Aim. Despite high levels of malnutrition, there is still very little information on the nutritional benefits of Spirulina, a natural alga that provides essential amino acids, rare essential lipids, and numerous minerals and vitamins, to undernourished children in the world. Methods. We carried out a prospective study of 50 children aged between six and 60 months. The intervention group consisted of 16 children who received 10 g of Spirulina daily, as well as the local diet administered by the nutritional centre, and the control group of 34 children who just received the local diet. Both groups of children were assessed on day zero, day 15, and day 30. Results. After treatment, the weight-for-age Z scores and weight-for-height Z scores increased significantly in the intervention group. At day 15, there was a statistically significant difference between the mean corpuscular volume, total proteins, and albumin (p < 0.05) in both groups, in favour of the intervention group, and at day 30, this difference extended to all of the studied parameters (p < 0.05). Conclusion. This study found that the nutritional status of undernourished children who received Spirulina supplements as well as the local diet administered by the nutritional centre improved quickly and significantly.

Inappropriate use of antibiotics is known as an important risk factor in the development of antibiotic resistance which increases the morbidity and mortality. We aimed to determine the prevalence and characteristics of antibiotic use in hospitals. A prevalence survey was conducted in 11 hospitals from 1 st to 31 th October 2014. In this study, from 700 patients investigated in this study, 476 received at least one antibiotic for their treatment; the prevalence of the antibiotic use was 68%. Most of patients were female (59.1%) and aged between 16 and 30 years. The most attended service was internal medicine (34%). 19 diseases were identified, malaria exhibited the highest prevalence (21.6%) followed by surgical site infections (10.7%), urogenital infections (8.6%), and infectious symptoms (8.4%) and bronchitis (8%). The 476 treated patients received a total of 667 antibiotic drugs (1.4 antibiotics per patient). The most prescribed antibiotic was ampicillin (35%) followed by gentamicin (13.6%), amoxicillin (13.5%), ceftriaxone (11%) and metronidazole (10.3%). The prevalence of combined therapy was 34.9% among patients who received more than one antibiotic. The most common route of administration was the intravenous (68.2%) and the most pharmaceutical form used was the powder for injection (51.1%). The prevalence of antibiotic use in Butembo hospital environment was very high which could be a risk factor for the development of resistance in case of inappropriate use of antibiotics.

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