ABSTRACT
The study was conducted to identify the problems related to feeding of children post tsunami in four villages in Pondicherry. Data were collected from 100 randomly chosen families who had an infant or a young child below 3 years of age during Tsunami. Informants were the mothers. In the population studied, 30% mothers did not exclusively breast feed for 6 months; 58% bottle fed their children and 51% fed their infants with commercial formula. The occurrence of diarrhea was three times higher among children who were fed with free breast milk substitutes (BMS) than in those who were not fed with the same. Those populations, wherein a pre-existing tradition of artificial feeding is present, infants are at further risk during a crisis situation like Tsunami. Breast feeding practices need strengthening even in routine conditions to tackle a disaster rather than intervention after the disaster.
Subject(s)
Age Factors , Altruism , Breast Feeding/statistics & numerical data , Child, Preschool , Diarrhea/epidemiology , Disasters , Female , Health Surveys , Humans , India/epidemiology , Infant , Infant Formula/statistics & numerical data , Infant Nutritional Physiological Phenomena , Infant, Newborn , Interviews as Topic , Male , Surveys and Questionnaires , Risk Assessment , Rural Population , Time FactorsABSTRACT
Experiments have been carried out on liver and Kidneys to study the age dependent changes in alanine and aspartate aminotransferases and the influence of steroid hormones corticosterone (catabolic), testosterone (anabolic) and vitamin B6 on these changes. The rats used were of the ages between 7 to 73 weeks. It is observed that specific activity of alanine aminotransferase as well as the activity per liver increased with age. The same is true with the kidneys. Corticosterone treatment brings about two and half fold increase in activity in the liver of younger rats, whereas there is only 25% increase in the oldest group. Testosterone and vitamin B6 lower this activity, the latter showed more pronounced effect. In the case of kidneys the changes are marginal. Aspartate aminotransferase shows marginal changes in the specific activities in both liver and kidney, whereas the total activity increases with age, except in the case of liver where there is decrease at 73 weeks. Both testosterone and vitamin B6 have marginal influence on the kidney enzyme. There is no apparent explanation for the differential behaviour of the two enzymes.