Background: Kano Plains, Kisumu County, Kenya experiences more severe river floods which is slow onset and predictable. The cost of annual relief and rehabilitation measures in Kano Plains alone is estimated at Kshs 57 million or US$ 600,000. This is attributed to the fact that since disasters do not occur frequently, people feel highly burdened to participate in community-based disaster preparedness activities during normal times when nothing happens. In this context, perceived risk does not contribute directly to taking protective responses. Thus, the socio-economic characteristics of the community and how these influence uptake of precautionary measures is the subject of inquiry in this paper. Results: The data for the study were collected through a survey of 384 households, five focus group discussions, and 21 key informant interviews. Descriptive analysis and frequency distribution were used to describe the data. Chi-Square test to determine the strength of the association between the variables and uptake of precautionary measures suggests no significant difference between education level and uptake. Binary logistic regression showed a significant difference on low uptake between those who lived within 2 Kms of River Nyando compared to those who lived more than 2 Kms from the river. Conclusions: Findings confirmed that high level of uptake of precautionary measures was dependent on distance, household composition, income, occupation of the household and social network type. It is hoped that these findings will encourage the government of Kenya to develop a policy that specifically informs residents of the flood prone areas on allowable distance from the river to where houses can be erected because some precautionary measures the households have employed involved moving to higher grounds.

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Although breast feeding (BF) is protective against infectious disease amongst children, its timing initiation effect after birth is unknown, whether immediate (<1 h), hours (>1 to <24 h) or days (>24 h).The authors examined relationships between early initiation time of BF and the prevalence of pneumonia and diarrhea in infants and under 5 children adjusting for gender, previous sibling death, maternal educational level, place of delivery and birth weight. This study utilized secondary database analysis of the de-identified and publicly available Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 4 data for the period between 2009-2011. A cross-sectional study was conducted for children under 5 years, using the data from Nigeria (n=26018), Ghana (n=7586), Togo (n=4908) and Sierra Leone (n=8798). A total of 47310 children were recorded for the four countries in West Africa with a mean age and birth weight distribution of 1.72±2 (0.45) years and 2.17±2 (0.62) kg, respectively. 'Hours' breast fed infants were significantly more likely to be protected from diarrhea than 'days' breast fed with a crude OR of 0.74 (95% CI= 0.68-0.80 P=0.0292). The estimated adjusted OR for 'hours' breast feeding in relation to protection against diarrhea as compared to 'days' is 0.81 (95% CI= 0.72-0.92 P=0.0478). In this population representing infants and children less than 5 years of age from four countries within the West African sub-region, breast feeding within 24 h after birth showed a protective effect against diarrhea as compared to breast feeding which commenced days after birth even after all adjustments for confounding variables had been considered.

Neutropenia is an adverse effect of various pharmacological therapies, including antipsychotics. Among the second-generation antipsychotic (SGA) medications, clozapine is most notable for neutropenic adverse effect. Risperidone, another SGA drug, is linked mainly with metabolic adverse effects, but rarely, blood dyscrasia adverse reactions have been reported. Hence, we report the case of a 56-year-old African American woman who developed severe neutropenia following two weeks of oral risperidone treatment. Her neutrophil levels returned to normal limits following discontinuation of risperidone and switching to haloperidol.