Adherence to viral load testing guidelines, barriers, and associated factors among persons living with HIV on ART in Southwestern Uganda: a mixed-methods study.

Background: Uganda adapted Viral load (VL) testing for monitoring HIV treatment success and virologic failure. However, there is a paucity of data on how the VL testing guidelines are followed in practice in the HIV clinics. This study determined the adherence to national guidelines on VL testing, barriers, and associated factors in persons living with HIV (PLHIV) on ART in southwestern Uganda.

A Locally Developed Electronic Health Platform in Uganda: Development and Implementation of Stre@mline.

Background: Electronic health records (EHRs) are especially important in low-resource settings due to their potential to address unique challenges such as a high number of patients requiring long-term treatments who are lost to follow-up, the frequent shortages of essential drugs, poor maintenance and storage of records, and inefficient clinical triaging. However, there is a lack of affordable and practical EHR solutions. Stre@mline is an EHR platform that has been locally developed by Ugandan clinicians and engineers in Southwestern Uganda.

Couple Beads: An integrated method of natural family planning.

Various fertility indicators are used by natural family planning methods to identify the fertile and infertile phases of a woman's menstrual cycle: mucus observations, cycle-day probabilities, basal body temperature readings, and hormonal measures of LH and estrogen. Simplified NFP methods generally make use of a single fertility indicator such as cycle-day probabilities (Standard Days Method) or mucus observations (Billings Ovulation Method). The Couple Bead Method integrates the two simplest fertility indicators, cycle-day probabilities and mucus observations, expanding its applicability to all women, regardless of cycle regularity and length.

Community based studies on childhood mortality in a malaria holoendemic area on the Tanzanian coast.

Demographic surveillance of children under 5 years of age was undertaken over a 2 year period in a rural area of coastal Tanzania where holoendemic malaria conditions exist. The mean annual entomological innoculation rate (EIR) during the period under study was 234 infective bites per person. There were 192 deaths in children and 1130 live births during the 2 years.

Changes in weight gain and anaemia attributable to malaria in Tanzanian children living under holoendemic conditions.

We investigated the effect of Plasmodium falciparum malaria on weight gain and haematocrit in Tanzanian children aged 6-40 months following a malaria control scheme which combined insecticide-impregnated bed nets with chloroquine chemotherapy on demand. Data from 7 villages (3 intervention and 4 control) were collected before, and one year after, the implementation of the programme. Initially, 82% of the children were parasitaemic, 78% were anaemic (i.