Urinary schistosomiasis is a chronic disease that is widely spread among the poor. It is caused by blood fluke of the genus Schistosoma, and transmitted to humans through water related activities by way of skin penetration. The infection is rarely fatal, however, it could impact on economic and health situations of infected individual often leading to learning disabilities and poor work productivity. We evaluated the prevalence level and dissimilarity of endemicity of urinary schistosomiasis among farmers in Shonga, a rural community in Edu Local Government Area (LGA) of Kwara State, Nigeria. Prior to the initiation of sample collection, we sought permission from the community head (Emir), followed by community awareness creation among head of farmers association, religious leaders and women leaders. Subsequently, we collected 121 urine samples from the consenting farmers and examined specimens for the presence of S. haematobium eggs using filtration techniques. Urinary schistosomiasis was endemic and dissimilar among the examined farmers, with 56(46.3%) out of the 121 examined specimens positive. Grouping farming type by religion, yam farmers were significantly different from the sugar cane farmers, but there was no statistical difference among Muslim and Christian farmers even though there was higher infection rate (50.7%) among the Muslim farmers than their Christian counterparts (40%). Conversely, classifying farming type by gender, vegetable farmers were significantly different from sugar cane farmers while female farmers were also statistically more infected than their male counterparts. This study shows that urinary schistosomiasis is endemic among farmers in Shonga, with significant variations in farming type and gender. Therefore, this finding will provide necessary guidance in allocating limited public health interventions among endemic groups to ensure such are delivered to the categories that require it most.
IntroductionPoultry production is a vital arm of livestock industry as it provides source of meat and egg for the ever growing human population (Angyiereyiri et al., 2015). In developed and developing countries, it is on a massive scale with a large number of different poultry species reared every year. In Nigeria, commercial poultry production is a thriving business enterprise providing a reasonable source of income for its rearers, especially during festive seasons. Peridomestic, free range, local, village or backyard poultry production involving the rearing of indigenous domestic fowls (Gallus domesticus) is also not uncommon as they serve household needs and constitute about 85% of Nigeria's poultry production (Ikpeze et al., 2008a;Nnadi and George, 2010). It is characterized by poor management interventions, feed supplementation, housing, predation and disease control. These setbacks are underlying factors for disease outbreaks and parasite infestation which at times culminate in high bird mortality (Ogada et al., 2016). Ectoparasites are of great economic importance and constitute a major constraint in indigenous chicken production system (Sychra et al., 2011). Some of the ectoparasites which have been reported in
The ionospheric numerical ionogram dataset on the Digisonde Ionogram Database (DIDBase) hosted by the Global Ionospheric Radio Observatory (GIRO) provides an important opportunity to study the bottomside ionospheric electron density profile. The study presents the description of software developed for digisonde numerical dataset that can be obtained from DIDBase. The developed DIDBase numerical data reader and cleaner named Digisonde Numeric Data (DINData) software can find missing data periods in the dataset and resequencing the date and time stamp on the dataset. The DINData software also allows users to apply settings to check the integrity of the scaled ionogram using the ionogram confidence score (CS) value. The DINData application is written in the Python programming language. The graphical user interface (GUI) of the software was developed using Kivy, a cross-platform Python GUI framework that is built on OpenGL. The Kivy framework allows the source code of the application to be packaged into various operating systems. The software currently runs on the Windows operating system and has a user-friendly graphical user interface to accept alphanumeric input entries.
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