Food safety describes handling, preparation and storage of food in ways to prevent foodborne illness. The contamination of food may occur at any stage in the process from food production to consumption ("farm to plate"-theme for World Health Day 2015).Unsafe food creates a vicious cycle of disease and malnutrition, particularly affecting infants, young children, elderly and the sick. Foodborne diseases include a wide spectrum of illnesses and a growing public health problem worldwide. METHODOLOGY: A cross-sectional community based study was done among 150 women in the field practice area of urban health training centre, Andhra Medical College, Visakhapatnam. Data was collected by administering questionnaire after taking informed consent. Data was entered in Epi data version 3.1 and analysed by using SPSS version 16.Results were represented in form of proportions and Fischer's Exact test was used to find significant association between variables. RESULTS: Among 150 participants, most of them were in age group of 21-30 years with mean age 33±11years.About 68% belonged to low socioeconomic status, 76.7% were housewives, and 79.3% were literates. Among the participants, 94.7% had good knowledge regarding food safety, 30.7% had good practices showing gap between knowledge and practices. In 12% of cases there was history of foodborne illness. There was significant association between knowledge and literacy status; knowledge and past history of foodborne diseases (p<0.05). CONCLUSION: There is need for an education program in the community to improve the practices among women regarding food safety to fill the observed gap between knowledge and practices.

BACKGROUND NRC was started in Visakhapatnam (KGH) in December' 2012 to nutritionally rehabilitate severely acute malnourished children. This study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of rehabilitation services provided at Nutritional Rehabilitation Center. OBJECTIVES 1) To evaluate the effectiveness of Nutritional interventional measures undertaken at Nutritional Rehabilitation Center through review of selected anthropometric measure indicators. 2) To assess the nutritional status after discharge from Nutritional Rehabilitation center. METHODS A Retrospective record based (secondary data) study conducted in the month of November 2013.Sevevnty five children were admitted in Nutritional Rehabilitation Center (NRC) of KGH, Visakhapatnam in the months of April to October 2013. The data was obtained from NRC records including anthropometric measurements at admission, discharge and follow-up. RESULTS Twenty percent of the children were less than 12 months of age and 34.7% were in the age group of 13-24 months. Forty eight percent were female and 52% were male children. Majority (93%) of the children stayed in the NRC for more than 14 days. There was significant difference in the weight of children at the time of admission and at the time of discharge (t=-15.942, p=0.001). There was no significant difference in Mid Arm Circumference at the time of admission and at the time of discharge (t =-0.942, p=0.349). Fourteen percent were defaulted. There was significant difference in weight of children at the time of discharge and at the time of first follow-up (t=2.203, p=0.03) and third follow-up (t=-8.903, p=0.001). CONCLUSIONS NRCs are effective in improving the nutritional status of severely acute malnourished children and the follow-up also shows the children are having catch-up growth. RECOMMENDATIONS: 1) Adequate number of NRCs should be available for severely acute malnourished children in all the areas. 2) Effective counseling measures should be adopted to decrease the default rate.

Malnutrition is the most widespread condition affecting the health of the children. Scarcity of suitable foods, lack of purchasing power of the family as well as traditional beliefs and taboos about what the baby should eat, often lead to an insufficient balanced diet, resulting in malnutrition. Culturally related food restriction and reduction in feeding frequency during common childhood illnesses further contributes to the burden of malnutrition and thus to childhood morbidity and mortality. METHODOLOGY: A hospital based, cross sectional descriptive study was conducted among 100 ill children less than 5 years age attending outpatient department of pediatrics in a tertiary care hospital, Visakhapatnam. A semi structured, pretested interview schedule was administered after taking prior consent from mothers. Results were analyzed by using MS Excel. Data was represented as frequencies, percentages and p<0.05 was taken as statistically significant. RESULTS: Among 100 study subjects, 62% were boys and 38% were girls. Thirty percent of children in the study had Grade IV malnutrition (IAP classification). 38% of the mothers had education up to high school. Most of them were Hindu by religion (70%), and housewives by occupation (71%). Most of them belonged to grade III socioeconomic status according to modified B G Prasad classification. During illness, one fourth of mothers in group A (children <6 months) and group B (7-24 months) decreased breast feeding and in group C (2-5 years), 35% mothers made the consistency of food thinner than usual. Belief on hot and cold foods concept was among 34% mothers. Level of education of mothers didn't show any significant difference in keeping beliefs regarding hot and cold properties of foods. CONCLUSION: False beliefs and practices like food restriction during child's ill health was observed in our study. Appropriate nutritional education to care givers, during common childhood illness is very much needed in the community. There is also a need for educating the physicians and other health care workers about food concepts and feeding practices during health and diseases, so that they can educate the mothers when they bring child for treatment.

The Advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led to the use of auditory data for detecting various diseases, including COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 infection has claimed more than 6 million lives till date and hence, needs a robust screening technique to control the disease spread. In the present study we developed and validated the Swaasa AI platform for screening and prioritizing COVID-19 patients based on the signature cough sound and the symptoms presented by the subjects. The cough data records collected from 234 COVID-19 suspects were subjected to validate the convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture and tabular features-based algorithm. The likelihood of the disease was predicted by combining the final output obtained from both the models. In the clinical validation phase, Swaasa was found to be 75.54% accurate in detecting the likely presence of COVID-19 with 95.45% sensitivity and 73.46% specificity. The pilot testing of Swaasa was carried out on 183 presumptive COVID subjects, out of which 82 subjects were found to be positive for the disease by Swaasa. Among them, 58 subjects were truly COVID-19 positive, which corresponds to a Positive Predictive Value of 70.73%. The currently available rapid screening methods are very costly and require technical expertise, therefore a cost effective, remote monitoring tool would be very beneficial for preliminary screening of the potential COVID-19 subject.