[Social and cultural barriers in pregnancy adolescents].

Objective: to compare pregnant adolescents of 15 and 19 years old to non-pregnant adolescents of the same age group with active sexual life in order to explore the existing relationship of the social and cultural barriers and the accessing of methods of birth control.

Methods: a case-control study was performed in a six month period at Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. The cases included pregnant adolescents of 15-19 years of age; the controls were non-pregnant adolescents with an active sexual life of the same age group.

Neonatal tetanus mortality in Veracruz, Mexico, 1989.

This article describes a survey conducted in the State of Veracruz, Mexico, to estimate neonatal tetanus (NNT) mortality. The survey, which entailed visits to 72,720 households, collected data on 8,401 live births and 209 infant deaths occurring between April 1988 and May 1989. Twenty-six of the 209 fatalities conformed to a WHO standard case definition of death from neonatal tetanus.

[The social impact of the vaccination against measles in Mexico. Comments during the course of the epidemics of 1988-1990].

A number of issues have arisen concerning the current measles epidemic. In this paper we review: 1) the causes of this cyclic rise; 2) the benefit of a vaccination program sustained during more than 15 years; 3) the vaccine efficacy, as well as 4) the vaccination coverage goal for controlling measles. Immediate causes of the epidemic recurrence are: 1) low vaccination coverage, and 2) an increasing absolute number of newborns enlarges the pool of susceptibles.

[Estimate of the cost/benefit ratio of measles vaccination].

Among primary health care programs, one of those that has the highest benefit/cost ratio is measles immunization. An estimate of cases, complicated cases and deaths that could have occurred if such immunization program would not have been run, and costs of medical care (hospitalization, physician's visits, medical treatment and rehabilitation), were calculated. Since population at risk has a steady-state given by those who enter -births- and releave it -when they are 15 years old-, if the program did not exist more than 2 million cases and at least 60,000 deaths from measles would have occurred annually.