Freetown has over 1 million residents, many of whom live in about 68 crowded informal settlements. Residents these settlements struggle daily to access basic services such as water, sanitation, and health-care services. We found that the government’s Covid-19 response measures (curfews, lockdowns, travel restrictions) excluded residents from contributing its design, implementation prevented acc...

Seismic risk scenarios are obtained for an informal settlement in Mérida (Venezuela), which is representative of an important number of urban areas in earthquake-prone regions of the developing world. The vulnerability indices of the buildings range between 0.64 and 0.80 on a scale of 0 to 1. In an intensity IX earthquake scenario, more than 32% of the buildings would suffer damage of grade 4 (...

INTRODUCTION Sub-therapeutic doses of antimicrobial agents are administered routinely to poultry to aid growth and to prevent disease, with prolonged exposure often resulting in bacterial resistance. Crossover of antibiotic resistant bacteria from poultry to humans poses a risk to human health. MATERIAL AND METHODS In this study, 17 chicken samples collected from a vendor operating in an info...

A basic ecological and epidemiological question is why some women enter into commercial sex work while other women in the same socio-economic environment never do. To address this question respondent driven sampling principles were adopted to recruit and collect data for 161 female sex workers and 159 same aged women who never engaged in commercial sex in Kibera, a large informal settlement in ...

A study was conducted with 487 black adult residents of a South African informal settlement (151 men and 336 women) to ascertain satisfaction with personal and environmental quality of life. It was hypothesised that: (1) health status and life satisfaction were the underlying dimensions of personal quality of life (PQOL); (2) health status and life satisfaction were more strongly associated wit...

INTRODUCTION Globally Cryptosporidium and Giardia species are the most common non-bacterial causes of diarrhoea in children and HIV infected individuals, yet data on their role in paediatric diarrhoea in Kenya remains scant. This study investigated the occurrence of Cryptosporidium species, genotypes and subtypes in children, both hospitalized and living in an informal settlement in Nairobi. ...

This paper provides an improved methodology for analyzing the dynamics of slums in Developing Countries (DC). In particular, it demonstrates how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Cellular Automata (CA) can be integrated to model, simulate, predict and dynamically visualize the growth of slums, and thus will improve future planning practices in DC. The paper first examines factors that co...