Atrial Septal Defect (Secundum) : A Case Report of a Family.

Atrial Septal Defect (ASD) Secundum type was detected in a female patient Miss S.A at 20 years of age. She was operated from Birla Heart Research Center, Kolkata India in 1995.She got married after two years. Her son Master Z.S was also diagnosed as ASD secundum and was operated from Narayana Hrudayalaya Institute of Cardiac Science, Bangalore, India in the year 2005 when he was 8 years old. Her daughter was born in the same year and was diagnosed as a case of large ASD secundum (almost common atrium). This girl is now waiting for device closure from Combined Military Hospital (CMH) Dhaka, but her weight is still low for such procedure. This family is a rare family where mother and both children have ASD secundum and possibility of genetic inheritance was strongly suspected which lead to the writing of this report.

Improved indicators of infant mortality for integrated primary healthcare programmes.

Mortality and fertility rates are decreasing rapidly in many developing countries. It is argued that the indices commonly used as measures of these changes, i.e. infant mortality rate and fertility rate, ignore the interaction between mortality and fertility, and do not reflect their combined impact in lowering overall infant mortality. The paper proposes new indicators of infant mortality, termed fertility-adjusted infant mortality ratio (FIMR), age-specific, fertility-adjusted IMR (AFIMR), and total infant mortality ratio (TIMR) that are more sensitive to rapid demographic changes. These indicators include the combined effects of changes in both fertility and infant mortality rates on overall infant mortality in a region and appear to measure the effects of integrated health programmes better. Further, these conceptualize the mother-infant pair as an appropriate unit with which to monitor mortality, and may be used for guiding allocation of resources intended to lower infant mortality. The application and usefulness of these indicators have been illustrated, using one hypothetical example and empirical data from the maternal-child health and family-planning programme in Matlab, Bangladesh, as well as data from white and black population groups in the U.S.A. The results of these examples demonstrate that the new indicators are more sensitive than traditional measures when describing infant mortality, and may better reflect the perception in infant mortality status in the community.

Health behavior, perceptions, practices, and decision making: sub-national and socio-demographic differentials in Bangladesh, 1995.

The study examines health behavior, perceptions, practices, and decision making using data from the 1995 Health and Demographic Survey conducted by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. Knowledge about causes of diarrhea and food contamination were higher than knowledge about causes of nightblindness and worm infestation but this knowledge is inadequate. The household's economic condition and the respondent's education were found to be positively associated with disease knowledge and food contamination; the same is also true for health behavior and practices. Sub-national variation in disease knowledge and food contamination exists but did not correspond always with the health behavior and practices. Decisions regarding treatment of disease were made by the husband and wife together in two-thirds of the cases, however, it was not uniform across socio-demographic and sub-national categories.