Background: Mass gatherings including a large number of people makes the planning and management of the event a difficult task. Kumbh Mela is one such, internationally famous religious mass gathering. It creates the substantial challenge of creating a temporary city in which millions of people can stay for a defined period of time. The arrangements need to allow this very large number of people to reside with proper human waste disposal, medical services, adequate supplies of food and clean water, transportation etc. Methods: We report a case study of Maha Kumbh, 2013 which focuses on the management and planning that went into the preparation of Kumbh Mela and understanding its water, sanitation and hygiene conditions. It was an observational cross-sectional study, the field work was done for 13 days, from 21 January to 2 February 2013. Results: Our findings suggest that the Mela committee and all other agencies involved in Mela management proved to be successful in supervising the event and making it convenient, efficient and safe. Health care services and water sanitation and hygiene conditions were found to be satisfactory. BhuleBhatke Kendra (Center for helping people who got separated from their families) had the major task of finding missing people and helping them to meet their families. Some of the shortfalls identified were that drainage was a major problem and some fire incidents were reported. Therefore, improvement in drainage facilities and reduction in fire incidents are essential to making Mela cleaner and safer. The number of persons per toilet was high and there were no separate toilets for males and females. Special facilities and separate toilets for men and women will improve their stay in Mela. Conclusion: Inculcation of modern methods and technologies are likely to help in supporting crowd management and improving water, sanitation and hygiene conditions in the continuously expanding KumbhMela, in the coming years.

As herd sizes have increased in the last decades due to commercialization of dairy sector, computer monitoring solutions, which provide fast and accurate evaluation of body condition score, gain more and more importance. The main reasons that discourage the use of traditional BCS estimation techniques are the lack of computerized reports, its subjectivity in the judgment, observational variations and time consuming on farm training of technicians. Moreover, measurement on a cow must be collected every 30 days interval throughout the lactation period to have valuable information for use in selection indices. However, an automated BCS largely diminishes the need for labor, time and training, be less stressful for the animals, increase accuracy and could provide large volumes of data for use in genetic evaluation. The sonography is also good technique to detect depletion of body fat reserve by measuring back fat thickness (BFT) in conjunction with BCS in dairy cattle. In India, BCS monitoring technique is not well adopted due to lack of farm mechanization, awareness and an extra labor charges, can create a burden on farm finances.

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Context Studies from high‐income countries indicates that infants born preterm are at increased risk of respiratory infections; however in the low and middle‐income countries (LMICs) data are limited. Our aim was to systematically review the studies evaluating the risk of respiratory infections in preterm children born in LMICs. Methods We searched Medline, PubMed, Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Embase, and Psych‐INFO databases for studies reporting respiratory outcomes in children born preterm in LMICs. Two authors extracted the data and evaluated the risk of bias with appropriate assessment methods independently. Results Twelve observational studies evaluating 5969 children were included in the review. The risk of lower respiratory tract infection varied from 5% to 73.9%. Similarly, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection risk ranged from 4.4% to 22.7%. The unadjusted relative risk for any respiratory tract infection or lower respiratory tract infection was significantly higher in the children born preterm than in children born at term (1.52 [95% confidence interval 1.25–1.85]). We also noted wide‐ranging risk of respiratory infections requiring in‐hospital or emergency care (range: 0.5%–27.7%) and hospital stay in children born preterm (range: 6–14.3 days). Conclusions Preterm‐born children in LMICs are at risk of increased respiratory infections compared to term‐born children; however, the baseline risk is variable, although substantial; This highlights the need for preventive strategies, including RSV immunoprophylaxis.