Articles: mortality.
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"This paper aims at finding out the socio-demographic perspective of...tribal and non-tribal females [in India] through a concrete pattern of field survey. The data gathered from 3,428 tribal and 2,447 non-tribal females have been analysed to examine the trends of differences in the status enjoyed by these women belonging to two different communities." Consideration is given to differences in literacy, nuptiality, marriage age, age structure, fertility, family planning, and infant mortality.
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One hundred and three children (1% of seriously ill children referred to the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra) were admitted with bacterial meningitis over a 17 month period. 43 of these children had been ill for more than 4 days before arrival at our centre. The main causative organisms were S. pneumoniae (47.9%), Neisseria meningitides (38.4%) and Haemophilus influenzae (9.6%). All bacterial isolates were highly sensitive to ceftriaxone. ⋯ No significant difference was noted among the three treatment regimens of ceftriaxone alone, penicillin plus chloramphenicol, and ceftriaxone alone for 48 hours followed by penicillin/chloramphenicol combination. Our overall outcome would have been better if patients had been started on appropriate antibiotic treatment within the earlier hours of the infection. Furthermore, the latter generation cephalosporins, including ceftriaxone, must be given consideration as antibiotics of first choice world wide.
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In order to determine whether firearm use was an increasing component of the general pattern of homicide in Cape Town, South Africa, hidden Markov time-series models were used to examine a week-by-week count of firearm homicides, non-firearm homicides, firearm suicides and non-firearm suicides for the 6-year period from 1986 to 1991. Of several models fitted to the proportion of homicides that involved firearms, the one which incorporated a discrete upward shift in the middle of 1991 was the most successful. ⋯ The sharp increase in 1991 in the probability that a homicide involved the use of a firearm is consistent with a reported upsurge in violence related to the so-called 'taxi wars'. Hidden Markov models, as a general methodology for the analysis of discrete-valued time series, may be a useful and flexible means of identifying time trends or points of transition related to events or interventions in a wide range of public health contexts.