Exploring the Causes of Low Immunization Status in School Going Children

Background: Although a definitive immunization program has been advocated for children in our country, the immunization coverage is far from satisfactory. There is paucity of survey studies related to immunization pattern. Objective: This study has been undertaken to explore the social and attitudinal factors with parents resulting into adverse immunization. Material and Methods: The study was school based cross-sectional study conducted in 50 schools of Indore district selected by random sampling from three groups. Information was collected from parents by providing pre-tested questionnaire. Result: Association of parent’s literacy and socioeconomic status with successful immunization could be established. Overall coverage rate with vaccines was poor in school going girls as compared to the boys; proving thereby that gender discrimination exists putting girls in disadvantageous position. Conclusion: It can be expected that the immunization status of school children will improve if identified risk factors such as parental education, socioeconomic status, awareness status are improved and attitudinal gender discrimination is curbed

A Constant Approximation for Colorful k-Center

In this paper, we consider the colorful k-center problem, which is a generalization of the well-known k-center problem. Here, we are given red and blue points in a metric space, and a coverage requirement for each color. The goal is to find the smallest radius rho, such that with k balls of radius rho, the desired number of points of each color can be covered. We obtain a constant approximation for this problem in the Euclidean plane. We obtain this result by combining a "pseudo-approximation" algorithm that works in any metric space, and an approximation algorithm that works for a special class of instances in the plane. The latter algorithm uses a novel connection to a certain matching problem in graphs