Infections were the common cause of CVST in children followed by anemia and dehydration. Mortality trend was low with earlier diagnosis and aggressive treatment. Anticoagulant treatment along with adequate hydration, antibiotics and correction of anemia can lead to a better outcome. A large local and regional prospective multicenter studies for pediatric cerebral venous sinus thrombosis is suggested to evaluate the risk factors and plan guidelines for managing this condition in children.

The current pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that led to an unprecedented crisis with significant health, social, and economic repercussions presented more serious concerns for those living with some chronic conditions such as epilepsy. This study was aimed to find out impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on management of epilepsy. A cross-sectional study was conducted through telephone interviews, targeting 213 caregivers of pediatric patients with epilepsy, belonging to underserved areas of Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan. A simple questionnaire was designed to record the responses of participants relevant to the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 pandemic and their knowledge about possible ways that can be accessed for the management of epilepsy during an ongoing pandemic. The current study, which holds 77% of the respondents from rural areas and 23% from urban settings, showed that partial measures of lockdown taken to stop or slow the spread of COVID-19 resulted in adverse economic and health outcomes in the said population including cancelation of follow-up visits, worsening of seizures, job loss, burden of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) costs, and discontinuation of medicines. Furthermore, knowledge about alternative ways to access health facilities was found very poor among caregivers. Income sources of poor people disrupted by lockdown can lead to unintentional nonadherence to medication, which is a clear picture of inequitable distribution of resources. This study highlights the major issues faced by the caregivers during this ongoing pandemic of COVID-19.

Objective: The role of methyl prednisolone in longitudinal extensive transverse myelitis in children is not completely discovered in developing country like Pakistan. So this is the first study which aimed to evaluate the efficacy of methyl prednisolone in longitudinal extensive transverse myelitis in children. Methods: This is quasi experimental hospital based descriptive prospective study. The data was collected from 34 children admitted in Paediatric Neurology department through Outpatient/emergency department in Children’s Hospital and the Institute of Child Health, Lahore for period of one year from January 2018 to December 2018. The children full filling the inclusion criteria were observed before and after giving injection methyl prednisolone 30mg/kg/dose (maximum dose one Gram irrespective of the body weight) once daily for five days in the form of intravenous infusion. Results: Complete recovery was seen in 41.2% while 58.8% showed partial recovery. The correlation of response to treatment (recovery) with gender, area of spinal cord involvement, muscle power and autonomic dysfunction is found at significance level of five percent according to Chi square test. Conclusion: Early consideration and administration of methyl prednisolone in longitudinally extensive transverse myelitis in children can be beneficial and can help to reduce the morbidity. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.36.3.1232 How to cite this:Ashfaq MA, Javed I, Arshad M, Yaseen MR. Role of Methyl Prednisolone in Longitudinal Extensive Transverse Myelitis (LETM) in Children. Pak J Med Sci. 2020;36(3):---------. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.36.3.1232 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Coronavirus triggers several respirational infections such as sneezing, coughing, and pneumonia, which transmit humans to humans through airborne droplets. According to the guidelines of the World Health Organization, the spread of COVID-19 can be mitigated by avoiding public interactions in proximity and following standard operating procedures (SOPs) including wearing a face mask and maintaining social distancing in schools, shopping malls, and crowded areas. However, enforcing the adaptation of these SOPs on a larger scale is still a challenging task. With the emergence of deep learningbased visual object detection networks, numerous methods have been proposed to perform face mask detection on public spots. However, these methods require a huge amount of data to ensure robustness in real-time applications. Also, to the best of our knowledge, there is no standard outdoor surveillancebased dataset available to ensure the efficacy of face mask detection and social distancing methods in public spots. To this end, we present a large-scale dataset comprising of 10, 000 outdoor images categorized into a binary class labeling i.e., face mask, and non-face masked people to accelerate the development of automated face mask detection and social distance measurement on public spots. Alongside, we also present an end-to-end pipeline to perform real-time face mask detection and social distance measurement in an outdoor environment. Initially, existing state-of-the-art single and multi-stage object detection networks are fine-tuned on the proposed dataset to evaluate their performance in terms of accuracy and inference time. Based on better performance, YOLO-v3 architecture is further optimized by tuning its feature extraction and region proposal generation layers to improve the performance in real-time applications. Our results indicate that the presented pipeline performed better than the baseline version, showing an improvement of 5.3% in terms of accuracy 1 .

An exceedingly facile green approach that produces a reliable adsorbent of transition metal such as Iron (Fe) using Mangifera Indica leaf extract at room temperature is described, acquires more significance nowadays. A single pot method used for synthesis with no capping agents, surfactants or other templates. The main intention of this study is to synthesize iron nanoparticles from leaf extract (Mangifera Indica) and examine its degradation potential for photo-catalytic removal of dyes (Congo red & brilliant green) from waste water. Characterization of synthesized nanoparticles was executed by pHpzc, SEM & FTIR studies and results confirms the presence of iron Nano-sheets with biomolecules. All photo-catalytic experimental results were discussed by SSE and Simple linear regression (SLR) R2 with dye concentration, pH, contact time and dose rate as dependent and independent variables. Adsorption experimental data was verified by kinetics and isothermal models. Results proposed that Langmuir and Pseudo-2nd order model give best fitness towards photo-catalytic adsorption procedure. Thermodynamics revealed that adsorption mechanism is endothermic described by the values of Gibbs free energy (ΔG), enthalpy (ΔH) with entropy (ΔS) and said to be chemisorption with spontaneous processes. Overall photo-catalytic adsorption execution of synthesized iron nanoparticles and simple biomass of Mangifera Indica gives satisfactory results for treating dyes waste water.