Vaccination or sanitation?

Adopt or Adapt: Sanitation Technology Choices in Urbanizing Malawi

This paper presents the results of a mixed-methods study examining adaptation strategies that property owners in low-income, rapidly urbanizing areas in Malawi adopt to address the limitations of pit latrines, the most common method of disposing human excreta. A particular challenge is lack of space for constructing new latrines as population density increases: traditional practice has been to ...

Religious exception for vaccination or religious excuses for avoiding vaccination

Vaccination is considered to be one of the greatest public health achievements in the 20th century, which has helped to build a society free of vaccine preventable diseases and save lives of millions children across the globe (1). However, in the 21st century, pediatric practice in the western world witnesses an era of vaccination refusal (2). Pediatricians, infectious disease experts, and publ...

Annual universal influenza vaccination: ready or not?

Influenza causes annual worldwide epidemics of respiratory disease. Currently, the United States and many other countries recommend influenza vaccination for persons who are at high risk for influenza-related complications. This commentary explores the potential benefits of a policy advocating universal annual influenza vaccination and outlines obstacles that need to be overcome to make such a ...

Ecological Sanitation

Diphtheria booster vaccination: one or two injections?

In a prospective, controlled, randomized, multicenter study the immunogenicity and tolerance of a single vaccination (day 0) and two (day 0, 28) booster vaccinations against diphtheria were compared in subjects who had received their last diphtheria vaccination more than 10 years ago. 415 subjects received the first booster vaccination, and 203 were vaccinated twice. The geometric mean diphther...