Studies of the fungus content of the air

Digitized by Kansas State University Librarie

Benefit incidence analysis of healthcare in Bangladesh – equity matters for universal health coverage

Background: Equity in access to and utilization of healthcare is an important goal for any health system and an essential prerequisite for achieving Universal Health Coverage for any country. Objectives: This study investigated the extent to which health benefits are distributed across socioeconomic groups; and how different types of providers contribute to inequity in health benefits of Bangladesh. Methodology: The distribution of health benefits across socioeconomic groups was estimated using concentration indices. Health benefits from three types of formal providers were analysed (public, private and NGO providers), separated into rural and urban populations. Decomposition of concentration indices into types of providers quantified the relative contribution of providers to the overall distribution of benefits across socioeconomic groups. Eventually, the distribution of benefits was compared to the distribution of healthcare need (proxied by ‘self-reported illness and symptoms’) across socioeconomic groups. Data from the latest Household Income and Expenditure Survey, 2010 and WHO-CHOICE were used. Results: An overall pro-rich distribution of healthcare benefits was observed (CI = 0.229, t-value = 9.50). Healthcare benefits from private providers (CI = 0.237, t-value = 9.44) largely favoured the richer socioeconomic groups. Little evidence of inequity in benefits was found in public (CI = 0.044, t-value = 2.98) and NGO (CI = 0.095, t-value = 0.54) providers. Private providers contributed by 95.9% to overall inequity. The poorest socioeconomic group with 21.8% of the need for healthcare received only 12.7% of the benefits, while the richest group with 18.0% of the need accounted for 32.8% of the health benefits. Conclusion: Overall healthcare benefits in Bangladesh were pro-rich, particularly because of health benefits from private providers. Public providers were observed to contribute relatively slightly to inequity. The poorest (richest) people with largest (least) need for healthcare actually received lower (higher) benefits. When working to achieve Universal Health Coverage in Bangladesh, particular consideration should be given to ensuring that private sector care is more equitable

Biochemical and hematological profile of different breeds of goat maintained under intensive production system

The aim of the study was to monitor the health and nutritional status of Kuwaiti’s Aradi and exotic Damascus and Barbari goat breeds raised under an intensive system of production through the determination of biochemical parameters and hematology profiles. The study was conducted during the summer season and blood samples were collected from lactating does and Damascus bucks. According to the findings of the present study, concentrations for glucose ranged from 60.75 to 71.76 mg/dl, for blood urea nitrogen (BUN) between 25 and 60 mg/dl, for creatinine between 1.2 and 1.9 mg/dl, for albumin between 3.7 g/dl and 4.05 g/dl, and total protein between 6.0 and 6.98 g/dl and in general were within the normal ranges for goats. The hematology profiles of Damascus bucks showed normal range for the most contents of white blood cells, apart from monocytes (M)%. At the same time, number of red blood cells was within the normal range (11.20-11.90 × 106/μL). However, hematocrit (HCT) % was lower (12.1-14.0) and mean corpuscular volume (MCV) content was higher (11.30 fL) compared to values reported for healthy goats in previous studies. The hematology profiles of lactating does of all breeds were within the normal range for white blood cells (8.05-12.88 × 103/μL) and red blood cell (10.44-12.65 × 106/μL). Low hemoglobin levels and a significantly (P<0.05) lower mean platelet volume (MPV), procalcitonin (PCT) and platelet distribution width (PDW) were found in Damascus does compared to the other examined breeds. The data of the present study could serve as reference values, since this is the first time that biochemical and hematological parameters were determined in Aardi, Damascus and Barbari goats managed under an intensive production system in Kuwait. These data can be used in the realistic evaluation and improving the management practices, nutrition, and monitoring health status and diagnosis of diseases.Keywords: Blood biochemical parameters, hematology profile, Damascus, Barbari, Aardi, intensive production syste

A review on activated carbon: process, application and prospects

Activated carbon (AC) is used in different states of applications after its discovery as a strong and reliable adsorbent. An overview on AC is presented together with revisiting the sources of AC generation; methods used to generate AC comprising of pyrolysis activation; physical activation; chemical activation and steam pyrolysis. The important factors affecting the AC production, the possible applications of AC and their future prospects are also discussed. AC is applied in water, wastewater and leachate treatments in many countries, especially to polish the color, remove the odor and some heavy metals. It is cheap and available, and can be produced from agricultural waste materials, e.g. rice husk, palm oil shell and coconut shell. The AC’s fine and porous structure and an extremely large particle surface area (>1000 m2/g) results in making it possessed powerful adsorptive properties. Therefore, the adsorption process using AC is found to be a potentially viable method of removing pollutants from aqueous solutions

Changes in inequality of childhood morbidity in Bangladesh 1993-2014: a decomposition analysis

Introduction: Child health remains an important public health concern at the global level, with preventable diseases such as diarrheal disease, acute respiratory infection (ARI) and fever posing a large public health burden in low- and middle-income countries including Bangladesh. Improvements in socio-economic conditions have tended to benefit advantaged groups in societies, which has resulted in widespread inequalities in health outcomes. This study examined how socioeconomic inequality is associated with childhood morbidity in Bangladesh, and identified the factors affecting three illnesses: diarrhea, ARI and fever. Materials and methods: A total of 43,860 sample observations from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, spanning a 22-year period (1993–2014), were analysed. Concentration curve and concentration index methods were used to evaluate changes in the degree of household wealth-related inequalities and related trends in childhood morbidity. Regression-based decomposition analyses were used to attribute the inequality disparities to individual determinants for the three selected causes of childhood morbidity. Results: The overall magnitude of inequality in relation to childhood morbidity has been declining slowly over the 22-year period. The magnitude of socio-economic inequality as a cause of childhood morbidity varied during the period. Decomposition analyses attributed the inequalities to poor maternal education attainment, inadequate pre-delivery care, adverse chronic undernutrition status and low immunisation coverage. Conclusions: High rates of childhood morbidity were observed, although these have declined over time. Socio-economic inequality is strongly associated with childhood morbidity. Socio-economically disadvantaged communities need to be assisted and interventions should emphasise improvements of, and easier access to, health care services. These will be key to improving the health status of children in Bangladesh and should reduce economic inequality through improved health over time

iBUST: An intelligent behavioural trust model for securing industrial cyber-physical systems

To meet the demand of the world's largest population, smart manufacturing has accelerated the adoption of smart factories—where autonomous and cooperative instruments across all levels of production and logistics networks are integrated through a Cyber-Physical Production System (CPPS). However, these networks are comprised of various heterogeneous devices with varying computational power and memory capabilities. As a result, many secure communication protocols – that demand considerably high computational power and memory – can not be verbatim employed on these networks, and thereby, leaving them more vulnerable to security threats and attacks over conventional networks. These threats can largely be tackled by employing a Trust Management Model (TMM) by exploiting the behavioural patterns of nodes to identify their trust class. In this context, ML-based models are best suited due to their ability to capture hidden patterns in data, learning and improving the pattern detection accuracy over time to counteract and tackle threats of a dynamic nature, which is absent in most of the conventional models. However, among the existing ML-based solutions in detecting attack patterns, many of them are computationally expensive, require a long training time, and a considerably large amount of training data—which are seldom available. An aid to this is the association rule learning (ARL) paradigm, whose models are computationally inexpensive and do not require a long training time. Therefore, this paper proposes an ARL-based intelligent Behavioural Trust Model (iBUST) for securing the CPPS. For this intelligent TMM, a variant of Frequency Pattern Growth (FP-Growth), called enhanced FP-Growth (EFP-Growth) algorithm is developed by altering the internal data structures for faster execution and by developing a modified exponential decay function (MEDF) to automatically calculate minimum supports for adapting trust evolution characteristics. In addition, a new optimisation model for finding optimum parameter values in the MEDF and an algorithm for transmuting a 1D quantitative feature into a respective categorical feature are developed to facilitate the model. Afterwards, the trust class of an object is identified employing the Naïve Bayes classifier. This proposed model is evaluated on a trust evolution-supported experimental environment along with other compared models taking a benchmark dataset into consideration, where it outperforms its counterparts

Fabrication and mechanical/thermal properties of composites from cotton linter and urea formaldehyde resin

The aim of this study is to prepare composite from commercial valueless cotton linter cellulose (CLC) of textile mills and garment industries, and urea formaldehyde (UF) resin. The alkali-treated cellulose (ATC), bleached cellulose (BLC) and microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) have been prepared from CLC. A novel fabrication method of CLC, ATC, BLC and MCC reinforced with urea formaldehyde resin has been developed. These composites are subsequently subjected to evaluation of their mechanical (tensile, flexural, hardness) and thermal (TGA, DTA, DTG) properties. The MCC-UF composites show the highest tensile strength (TS), flexural strength (FS) and Vickers micro hardness number (VHN) having the corresponding values 48.09 MPa, 34.05 MPa and 521.33 VHN respectively. The lowest mechanical values are found for CLC-UF composites (TS 32.96 MPa, FS 21.28 MPa and VHN 201.00). It is also revealed that the mechanical properties of the composites increase with the increase in fibre loading up to 5% and beyond this loading, these values are decreased. The morphological changes in flexural fractured surface are clearly observed by scanning electron microscopy measurement. The thermal stability of the composites is influenced by the filler content. The thermal stability of MCC-UF composite is found slightly higher than those of other composites.

Does health intervention improve socioeconomic inequalities of neonatal, infant and child mortality? Evidence from Matlab, Bangladesh

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Although there are wide variations in mortality between developed and developing countries, socioeconomic inequalities in health exist in both the societies. The study examined socioeconomic inequalities of neonatal, infant and child mortality using data from the Matlab Health and Demographic Surveillance System of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Four birth cohorts (1983–85, 1988–90, 1993–95, 1998–00) were followed for five years for death and out-migration in two adjacent areas (ICDDR,B-service and government-service) with similar socioeconomic but differ health services. Based on asset quintiles, inequality was measured through both poor-rich ratio and concentration index.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The study found that the socioeconomic inequalities of neonatal, infant and under-five mortality increased over time in both the ICDDR,B-service and government-service areas but it declined substantially for 1–4 years in the ICDDR,B- service area.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The study concluded that usual health intervention programs (non-targeted) do not reduce poor-rich gap, rather the gap increases initially but might decrease in long run if the program is very intensive.</p

Agricultural livelihoods in coastal Bangladesh under climate and environmental change - A model framework

We describe a novel integrated modelling system aiming to approximate the impact of environmental change on farmers' livelihoods in Bangladesh.</p

Inequalities in Health Status from EQ-5D Findings: A Cross-Sectional Study in Low-Income Communities of Bangladesh

Background: Measuring health status by using standardized and validated instrument has become a growing concern over the past few decades throughout the developed and developing countries. The aim of the study was to investigate the overall self-reported health status along with potential inequalities by using EuroQol 5 dimensions (EQ-5D) instrument among low-income people of Bangladesh. Methods: A cross-sectional household survey was conducted in Chandpur district of Bangladesh. Bangla version of the EQ-5D questionnaire was employed along with socio-demographic information. EQ-5D questionnaire composed of 2-part measurements: EQ-5D descriptive system and the visual analogue scale (VAS). For measuring health status, UK-based preference weights were applied while higher score indicated better health status. For facilitating the consistency with EQ-5D score, VASs were converted to a scale with scores ranging from 0 to 1. Multiple logistic regression models were also employed to examine differences among EQ-5D dimensions. Results: A total of 1433 respondents participated in the study. The mean EQ-5D and VAS score was 0.76 and 0.77, respectively. The females were more likely to report any problem than the males (P<0.001). Compared to the younger, elderly were more than 2-3 times likely to report any health problem in all EQ-5D dimensions (OR [odds ratio]=3.17 for mobility, OR=3.24 for self-care). However, the respondents of the poorest income group were significantly suffered more from every EQ-5D dimension than the richest income quintile. Conclusion: Socio-economic and demographic inequalities in health status was observed in the study. Study suggests to do further investigation with country representative sample to measure the inequalities of overall health status. It would be helpful for policy-maker to find a new way aiming to reduce such inequalities