Influenza is a contagious disease that causes epidemics in many parts of the world. The World Health Organization estimates that influenza causes three to five million severe illnesses each year and 250,000-500,000 deaths. Predicting and characterizing outbreaks of influenza is an important public health problem and significant progress has been made in predicting single outbreaks. However, multiple temporally overlapping outbreaks are also common. These may be caused by different subtypes or outbreaks in multiple demographic groups.

Pakistan ranks 26th in Childhood mortality rates, globally. Pakistan, with other 4 countries is responsible for about half of the deaths of children age under 5. Despite such burden vital registration system is not well established, health facilities are not easily accessible and mostly deaths occur at home, making identification of cause of death (COD) difficult.

Objective

To identify Cause of deaths among children below age of 5years from a prospective cohort of women in one urban and four peri-urban settings of Karachi, Pakistan

Unhealthy diet is becoming the most important preventable cause of chronic disease burden. Dietary patterns vary across neighborhoods as a function of policy, marketing, social support, economy, and the commercial food environment. Assessment of community-specific response to these socio-ecological factors is critical for the development and evaluation policy interventions and identification of nutrition inequality.

To immediately monitor disease outbreaks, the application of laboratory-based surveillance is more popular in recent years. Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (TCDC) has developed LARS to collect the laboratory-confirmed cases caused by any of 20 pathogens daily via automated submitting of reports from hospital laboratory information system (LIS) to LARS since 2014 [1]. LOINC is used as standardized format for messaging inspection data [1, 2]. There are 37 hospitals have joined LARS, coverage rate about 59% of all hospitals in Taiwan.