the views and experiences of practitioners and scientists on social, ethical and clinical dilemmas encountered when working in the field of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for serious genetic disorders. The study produced an ethnography based on observation, interviews and ethics discussion groups with staff from two PGD/IVF Units in the UK. We focus here on staff perceptions of work with embryos that entails disposing of ‘affected’ or ‘spare’ embryos or using them for research. A variety of views were expressed on the ‘embryo question’ in contrast to polarised media debates. We argue that the prevailing policy acceptance of destroying affected embryos, and allowing research on embryos up to 14 days leaves some staff with rarely reported, ambivalent feelings. Staff views are under-researched in this area and we focus on how they may reconcile their personal moral views with the ethical framework in their field. Staff construct embryos in a variety of ways as ‘moral work objects’. This allows them to shift attention between micro-level and overarching institutional work goals, building on Casper's concept of ‘work objects’ and focusing on negotiation of the social order in a morally contested field.The Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Programme, who funded the projects‘Facilitating choice, framing choice: the experience of staff working in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis’ (no: 074935), and ‘Ethical Frameworks for Embryo Donation:the views and practices of IVF/PGD staff’ (no: 081414)

Expected Performance of the ATLAS Experiment - Detector, Trigger and Physics

A detailed study is presented of the expected performance of the ATLAS detector. The reconstruction of tracks, leptons, photons, missing energy and jets is investigated, together with the performance of b-tagging and the trigger. The physics potential for a variety of interesting physics processes, within the Standard Model and beyond, is examined. The study comprises a series of notes based on simulations of the detector and physics processes, with particular emphasis given to the data expected from the first years of operation of the LHC at CERN

Performance of the ATLAS Detector using First Collision Data

More than half a million minimum-bias events of LHC collision data were collected by the ATLAS experiment in December 2009 at centre-of-mass energies of 0.9 TeV and 2.36 TeV. This paper reports on studies of the initial performance of the ATLAS detector from these data. Comparisons between data and Monte Carlo predictions are shown for distributions of several track- and calorimeter-based quantities. The good performance of the ATLAS detector in these first data gives confidence for successful running at higher energies