Articles: health.
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Children's doses of drugs are prescribed according to bodyweight but in resource-poor countries weighing scales may be unavailable, inaccurate, or broken. We designed a length/weight tape for use in our community and found it reasonably accurate for weights of 4-16 kg and better than a clinician's guess.
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Multicenter Study Comparative Study
Family planning services in adolescent pregnancy prevention: the views of key informants in four countries.
Rates of adolescent pregnancy vary widely in the developed world. The prevention of adolescent pregnancy in the United States might be improved by comparing the provision of family planning services in the United States with that in some other developed countries. ⋯ As described by key informants, the family planning services available to teenagers in the Netherlands and Sweden have many of the features identified by respondents from all four countries as those that would characterize ideal family planning services for adolescents.
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To determine the nutritional status and nutrient intake of preschool children in a sub-Sahelian setting so as to ascertain whether they meet the acceptable standards. ⋯ The poor nutritional status of the children was largely due to the low intake of essential nutrients.
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Calculation of the incidence of typhoid fever during preschool years is important to define the optimum age of immunisation and the choice of vaccines for public-health programmes in developing countries. Hospital-based studies have suggested that children younger than 5 years do not need vaccination against typhoid fever, but this view needs to be re-examined in community-based longitudinal studies. We undertook a prospective follow-up study of residents of a low-income urban area of Delhi, India, with active surveillance for case detection. ⋯ Our findings challenge the common view that typhoid fever is a disorder of school-age children and of adults. Typhoid is a common and significant cause of morbidity between 1 and 5 years of age. The optimum age of typhoid immunisation and the choice of vaccines needs to be reassessed.