Social determinants of low uptake of childhood vaccination in high-risk squatter settlements in Karachi, Pakistan - A step towards addressing vaccine inequity in urban slums.

Background: Routine vaccination has remained historically low in major urban pockets of Pakistan, and now lags behind rural vaccination rates. Grossly insufficient publicly funded primary healthcare infrastructure, heterogeneous mix of providers and multi-ethnicity of populations pose challenges in the delivery of essential health services. This paper ascertains factors associated with uptake of routine childhood vaccination, using Pentavalent-3 vaccine, as a proxy indicator for completion of age-appropriate vaccines in urban slums of Karachi, at high risk of Polio and vaccine preventable disease outbreaks.

Approaches to Muslim Biomedical Ethics: A Classification and Critique.

This paper provides a perspective on where contemporary Muslim responses to biomedical-ethical issues stand to date. There are several ways in which Muslim responses to biomedical ethics can and have been studied in academia. The responses are commonly divided along denominational lines or under the schools of jurisprudence.