Promoting informed choice: evaluating a decision-making tool for family planning clients and providers in Mexico.

Context: The World Health Organization (WHO) has developed a decision-making tool to be used by providers and clients during family planning visits to improve the quality of services. It is important to examine the tool's usability and its impact on counseling and decision-making processes during family planning consultations.

Methods: Thirteen providers in Mexico City were videotaped with family planning clients three months before and one month after attending a training session on the WHO decision-making tool.

Keeping up with evidence a new system for WHO's evidence-based family planning guidance.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is responsible for providing evidence-based family planning guidance for use worldwide. WHO currently has two such guidelines, Medical Eligibility Criteria for Contraceptive Use and Selected Practice Recommendations for Contraceptive Use, which are widely used globally and often incorporated into national family planning standards and guidelines. To ensure that these guidelines remain up-to-date, WHO, in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Information and Knowledge for Optimal Health (INFO) Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Communication Programs, has developed the Continuous Identification of Research Evidence (CIRE) system to identify, synthesize, and evaluate new scientific evidence as it becomes available.

Developmental toxicity studies of methyl ethyl ketoxime (MEKO) in rats and rabbits.

The developmental toxicity of methyl ethyl ketoxime (MEKO), an industrial antioxidant used primarily as an antiskinning agent in alkyd paint, was investigated in rats and rabbits. Following preliminary dose range finding studies, groups of 25 pregnant rats or 18 pregnant rabbits were dosed by gavage with aqueous solutions of MEKO at 0, 60, 200, or 600 mg/kg (rats) or 0, 8, 14, 24, or 40 mg/kg (rabbits) on gestation days 6-15 or 6-18, respectively. In rats, dose-dependent clinical signs of maternal toxicity including reduced body weight gains were noted at 200 and 600 mg/kg.