Event classification from the Urdu language text on social media

The real-time availability of the Internet has engaged millions of users around the world. The usage of regional languages is being preferred for effective and ease of communication that is causing multilingual data on social networks and news channels. People share ideas, opinions, and events that are happening globally i.e., sports, inflation, protest, explosion, and sexual assault, etc. in regional (local) languages on social media. Extraction and classification of events from multilingual data have become bottlenecks because of resource lacking. In this research paper, we presented the event classification task for the Urdu language text existing on social media and the news channels by using machine learning classifiers. The dataset contains more than 0.1 million (102,962) labeled instances of twelve (12) different types of events. The title, its length, and the last four words of a sentence are used as features to classify the events. The Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (tf-idf) showed the best results as a feature vector to evaluate the performance of the six popular machine learning classifiers. Random Forest (RF) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) are among the classifiers that out-performed among other classifiers by achieving 98.00% and 99.00% accuracy, respectively. The novelty lies in the fact that the features aforementioned are not applied, up to the best of our knowledge, in the event extraction of the text written in the Urdu language.

Infant feeding knowledge and practice vary by maternal HIV status: a nested cohort study in rural South Africa

Background

We investigate whether correct infant feeding knowledge and practice differ by maternal HIV status in an era of evolving clinical guidelines in rural South Africa.

Methods

This cohort study was nested within the MONARCH stepped-wedge cluster-randomised controlled trial (www.clinicaltrials.gov: NCT02626351) which tested the impact of continuous quality improvement on antenatal care quality at seven primary care clinics in KwaZulu-Natal, from July 2015 to January 2017. Women aged ≥18 years at delivery were followed up to 6 weeks postpartum. Clinical data were sourced from routine medical records at delivery. Structured interviews at early postnatal visits and the 6-week postnatal immunisation visit provided data on infant feeding knowledge and feeding practices respectively. We measured the relationship between maternal HIV status and (i) correct infant feeding knowledge at the early postnatal visit; and (ii) infant feeding practice at 6 weeks, using Poisson and multinomial regression models, respectively.

Results

We analysed data from 1693 women with early postnatal and 471 with 6-week postnatal interviews. HIV prevalence was 47% (95% confidence interval [CI] 42, 52%). Women living with HIV were more knowledgeable than women not living with HIV on correct infant feeding recommendations (adjusted risk ratio, aRR, 1.08, p <  0.001). More women living with HIV (33%; 95% CI 26, 41%) were not breastfeeding than women not living with HIV (15%; 95% CI 11, 21%). However, among women who were currently breastfeeding their infants, fewer women living with HIV (5%; 95% CI 2, 9%) mixed fed their babies than women not living with HIV (21%; 95% CI 14, 32%). In adjusted analyses, women living with HIV were more likely to avoid breastfeeding (adjusted relative risk ratio, aRRR, 2.78, p <  0.001) and less likely to mixed feed (aRRR 0.22, p <  0.001) than women not living with HIV.

Conclusions

Many mothers in rural South Africa still do not practice exclusive breastfeeding. Women living with HIV were more knowledgeable but had lower overall uptake of breastfeeding, compared with women not living with HIV. Women living with HIV were also more likely to practice exclusive breastfeeding over mixed feeding if currently breastfeeding. Improved approaches are needed to increase awareness of correct infant feeding and exclusive breastfeeding uptake.

Evolution of Video Assisted Thoracoscopic Surgery in the Caribbean

Video Assisted Thoracoscopic Surgery (VATS) has become the mainstay of thoracic procedures in developed countries. The benefits of VATS over a thoracotomy, and its equivalency in oncologic resections has been clearly established. The introduction of this minimally invasive approach to thoracic surgery to the Caribbean has been a slow progression. The main restrictions to the full implantation of VATS in the resource poor Caribbean setting has been obtaining material resources, developing the necessary human resources, and the small case loads. Each territory has adopted its own innovative approach to getting VATS programmes started. We review the current status of VATS in the English speaking Caribbean.

Learning from the experience of maternity healthcare workers in Malawi: a qualitative study leading to ten low-cost recommendations to improve working lives and quality of care

Background

In Malawi there are too few maternity healthcare workers to enable delivery of high quality care to women. These staff are often overworked and have low job satisfaction. Skilled maternity healthcare workers are essential to improve outcomes for mothers and babies. This study focuses on understanding the working life experience of maternity staff at district hospitals in Malawi with the aim of developing relevant low-cost solutions to improve working life.

Methods

A qualitative study using semi-structured interviews was undertaken in three district hospitals around Malawi’s Capital city. Thirty-one staff formed a convenience sample, purposively selected to cover each cadre. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and then analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis complemented by Template Analysis to elicit the experience of maternity staff.

Results

Staff describe a system where respect, praise and support is lacking. Many want to develop their skills, however, there are barriers to advancement. Despite this, staff are motivated; they are passionate, committed professionals who endeavor to treat patients well, despite having few resources. Their ‘superdiverse’ background and experience helps them build resilience and strive to provide ‘total care’.

Conclusions

Improving working lives can improve the care women receive. However, this requires appropriate health policy and investment of resources. There are some inter-relational aspects that can be improved with little cost, which form the ten recommendations of this paper. These improvements in working life center around individual staff (respecting each other, appreciating each other, being available when needed, performing systematic clinical assessments and communicating clearly), leadership (supportive supervision and leading by example) and the system (transparent training selection, training being need driven, clinical skills being considered in rotation of staff). To improve working lives in this way will require commitment to change throughout the health system. Thus, it could help address preventable maternal and newborn deaths.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (10.1186/s12884-018-1960-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Microvascular reconstruction of facial defects in settings where resources are limited

The surgical treatment of defects caused by noma is challenging for the surgeon and the patient. Local flaps are preferred, but sometimes, because of the nature of the disease, there is not enough local tissue available. We describe our experience of free tissue transfer in Ethiopia. Between 2008 and 2014, 34 microsurgical procedures were done over 11 missions with the charity Facing Africa, predominantly for the treatment of defects caused by noma (n=32). The mean duration of operation was 442 minutes (range 200 - 720). Six minor wound infections were treated conservatively and did not affect outcome, a return to theatre was required in 4 patients with wound infections and one with a haemorrhage; 2 flaps failed and 2 partially failed, one patient developed an oronasal fistula, and one had an infection at the donor site that required a repeat graft. In settings where resources are limited, free flaps can be used when local tissue is not available and they cause less morbidity than pedicled tissue transfer.