Networks of care for optimizing Primary Health Care Service Delivery in Ethiopia: Enhancing relational linkages and care coordination.

Introduction: Ethiopia has made notable progress in reducing maternal and perinatal mortality, yet challenges remain in meeting the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Persistent issues such as low service utilization, coupled with poor quality, fragmented care, and ineffective referral systems hinder progress. The "Improve Primary Health Care Service Delivery (IPHCSD)" project, implemented by JSI and Amref Health Africa since April 2022, seeks to address these gaps through a Networks of Care (NoCs) approach.

Biological and residual activity of candidate larvicide formulation, SumiLarv 2MR, against an exotic invasive mosquito Anopheles stephensi Liston, 1901 (Diptera: Culicidae) in Ethiopia.

The study evaluated the efficacy and residual activity of SumiLarv 2MR, SumiLarv 0.5G, and Abate 1SG (used as a positive control) against Anopheles stephensi larvae in Awash Subath Kilo, Afar Regional State, Ethiopia, using a semi-field experimental setup. Plastic containers with capacities of 100L and 250L were used to assess the residual efficacy of SumiLarv 2MR.

Comparing time to recovery in wasting treatment: simplified approach vs. standard protocol among children aged 6-59 months in Ethiopia-a cluster-randomized, controlled, non-inferiority trial.

Introduction: Wasting occurs when the body's nutritional needs are unmet due to insufficient intake or illness. It represents a significant global challenge, with approximately 45 million infants and children under 5 years of age suffering from wasting in 2022.

Methods: A cluster-randomized, controlled, non-inferiority trial was conducted in three regions of Ethiopia.

A novel nonparametric time-dependent precision-recall curve estimator for right-censored survival data.

In order to assess prognostic risk for individuals in precision health research, risk prediction models are increasingly used, in which statistical models are used to estimate the risk of future outcomes based on clinical and nonclinical characteristics. The predictive accuracy of a risk score must be assessed before it can be used in routine clinical decision making, where the receiver operator characteristic curves, precision-recall curves, and their corresponding area under the curves are commonly used metrics to evaluate the discriminatory ability of a continuous risk score. Among these the precision-recall curves have been shown to be more informative when dealing with unbalanced biomarker distribution between classes, which is common in rare event, even though except one, all existing methods are proposed for classic uncensored data.

A Bayesian Approach to Kinetic Modeling of Accelerated Stability Studies and Shelf Life Determination.

Kinetic modeling of accelerated stability data serves an important purpose in the development of pharmaceutical products, providing support for shelf life claims and expediting the path to clinical implementation. In this context, a Bayesian kinetic modeling framework is considered, accommodating different types of nonlinear kinetics with temperature and humidity dependent rates of degradation and accounting for the humidity conditions within the packaging to predict the shelf life. In comparison to kinetic modeling based on nonlinear least-squares regression, the Bayesian approach allows for interpretable posterior inference, flexible error modeling and the opportunity to include prior information based on historical data or expert knowledge.

Retrospective Analysis of the Outcome of Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients with Coexisting Metabolic Syndrome and HIV Using Multinomial Logistic Regression.

Globally, the coexistence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) and HIV has become an important public health problem, putting coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) hospitalized patients at risk for severe manifestations and higher mortality. A retrospective cross-sectional analysis was conducted to identify factors and determine their relationships with hospitalization outcomes for COVID-19 patients using secondary data from the Department of Health in Limpopo Province, South Africa. The study included 15,151 patient clinical records of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases.

A digital nervous system aiming toward personalized IoT healthcare.

Body area networks (BANs), cloud computing, and machine learning are platforms that can potentially enable advanced healthcare outside the hospital. By applying distributed sensors and drug delivery devices on/in our body and connecting to such communication and decision-making technology, a system for remote diagnostics and therapy is achieved with additional autoregulation capabilities. Challenges with such autarchic on-body healthcare schemes relate to integrity and safety, and interfacing and transduction of electronic signals into biochemical signals, and vice versa.

Correction to: The prevalence and associated factors of alcohol use among pregnant women attending antenatal care at public hospitals Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2019.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.

The prevalence and associated factors of alcohol use among pregnant women attending antenatal care at public hospitals Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2019.

Background: Alcohol use during pregnancy is a significant public health problem, ultimately affecting the neonatal offspring. Recent studies explore that no safe amount and safe time to drink alcohol during pregnancy. Even though drinking in pregnancy has a wide range of problems, a small number of scientific publications document on the magnitude of drinking alcohol during pregnancy in Sub-Saharan African countries including Ethiopia.

NFC Powered Implantable Temperature Sensor.

Inductively powered 99% accurate implantable temperature sensor is designed, characterized and the findings are presented in this paper. The implantable sensors deliver a continuous temperature reading to external storage or readout devices via Near Field Communication interface. A 2.

Using additive and coupled spatiotemporal SPDE models: a flexible illustration for predicting occurrence of Culicoides species.

This paper formulates and compares a general class of spatiotemporal models for univariate space-time geostatistical data. The implementation of stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) approach combined with integrated nested Laplace approximation into the R-INLA package makes it computationally feasible to use spatiotemporal models. However, the impact of specifying models with and without space-time interaction is unclear.

Joint Bayesian modeling of time to malaria and mosquito abundance in Ethiopia.

Background: This paper studies the effect of mosquito abundance and malaria incidence in the last 3 weeks, and their interaction, on the hazard of time to malaria in a previously studied cohort of children in Ethiopia.

Methods: We model the mosquito abundance and time to malaria data jointly in a Bayesian framework.

Results: We found that the interaction of mosquito abundance and incidence plays a prominent role on malaria risk.

Multinomial additive hazard model to assess the disability burden using cross-sectional data.

Population aging is accompanied by the burden of chronic diseases and disability. Chronic diseases are among the main causes of disability, which is associated with poor quality of life and high health care costs in the elderly. The identification of which chronic diseases contribute most to the disability prevalence is important to reduce the burden.

Risk Factors for Mortality among Adult HIV/AIDS Patients Following Antiretroviral Therapy in Southwestern Ethiopia: An Assessment through Survival Models.

Efforts have been made to reduce HIV/AIDS-related mortality by delivering antiretroviral therapy (ART) treatment. However, HIV patients in resource-poor settings are still dying, even if they are on ART treatment. This study aimed to explore the factors associated with HIV/AIDS-related mortality in Southwestern Ethiopia.

Identification of different malaria patterns due to Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax in Ethiopian children: a prospective cohort study.

Background: The identification of epidemiological pattern of infection with Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax in malaria-endemic area, where multiple episodes are common, is important for intervention programmes.

Methods: A longitudinal cohort study based on weekly house-to-house visits was conducted between July 2008 and June 2010 in 2040 children less than 10 years of age, living nearby the Gilgel-Gibe hydroelectric power dam reservoir in order to determine factors associated with increased P. vivax and P.

Human body and head characteristics as a communication medium for Body Area Network.

An in-depth investigation of the Body Channel Communication (BCC) under the environment set according to the IEEE 802.15.6 Body Area Network (BAN) standard is conducted to observe and characterize the human body as a communication medium.

Is there a correlation between sleep disordered breathing and foramen magnum stenosis in children with achondroplasia?

Children with achondroplasia have midface hypoplasia, frontal bossing, spinal stenosis, rhizomelia, and a small foramen magnum. Central sleep apnea, with potential resultant sudden death, is thought to be related to compression of the spinal cord at the cervicomedullary junction in these patients. Screening polysomnography and/or cervical spine MRI are often performed for infants with achondroplasia.

Animal Ownership and Touching Enrich the Context of Social Contacts Relevant to the Spread of Human Infectious Diseases.

Many human infectious diseases originate from animals or are transmitted through animal vectors. We aimed to identify factors that are predictive of ownership and touching of animals, assess whether animal ownership influences social contact behavior, and estimate the probability of a major zoonotic outbreak should a transmissible influenza-like pathogen be present in animals, all in the setting of a densely populated European country. A diary-based social contact survey (n = 1768) was conducted in Flanders, Belgium, from September 2010 until February 2011.

Quality of antenatal care services at public health facilities of Bahir-Dar special zone, Northwest Ethiopia.

Background: Antenatal care (ANC) is one of the evidence based interventions to decrease the probability of bad health outcomes for mothers and their newborns. Effectiveness of antenatal care, however, relies on the quality of care provided during each antenatal care visit. Hence this study attempted to assess the quality of antenatal care services at public health facilities of Bahir-Dar special zone, North Western Ethiopia.

The role of health extension workers in improving utilization of maternal health services in rural areas in Ethiopia: a cross sectional study.

Background: Community health workers are widely used to provide care for a broad range of health issues. Since 2003 the government of Ethiopia has been deploying specially trained new cadres of community based health workers named health extension workers (HEWs). This initiative has been called the health extension program.

Quantitative computed tomographic scan and polysomnographic analysis of patients with syndromic midface hypoplasia before and after Le Fort III distraction advancement.

Background: Distraction advancement has been advocated for treatment of obstructive sleep apnea associated with congenital midface hypoplasia. The purpose of this study was to relate changes in maxillary position to changes in obstructive sleep apnea measures on polysomnography in a consecutive series of patients.

Methods: Among 26 syndromic pediatric patients undergoing Le Fort III distraction over a 5-year period, 15 had documented obstructive sleep apnea with an apnea hypopnea index greater than 5.

Cost-effectiveness analysis of clinical specialist outreach as compared to referral system in Ethiopia: an economic evaluation.

Background: In countries with scarce specialized Human resource for health, patients are usually referred. The other alternative has been mobilizing specialists, clinical specialist outreach. This study examines whether clinical specialist outreach is a cost effective way of using scarce health expertise to provide specialist care as compared to provision of such services through referral system in Ethiopia.